What really killed the public RP scene in ESO was the release of One Tamriel which sharded up the game world.
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That I can beleive. I wasnt as big into ESO on its release for a few reasons but I always heard glowing stories about the open world Rp. If only I had a better PC back then 
I RPed actively from 2014 until 2018 when I went to army. I saw the rise and fall of the public RP scene, and One Tamriel did more damage to the community than housing ever did. The lack of dedicated RP servers also did its fair share of damage, since what public RP there used to be pre-sharding was constantly being griefed if it was anywhere near a popular hub — which most community interactions revolved around.
I remember a brief window of time where RP actually flourished after player housing was implemented (but before sharding was implemented) when people were able to create their own open establishments to share with the community without the risk of griefing. There was a little renaissance of slice of life RP with taverns, shops, museums, and even public gardens opening up for social RP without OOCers crashing it and spamming toys and spells.
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Sharding killed GW2 RP.
a problem i can at least relate to with gw2 rp in the same period due to a similar no rp-server issue. as bad as oocers can be on wow at least on rp servers theres some rules to report griefing with.
And this is where I see the benefit of Housing in WoW. People able to make the IC establishments and homes they already have without ye old fighting over a single building. people are just too quick to doompost.
and yet still somehow thrives on NA im told. it contributed EU side but it wasnt the sole cause.
It doesn’t.
It’s pretty simple, when public RP goes away, RP eventually goes away some time afterwards.
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As long as it supplements RP in the main world, it can be a boon for RP. The griefing and sharding killed over world RP in ESO, hence it regressed into cliques afterwards because it was forced to become the replacement for main RP.
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The assumption is that cliques are always inherently a bad thing. They’re not. Especially not on role-playing servers that have a track record of stalking and harassing individuals for all sorts of weird and petty reasons. As well as attempting to police what sort of elements of the setting people are ‘supposed to’ like or dislike. I know a lot of people who stick to ‘cliques’ to protect themselves from the nastier individuals on this server.
That sort of behaviour has inflicted far more harm and division than player housing ever will, as far as I’m concerned.
The game is also twenty years old so of course it is not going to be as active as it was, say, a decade or more ago. In fact, I’d say it’s impressively active despite its age and the addition of player housing is an excellent sign that the game isn’t liable to be abandoned or put into maintenance mode anytime soon.
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Near as I can tell ESO RP was already a drama filled destined to die hellhole from near launch. A few members of my former swtor guild went there and one became very involved… they did not have nice stories.
Toxic people from swtor going over didn’t help. Housing or no, first tamrial or no, ESO rp was a mess from the start.
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My controversial take is that the kind of people who are jumping at the chance to bubble RP up with housing were never that interested in RPing with other people to begin with. It’s also not all that different in practice from people using existing locations in-game as stand ins for other private places, because it effectively excludes other people out who wanted to use that location as-it-was.
If more and more guilds are going to turn away from public RP after housing, I think the better question to ask is not if housing was bad for RP, but what was going on in the public RP scene that made people want to distance themselves from it.
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Both FFXIV and TESO also suffered heavily from a regional split that resulted in many Europeans deciding to play on the American servers rather than the European servers.
There’s also a lot of, shall we say, cultural differences between European and American role-players both in regards to role-play itself and outside of it. FFXIV in particular was plagued significantly by ERP and ‘venues’ that were never anything more than outright brothels.
The game basically exists to stroke the ego of the player’s self insert in the main scenario quests, too, so there was a lot of ‘main character syndrome’ at play across the board.
Add in the attempts to stalk, doxx, harass and threaten to murder and ‘grape’ Garlean role-players and it made for quite the hot mess. During my stint as a moderator on the now archived Hydaelyn role-players site I saw some truly awful things, some of which had to be sent to the authorities.
I guess what I’m getting at is that player housing will not ‘kill’ role-play. Unhinged role-players will do that and they are the reason in many cases as to why ‘bubble’ role-play exists.
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My controversial take is that they don’t really understand how RP works. No roleplayer roleplays forever, and you will eventually have to replace the people you bubble RP with. New friends can only be found within the community at large, through public RP.
A community also has to renew itself to avoid becoming stale and slowly eroding and declining. A new roleplayer that comes to AD doesn’t have access to any of these exclusive bubbles. In the hypothetical scenario of people locking themselves up in their house, someone without connections will have a hard time finding any roleplay at all.
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I don’t think that it’s fair to say that they don’t understand roleplay, when really they just approach and enjoy it in a different way from you. It’s worth noting that the demographic of the game has changed over time (aka we’ve all gotten older), so priorities and preferences will have shifted accordingly.
Random roleplay can be like rolling a dice, with a solid chance that your night ends and it feels like wasted time (maybe due to roleplay you find objectionable, or maybe just being unable to find anything that fits your preferences). Having an established group of friends with similar preferences is a convenient safety net.
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I sometimes get the feeling that people don’t always understand why the server needs public RP, and why it needs hubs and a central point like Stormwind. That is for the reasons I mentioned in my previous post.
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It’s a personal preference. Some people really are only interested in interacting with a select few carefully curated role-players and they may or may not find replacements if those individuals take their leave of the game.
Incidentally, they might only interact with a select few on the basis that other aspects of the game - such as raiding - eat into their time. Not everybody wants to join a role-playing guild after all or is even in a position to if they’re already part of a raiding guild.
