Attempts to shrug at you ends up being just as bad as would.
It’s silly to expect every emote prefixed with a this could happen conditional.
If I emote /me kills you in 70 words then whoever I’m RPng with has every right to respond with /me avoids death by X y z.
If you attempt to shrug at me, I have to know why you can’t.
Because of WoWs ridiculously large shoulder pads.
Used to be you could.
And this is why you no longer can. The one thing that always separated AD from RP in other MMOs is the living world experience, the fact that most people recognized the server was a collaborative RP project that had to be self-moderating. There were rules to the game, a sort of understanding between those involved. And those same rules applied whether you were in Stormwind or Duskwood or Booty Bay or Westfall or Menethil or Winterspring or Ratchet or the Swamp of Sorrows or Lakeshire or Orgrimmar or Razor Hill or the Crossroads or Ashenvale or Feralas or the Borean Tundra or Andorhal or Stromgarde or Brill or the Sepulcher or even Outland on occasion. How many active hubs are there nowadays?
Yes we’ll just roleplay weird concepts that have nothing to do with the game, chug growth pots and pretend our characters actually do things. I MEMBER BACK IN THE DAY you could literally set out on a self-imposed task where for instance your character had to travel somewhere and by the time you reached your destination you would have got into a crazy number of adventures.
Anyways the answer to the OP is: you handle bad roleplay by being an example for others and collectively enforcing a series of passive societal norms to ensure standards and judge and condemn the offenders but not too harshly because what’s even the point then.
You still couldn’t back then. People were just toxic and bullying others out of the hobby to feel like little kings.
You really ought to take off the rose-tinted sunglasses for this. You can still do all of these things, and these hubs still do have agreed upon social norms and rules for RP. The only difference today is that they don’t cater to you and you don’t like them.
The very “standards and judge and condemn” you’re arguing for is the exact reason why so many hubs ended up dying off alongside Blizzard dog handling of the game, because once you’ve rooted out “BadRP” of one kind, people just started purity-testing one another into discovering increasingly more mundane ways in which “BadRP” exists.
And believe me, BadRP isn’t the reason why these hubs and styles of RP died off, it was entirely their own internal politics that couldn’t stand up to the dumpster-fire that was trying to enjoy the game during Shadowlands.
Or because they’re not, in fact, attached to the character whatsoever, and are instead floating.
-Sighs in at least three female race models…-
Who do they cater to?
Whoever enjoys what’s going on in Stormwind? It must cater to someone to have that many players? bffr
We’re all guilty of engaging with things we don’t like constantly, sadly. I still regularly scroll through a certain platform despite it doing nothing but annoy me, likewise I still log into WoW and (I’ll freely admit, as douchey as it makes me sound) fly around certain roleplay hubs and look at the roleplay going on like I’m Gordon Ramsay checking the kitchen on an episode of Kitchen Nightmares.
It’s much better to just focus on the RP you enjoy than trying to “change the scene”. These people don’t engage with the forums and don’t particularly care that you disapprove of their roleplay, and I guess if they’re having fun at the end of the day…
I agree with you and miss these times so much, but ultimately there’s nothing we can really do. It’s all a bit too far gone imo.
When I first started to roleplay (as cringe as this sounds) there were always certain people I looked up to, rightly or wrongly. I remember seeing someone’s edgy Argent Archives page with character art, a clean TRP, etc and being as young as I was, I aspired to be like that in a weird way since at the time I thought it was cool as hell.
There aren’t many “good examples of roleplay” in these spaces anymore because the “good RPers” don’t want anything to do with these spaces, nor should they really be expected to set an example I suppose.
I remember way back in the day there’d be back and forth conversations about stuff like High Elves being added as a playable race and the roleplay connotations, and - if I’m remembering correctly - there was the argument that adding High Elves would lead to an explosion of High Elf rp of terrible quality, etc. At the time I thought it was a silly and elitist argument, and in the context of high elves I do still believe that, but I think the general principle behind what these people were saying has stood the test of time.
Looking around Stormwind at the typical elf or the typical dracthyr has me feeling like Oppenheimer at the end of the biopic: “When I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that would destroy the world… I believe we did.”
There’s something quite fascinating with stuff like this honestly. Back then there were still poor High-Elf RPers using Humans w/ hoods or etc. to represent a High Elf, but the sheer fact that you had to put a lot of effort into getting people to believe and go along with the fact that your hooded Human was a High Elf did, imo at least, lead to a solid grouping of people who executed the concept well.
