We could start migrating more RP to the north of the valley, much unused stuff there to facilitate town RP, mostly we’re all at the south side of the river near the barracks and tavern while on the other side there are shops and such gathering dust.
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Spreading rpers too thin is the main problem. I know some guilds like the Dustpaw Caravan have been doing a good job at bringing back the Valley of Wisdom as a RP hub, would love to see more of that. As for the north area by the smith / mining trainer, it’s sort of weird that people don’t rp there. I’ll set up some npcs to try and lure people over there tonight, we’ll see how it goes! (Good idea).
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Dustpaw, along with the Bilgewater Battalion, Eternal Sisterhood and the Highblood Myrmidons plan on using the Drag, Valley of Wisdom and the Valley of Spirits a lot more in the near future.
As far as the Dustpaw goes, we often camp in the Valley of Wisdom, but there’s also been talk of organising commerce RP in the Drag. We think the Drag is criminally unused despite all the cool buildings for RP.
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I’ll write a longer response when I’m on my laptop since mobile typing makes my feeble gaming fingers go owie.
I read a thread some day ago where people where mad at the /y spam from the SW protest. This is understandable, but this isn’t a fault of the PCU. Rather one should point a finger to Blizzards extremely lacking support of RP and the inability to create large-scale RP events without it disturbing others. But this system is what we have to work with. The problem with the SW protests and /y occurs because there is only one town to do town-RP in. If something’s happening in the town you can’t simply pick up and go to another town to find town-rp, because there isn’t one. Goldshire would be the perfect place to go if you don’t want to be a part of a major SW event but still want some town-RP, sadly that is not possible currently.
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Perhaps the logging camp at the border of redridge/elwynn could make a good substitute and there is the north with various abandoned towns and such but those might be less then ideal to use due to their setting/location.
Another great place to RP! This places a responsibility on active RPers to advertise these and spread the words of other towns.
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I was part of a guild that tried to turn Eastvale into RP hub and even managed to get ERPers away from it (at least during main RP hours). Unfortunately, after a while, it died down because outside of guild members, there was rarely any visitor. People just tend to stick to places where they have abundance of roleplay rather than those that have smaller community and are trying to form a hub.
There´s also the whole thing with town RP being pretty difficult to keep interesting, since you have characters that are mostly locked to one small area and dealing with things that many RPers simply might not find interesting in a long run.
I keep seeing comments saying how it would be amazing to come to random town and see people RPing innkeeper or townsfolk who send their hero on some adventure. I don´t think people fully realize that these NPC characters (because that´s really what people talk about in comments like that) have to be RPed by other people on regular basis to achieve this feeling of living world.
That means a group of RPers has to dedicate themselves into doing townsfolk RP, mostly with each other, just so random people passing by (often doing their own RP storylines) can get a good feeling.
You are free to start an Eastvale guild then.
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I think we misunderstood each other. What I hope for Goldshire or Lakeshire could be is RP hubs, not towns which have their own ecosystems.
Which requires them to have their own ecosystems. New hubs can only be created by people who decide to make them into main bases of their guilds and communities, not people visiting the place every once in a while. And even then it can fail because RPers tend to group up where the RP is, which tends to be pre-existing hubs.
It´s really difficult thing to do and just saying “people have the responsibility to do it” doesn´t solve anything.
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I really do wish That Village could be purged for good… No, it’s not the same with ‘just turn on Warmode’.
I’d like to get in some casual RP on this character, and Elwynn was her home. It’s just sad that what should be a common human RP area is… makes aggravated gestures that.
Anyway, a bit more on-topic, it’s nice to see this thread still turning out some good discussion and good advice. Heck, seeing Perroy step down off his meme throne for any length of time is usually worth it 
(sincerely, though, I find the slightly more serious posts nearly always more engaging and sensible stuff I can’t disagree with.)
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I mean, Elwynn is legit a fantastic zone to rp in, or well, it would be with the removal of certain, ahem… elements. It lends itself for all different sorts of roleplay, lighthearted and more serious ( anyone remember the quest near Eastvale where two guards got eaten by murlocs? ).
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Goldshire and small area surrounding it is the only problematic place. While there are ERPers all over the zone, it´s mostly pairs of people who will have hard time doing their thing when there are active roleplayers around.
I´d say eastern portion is far better, with Tower of Azora being potential place for mages and similar people, Eastvale for townsfolk and guard tower nearby for soldiers. That´s not to say west is bad, but all it has is barracks and guard tower.
Plus, east is on the border of Redridge and Duskwood, while west borders Westfall, which is far less used area for RP.
Playing out travel rp and chancing encounters with other people is a pretty good way of diversifying roleplay I feel.
The more remote the location, the less likely you are to bump into other people obviously but all it takes is a few pebbles to get a bigger stone rolling.
I would love to see more people wander through the zones in character and stop by random towns along the way. Perhaps you bump into people while you rest that have taken a different route and have something exciting to tell?..
