A sad but true reality.
Of course I agree that we should build a large and strong RP community but I do not see how that would eliminate “unwanted aspects of the OOC presence”. A large RP community is more resistant to the damage griefers can inflict but it doesn’t make the problem go away.
The problem can only be solved by appealing to OOCers and primarily Blizzard.
You are completely right that building up a strong community will not eliminate unwanted OOC aspect but what I meant is that if we continue to grow as a RP Community the OOC aspect will not gain the upper hand.
I feel like a lot of people do come to Argent Dawn in hope to get started here but due to several reasons are unable to get proper help to get a foot in place and that do decrease the potential RP’ers we have access to and with less RP’ers around the OOC’ers will seem larger in number.
So building up the RP community isn’t the solution or problem but something I think will be healthy for the server overall and getting more ‘‘Sticky Threads’’ with existing communities, racial guilds and so on would help sending new/returning players to good places to get a foot on the server.
Edit: I do find it important as well to combat the huge OOC presence that is on the server and I am glad to read what people are currently doing to fight the situation and suggestions on what more can be done.
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I think the idea is if you can strengthen the Rp community to a point where they walk around all areas with utter confidence, bringing in newcomers, being positive rather than divisive, you set an extremely strong standard for the community of the server.
Then, when griefing occurs, if this strong community then uniformly reacts and passes along these messages, blizzard will be prone to noticing and doing something about it.
Although we all agree that OOCers who grief are bad and ERP is bad, the community is somewhat splintered in some areas, with varying perceptions of how to engage with new RPers etc. This doesn’t present a very strong front when appealing to blizzard to get something done.
it shouldn’t be how it is- these issues are issues regardless of who presents them. But if the community has a very strong measured presence that focuses predominantly on the positives and the experience of new and unsure players, it becomes absolutely clear as day that what the griefers are doing isn’t just anti-RP, it is frankly anti-social attitudes and blizzard will hopefully be more inclined to move against it.
This is what I have meant when i’ve said about RPing in OOC basecamps and not being discouraged or devolving into petty swipes when getting trolled. It’s about changing the perception of what griefers are doing to the server and presenting the issue in a uniform and measured manner. This is vastly more likely to get a response than people complaining but moving after 15 minutes anyway because it just fuels the OOCers “reasoning” that it was “only 15 minutes, chill bro”.
EDIT: If I have time tonight I may set up a tester of my aforementioned “Pandaren info guy” in one of the capitols and see how it goes and what reactions I get if I don’t budge. Although screenies don’t provide evidence for tickets, if I can grab screens of my stated purpose there, and then capture some of the possible responses I get (text only, no names or visuals) it again will help illustrate what we’re up against and can go into the "Enforce RP rules " thread in the GD. I’ll have to see if I have time tonight as i’m working from a shared gaming laptop atm and methinks the wife is going to be working on an art project. We shall see.
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An actual lie because chats are logged and 300 people spamming /y in a major city are very, very obvious offenders. I know this because of reporting a person being allkindsof-ist with date and hour and getting a detailed response of how they’d been exposed.
On twitter, because this is a quarantined zone to be forgotten, not probed for valuable feedack.
So Blizzard are not only lazy but lying through their teeth?
Thank you Levey, very cool.
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Imagine the developer team’s faces when you tell them about the rampant OOCer and ERPer problem on stage in Blizzcon.
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Very much so with the entire point being that they nailed it down to my instance group by timestamps to expose the creep and give them a well deserved break from the game.
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That’s because different people prefer different kinds of RP, and different approach to RP. It’s almost impossible to unite all RPers on that front, because the differences are simply too great.
But what you can do is encourage settling new places with RPers, new areas. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that you should try and take over Trade District or Valley of Strength though. There are other areas that could use some RP population in them.
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Pro-tip; this sort of argumentation undermines the point the thread seems to be going for, and only serves to bolster the impression that the discussion about “OOCers” is inherently toxic.
If you genuinely want to see things improve, you will have to get better at the optics of how your argument comes across to others. This, to me, seems to be the biggest hurdle for this initiative having any chance of taking off in any substantial way.
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We should.
This is an RP server, we should be able to use all aspects of the cities without fear of harassment and grief.
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I think that’s a fool’s errand, but good luck.
I do feel one positive change on the server is being allowing more personal/unique guild concepts and characters. Circa.2011/2014, a Scarlet guild would be absolutely destroyed on the forums for not being minute lore accurate, and now we have two active Scarlet guilds on the server with very little drama towards them.
I feel that, the more Blizzard mutilates their own universe, the more AD as grown open to headcanons and minor lore bending to allow interesting and fun narratives/stories, instead of sticking to the rigidity of a few years back where we’d crucify someone for RPing a concept based on RPG lore. I play a Bard of Glamour Night Fae-empowered human bard, and few people attack me with “wow what a sh!t concept, read the lore”. Maybe it’s nativity but I do enjoy that shift in narrative/thoughts.