As ironic as it will be to see a guy with a High Elf Forum Avatar complain about this: they’re now too common, they speak like modern 18-21 year olds or like Humans. Nothing differentiates High Elf RPers for the most part now from the average Human or Orc RPer. I look at a High Elf and I always think of those old Warcraft 2 and Warcraft 3 lore tidbits talking about how they were a mythical and ethereal people, one that the mere sighting of was taken to be an omen of doom or prosperity. I think of that scene in the LOTR movies with Arwen’s daughter where she’s perceived as this radiating white light rather than an actual person. I think of a race for whom the mere thought of taking direct action should be considered a heavily-weighed matter, the deliberation on the countless consequences that taking up the sword could bring with it.
dude the war sucks ngl i just wanna sip milkshakes with my half-elf girlfriend and then go eat a goblin burger, bro quel’thalas was overrated
Why make the effort to portray something cool like you described when you can just be a human with elf ears and most of the stormwind/stromgarde homies will think you’re cool anyway.
Night Elf player, sipping cold tea: "First time? 
"
(I’m joking around, but also absolutely agree with you)
Let’s be fair Blizzard not portraying this aspect of High Elves at all in any content they showed up in didn’t help.
I actually once thought about making a high elf myself, a super-grim huntsman inspired by Hawkspear (an HE that lost most of his people and thus became some kind of lone wolf adventurer). But then I realized it would be hard to sell “I am one of the few remaining ones” when you have high elves swarming all of the hubs.
Either way! I don’t think it is ironic for an high elf to desire an experience that is more coherent with the game’s portrayal and their canonical struggles. I’s always endearing to look at an avatar like yours, which looks like an actual high elf from WoW.
However let’s be real,
that might be a tad too much for WoW’s standards.
I prefer to go the Fëanor route.
Renounce ethereal wise radiant beings, embrace “F*ck it, we ball!”
There is definitely a homogenization between various cultures and races of Azeroth, and between Blizzard and us role-players, I consider the former to be the bigger issue.
There is little in the game, for instance, for blood elven (and by extension high elven) players to look at and aspire to portray, in the vein Meronspell put it.
This naturally does not mean that one cannot adopt such a persona for one’s Thalassian character, though the caveat may be a degree of contextual disconnect between the character’s “vibe” and the world in which they live… even though said character ought to be the elven norm rather than an anomaly.
Unfortunately, nearly all Thalassian-specific encounters in the game (where they can’t be replaced by any other type without losing the context) belong to the times of Vanilla or TBC, where the absense of the Sunwell and the entire race’s mana starvation were the defining factor for the entire civilization. The few exceptions like the Purge of Dalaran only took away factors like belonging to the world-wide arcane tradition founded by them. What is left of them now, with the Light added on par with the arcane… I don’t know. Probably protecting the Sunwell from the void elves, but we can’t treat living embodiments of corruption as living embodiments of corruption these days.
Look, I don’t profess to have any great standards. I’ve no official academic background in literacy, nor the years of experience to make up for a lack thereof. But if my 21 year-old, read-weekly self can at least try to make the things I say sound vaguely poetic and as if they were spoken by an Elf then I can’t really grasp why Blizzard’s massive, experienced and academically-trained writing team can’t. It doth boggle the mind.
It’s unfortunate really, because there did used to be imo. You could occasionally see Elves scattered around the world in Vanilla and I feel back then they did do a good job with their dialogue - if not making it poetic then at least making it haughty, prideful and implying a greater knowledge they won’t reveal. The issue goes beyond Elves as well, unfortunately, the Orcs have increasingly been put into circumstance where they think and speak as Humans would, the Tauren have increasingly found themselves neutered and watered-down from their Vanilla Era quests where they would have you eliminate any sort of polluter/exploiter of Nature with extreme prejudice.
They gotta stop doing this and very quickly because I don’t know if I’ll survive a Midnight expansion where Blizzard does the whole “good space-cancer vs bad space-cancer” shtick when the Void is just highly corruptive to individuals and the environment both actively and passively. I think people forget that Void Elves are literal walking space-cancer chernobyl’s much like Lightforged are literal walking embodiments of the Divine.
What confuses me still is that we have seen anti-magic stances from High Elves and their sympathisers, but Blizzard later did a very strong U turn in regards to that and especially with the introduction of Void Elves, which the High Elves surprisingly accepted cause Alleria said so. Sure, Alleria might be a war hero, but the Blood Elves were their people and Kael’thas their Prince, so why is this where the line is drawn? It felt like a very odd writing choice. No fel and magic in moderation, but also let’s grow tentacles.
To be fair, this isn’t a High Elf exclusive issue, but I feel that people cling on them more than anything because they tend to blend the lines between them and LotR. If any elves have suffered the injustice of being written poorly in regards to their ancient selves, that is no doubt the Night Elves, with their longer life span and far more experience on their shoulders. Though there are pockets of them trying to own it again, it always fails, because - no matter how much they undeniably use elves in their stories and narratives several expansion in a row - it doesn’t feel like the focus of Blizzard is actually elves, that regarding their cultures and nuisances. Those are after all treated with hasty, non-sensical decisions and retcons.