Some of my favourite recent roleplay memories were made possible by that. (Thanks to the colorful bunch of hordies that helped us fight back quillboar in the northern barrens we randomly came across for example)
I’d encourage people to give it a go and not to shy away from engaging with people they havent met before to begin with.
Your actions to actively seek out and engage in roleplay do make it easier for other people around you to do the same.
By breaking the initial wall of uncertainty, you make contacts and through those IC-contacts you increase the number of people to engage with exponentionally because it is easier to get a conversation going if you already met someone before, simple as.
Don’t be afraid, try new things and as many people have pointed out before, most importantly have fun.
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I honestly don’t think Blizzard will take action on protecting RP servers as its their least concern. I’d be surprised if they do and any time soon.
They’ve responded to things in the past. Added the language potions and removed sharding.
If enough of us communicate issues, we may see action.
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If you don’t ask, you certainly won’t get.
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Pretty much just parroting the two most recent posts here, but yeah - change might be unlikely, but it goes from unlikely to impossible when you choose to be complacent and live with what you’ve got as opposed to making an actual effort to speak up and make your opinions + feedback known
Want change? You can’t sit silently and expect it 
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Sorry if some of this has been mentioned before, I haven’t had chance to go through the full thread yet.
I would love nothing more than the general erp creepers to be out of public eyes, at minimum. Plenty of times a fun interaction with another player turns to them attempting to bed you, Stormwind mainly, and back when I was new that was one of the biggest things that put me off the whole idea of roleplay, and put me off when I first started to explore it.
The same to a smaller degree with heavy recruitment, they both almost make any casual town interaction feel disingenuous, with some other motive always in mind. I don’t have a problem with people recruiting at all, but it feels like people genuinely looking for casual conversation or rp is not around, Orgrimmar seems better in that regard, really.
I’m rambling but what I actually wanted to say was talking about actual solutions to some of these issues. Imagine that hiring more GM’s for rp servers wasn’t an option, or even would be enough anyway, the few things I can think of are things most roleplayers/players in general wouldn’t like very much.
Things like a chat filtration system, where certain phrases come up censored regardless of filter, or don’t get posted into chat at all, with extreme vulgarity flagging a warning outright even. I’d personally be okay with that but I know a lot of people would not, and I can see it causing more issues than it would solve in the beginning.
Censored or flagged TRP profiles is also an option, because of course there’s no reasonable way to expect an addon creator to have to moderate at that level, it would be insane. But again, it’s something a lot of people may not approve, and people can easily create creepy erp profiles without profanity, so it might not even really solve anything.
An option could be that people could flag their profiles as adult, and only others flagged as adult could see those trps. While it doesn’t get rid of it, at least we don’t have to see that garbage, in terms of short term solutions that could help.
I imagine its especially difficult to prove what happened with griefing and stuff on the GM side of things hours or days later, I’m not sure if they even can/do see TRP profiles, and auto-flags and bans are already proven to be abused at times, so I find it difficult to come up with a real solution there.
In terms of /yelling in stormwind interrupting others (I wasn’t there and don’t know any context) If its OOC yelling to advertise something then of course its no good. IC Yelling a lot is quite interruptive to others so I would assume common sense be applied to how much its used, because yes, I think larger events like people have mentioned in towns and such would be great, but if people aren’t interested they should be able to get far enough away from it.
Perhaps reducing how far /yells travel would be a good solution there, and for OOC purposes, a dedicated rp channel might help, though it could be just as prone to bot spam.
For both world travelling RP and town event rp perhaps addons could be a solution for that.
I always thought an addon that people could connect to, and it could show others on their world map where people are, would be nice to see. I know you can scan individual areas and stuff I think with TRP but there’s a lot of zones to scan.
An addon that works like a public calendar or bulletin board could be good too, but could also be prone to spam I suppose.
If any of those do already exist do let me know, as I’d be interested in seeing them!
and I know those solutions will have plenty of flaws but its worth at least discussing approachable solutions here I feel like.
Again, sorry for long ramble!
As multiple people have pointed out already, OOC and ERP are hardly the only things that make for bad climate on the server.
You cant just pretend that the bad reputation that the PCU has with a lot of people comes out of thin air alone.
It’s always a lot harder to control other people, especially with the lack of tools Blizzard gives us players to truely get rid if ignored players and the like.
It is a lot easier to keep a close eye on your own people. Call out things like homophobia/sexism RP and make sure people know that stuff like that is just as untolerable as the OOC/ERP.
I’ve seen officers of your guilds go around in places like Orgrimmar and in RP say stuff to other characters like: “You’re not a real troll/orc/Tauren/etc. because you bed women/men” to characters they, I assume, suspected or knew to be gay.
Obviously stuff like that should be called out always and I dont want to single out the PCU alone for this. But you guys do have a lot of guilds under your mantle and you could really make a big positive impact.
Lol these are the biggest issue for this server. I recently had a conversation with friends about previous rp experiences, and it’s shocking of how many of us experienced predators trying to erp with minors when we were young, which shows that it is a server wide issue not just a random case.
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