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Not “take over” because that implies we’re trying to kick OOCers out of them, rather I think if we’re to try and set a serious tone for who OOC grief behaviour is so detrimental we need to start feeling comfortable trying to get RP going in these areas again.
Yes, it’s basically inviting griefing, but hasn’t our argument always been that they’re the ones in the wrong? If people keep moving away from areas they huddle up in we’re basically proving their point that there is “no problem”.
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OT: Maybe i’ve got you confused with someone else, is that Xav? First name that came to be my head after looking at the character art thread.
It certainly came out that way mate, especially judging by the comments from some other posters here.
But I see your point. I just don’t think it’s worth the effort, but I wish you best of luck with it.
I don’t intend on making this a debate on the Archives, because I think that Perroy’s intentions here and the topic of the thread are v constructive, but:
I think that AA - as a tool for the server, and a means of advertising roleplay to people outside of AD - is at its best when it’s a repository for character information. The “old” format could use updating, and it has, but it is also very good for allowing us to convey IC information about our characters.
I definitely appreciate wanting to take artistic license and show off some really awesome art, but I think there’s a risk of overdoing it – and in the end, we’re just going to see a page of colourfully arranged artwork, not information on a character that we can enjoy reading or, more importantly, be able to engage with on our own characters.
I love the Blades’* guild page, and a lot of the commissions associated with its cast, but sometimes I look at a profile and think: this tells me absolutely nothing about this character. I’m just looking at this great aesthetic but I don’t learn anything.
It’s important that the Argent Archives remains an advertisement for our roleplay, and what I feel that needs to involve is the continuation of it as something that can be used as an in-character resource.
You’re right though that it probably needs a new domain – it’s still a very good tool for looking through past stories on server, advertising events & guilds, and generally allowing us to provide other players with information that they can use or engage with.
Unfortunately despite that, it’s become increasingly clunky and (often) very slow when there’s too many people trying to use it at once. The ideal for me - as someone who lurks on AA every day - would be for the essence of it to be carried over onto a new domain with updated features. Updating and not fixing what’s not broken.
*I assume you’re a member of the Blades.
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I think that the least Blizzard could (and should) do is to properly return the page with rules for RP servers. Or make a blue post thread about it. They’d only have to type their text.
We’ve been having these same cyclical contrarian threads claiming that OOCing in /say etcetera is somehow okay and shouldn’t be punishable.
Yeah, sure. Why, tell me, must I listen to weird ERP-bait flirts in /say / “haha nice meme” / whatever else whenever I go to Boralus?
I think that Blizzard returning the rule page should be their first action because it gives a concrete piece of evidence as to what people of Argent Dawn should abide by.
Of course, a simple rule page wouldn’t enforce itself. In all likelihood, quite a few of the people who are on AD and keep OOCing in Boralus / wherever would likely continue doing so.
However, this would push those who are somewhere in the middle between a roleplayer and an OOCer (ie former RPer / somebody trying to get into RP / a very stubborn forum contrarian who RPs but also keeps insisting that OOCing in IC channels is ok) into unifying with the rest of the bigger RP community in the agreement that OOCing shouldn’t be ok and should be punished. And that way we’d have a larger body thus a louder and much more audible by Blizzard (in money) voice.
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Nah it’s more about using the space as much as they do, and not rolling over. It won’t be an overnight thing but it’s required to properly illustrate the point we’re trying to make that it is disruptive. If RPers keep moving out of areas dominated by OOCers due to griefing, then from a technical point of view “there is no problem” because the two groups rarely mingle. This is largely because the RP community are the ones making sacrifices by going to locations other than those they would prefer to, to avoid the griefing.
However why do the Rpers have to make sacrifices? We should be able to Rp where we like because RPing in-itself does not actively prevent an OOC player doing anything, and anyone who actively disrupts that for no reason other than to disrupt it should be the one clearly identified as being in the wrong, and the one who needs to “make changes”. You only make that absolutely crystal clear to outside parties if RPers stop moving away from the griefers and simply keep ticketing them if and when it occurs.
At this point I don’t see another sensible way of dealing with it outside of this, which essentially forces blizzard (assuming neither party, the RPer nor the OOcer backs down) to do something about it. The important thing is the RP party needs to stop being the one who “makes sacrifices”. At this point we’re all DHs and it needs to stop.
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Fair, fair. I probably shouldn’t have put it that way. However, I am not a big fan of people who considering some OOCers harmless and think they are fine and aren’t detrimental to the server. They essentially cause a domino stone effect, as we’ve seen in Asmon’s latest EU stream. It potentially opens up the floodgates for more people to grief and insult roleplayers, knowing full well Blizzard will not lift a finger to help roleplayers remain, as Lupús would have put it: in a safe space.
The reason why so many people may lash out vehemently against OOCers and OOC enablers, is because AD is quite literally -the- last bastion for RP. All the other servers have been taken over by OOCers (from what I know, at least) and whatever little RP happens there, is most likely very small bubble RP in cliques, if anything.
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