Yet others are perfectly content waiting for a public event to be advertised and they will in turn get their ‘role-play fix’ through that.
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Stormwind and its RP aren’t going anywhere – I would stake Telaryn’s soul on that much.
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Having only experience with FFXIV as another MMORPG with player housing (edit: I lied, remembering all the fun I had with housing in Ultima Online a thousand years ago), I agree that the existence of housing isn’t the only thing keeping roleplay hubs and large campaigns from emerging in the open world in that particular game. There are many elements that discourage them:
- Lack of official roleplay servers
- Lack of chat bubbles + autoscrolling chat = difficult to keep up in busy roleplay environments
- AddOns being treated akin to black market wares that you need to be hush-hush about, compared to WoW where it’s perfectly fine to advertise them on the forums and RP Discord servers. AddOns like TRP, Listener, etc. add so much convenience to our everyday roleplay experiences in the open world.
- Impossible to create large scale events without characters disappearing a few feet away from you. This diminishes the aspiration to create such events, along with the aforementioned difficulty of keeping up with the chat.
- Far fewer ways to add flavor to open world roleplay, compared to WoW toys that you’re able to place outdoors, all the consumables and items, not to mention pickpocketing appearances and prisms.
- Housing has been there since the game’s early days, compared to AD where we’ve had two decades of roleplaying primarily in the open world; I don’t think people will stop adventuring outdoors or creating public community events any time soon, it’s something a big chunk of us would sorely miss, and an important part of so many guild concepts.
Now, it’s inevitable that housing is coming to WoW. No amount of “no housing” comments is going to change that, though I understand people want to air their concerns. I think it’s more constructive though to provide feedback on how to make the housing as good as it can be with the roleplay community in mind, especially if the devs want to tie social elements to the feature.
Now, my own hopes for player housing:
- Enough customization options to turn it into a leisure creative activity, the ability to create unique-looking spaces. I’d love to waste hours upon hours to plan room layouts and decorate spaces around different themes. Some might think this would be time away from roleplaying, but for me, it’d be playtime added on top of roleplaying. It’d also draw more eyes to the game when people generate a buzz sharing their designs online.
- Size options from small to big; from cottages to large interiors suitable for community events, and the ability to invite a lot of people to visit the place. Perhaps then we wouldn’t always have to use the Greymane Manor OOC for all the Gilneas balls… just as an example.
- While a plot of land around the house would be nice, I’d also be happy just with an indoor instance if there were ways to avoid a claustrophobic feel through fake window views etc. This is perhaps driven by concern that the fixtures would be locked to few house models per race, limiting the customization options.
- Visit system: different toggles, from private with permission exceptions to public, letting anyone find and visit your house from some kind of an in-game housing catalog. This would enable creating venues players might build for the roleplay community readily available 24/7.
- No neighbourhoods unless you were able to choose who you’d like to share a plot / district with. If randomized neighbours were to be a thing, at least lock the style of housing exteriors to a specific theme, to avoid the immersion stuttering when your elven house that is IC meant to be in Ashenvale, sits between Gnome and Forsaken homes.
- A co-working system; the ability to let other players modify your home with a variety of permission levels, from being able to only move furnishings, to changing the layout, to withdrawing items from the furnishing storage. This would be an example of a social feature tied to housing, being able to work on it together with your friends / partner etc. From RP POV, it’d let different players move furnishings during an event which could be useful. On FF14 many people even commission housing enthusiasts to build and decorate the interior of their homes, though it’s always a risk as much it would be to give a stranger access to your guild bank.
- The ability to change music in your house. There’s no shortage of soundtracks in the game. Again this would be a nice feature for roleplaying in the space and for events hosted in houses.
- The ability to float furnishings in the air… I suspect this probably won’t be allowed, but damned it’s part of the reason why the housing is so creative on FF14, as people sink and float furnishings, utilizing all sides of a furnishing piece in ways you’d never thought of in order to create something cool. Nevermind that it was never a planned feature on FF14 either, but the devs never fixed the glitches letting people circumvent the base limitations.
- Please don’t make it overly expensive to obtain a house/different house sizes/furnishings, I don’t want to sell my kidney every time I want to redesign my home(s)
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As long as we reinforce the stigma of it as being universally third rate second-life nonsense to be avoided, we encourage further splintering and isolating into instanced housing becomes the logical conclusion so as to curate and quality control. Thus RP communities die of contempt for one another in bubbles and the open world goes silent as nobody can do much to perpetuate the open world without connections no matter the extent of their ambitions.
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I don’t see the arrival of housing changing anything in regards to whether people decide to bubble or not. The people that do “disappear” from a place like Stormwind will almost certainly already have been isolated before in some way. What open world RP there still is isn’t going anywhere, because the people who ARE out there want to adventure in the world, and housing is never going to replace that. If anything, it’s just going to clean up Goldshire and the harbor a bunch lmao
More to the point of the thread, and to prevent the people who aren’t RPers from vanishing from cities as well the way garrisons did, never add any player utilities like professions and crafting tables, auction houses, just about anything that would require being in the city. The few exceptions I’d make are transmogrifiers, barbers and banks, if for no other reason than having your stash on the go at home makes sense. And if there should be some crafting, make it the often suggested carpentry profession for making new decorations.
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This is a big one to me. A region populated with soaring elven spires is a spectacular thing to imagine. A lone such tower, flanked by a Forsaken blight-lab and rustic human cottage? It would force my suspension of disbelief into overdrive.
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