[Meta] Worth the effort?

Argent Dawn
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Argent Dawn is, unquestionably, a fortress. Many claim Argent Dawn to be the last haven, a refuge for the dwindling population of Roleplayers still engaged with World of Warcraft. Indeed, over the years, Argent Dawn has built itself a cadre of residents, militia, and active guards that reside within this now-venerable fortress, defending it against perceived threats from weakening the walls, while welcoming perceived boons to strengthen it. After all, Argent Dawn is, unquestionably, a fortress.

Salutations, residents of Argent Dawn!
I want to talk about our realm, our haven, our residence. For many, many years, Argent Dawn has been the home to the liveliest, the colourful, the historic, and the remarkable. So many in fact, that it becomes an incredible effort to bring remembrance to all those who are amongst us now, and have been with us in the past. The history of the realm is decorated with many, many, many voices.

Have we been more at odds with each other than now?

Over the years, there´s been a growing divide in the server. Disagreements, accusations, grievance, even hatred. Everything from the past has been building up into a pile that fractures the community of Argent Dawn into multiple groups by its sheer mass. We don´t get along any more.

Even still, despite of this, we carry on because this is our haven, our refuge, our realm, our fortress. By our human nature, we want it to become better, but that nature has made us forget that there are many, many more residents here on Argent Dawn. And what has become our response? To ignore, undermine efforts, and deny their existence. Simply put, we do not want to be together any more.

The dwindling residents still remaining join sides instead of the community. Wage war against the disagreeable. This isn´t healthy for our realm.

Is this hate worth the effort?

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I think you’ll find two groups. Those who will say “yes” and those who will say “no”, but will be unwilling to change anything about their attitude, which might be what caused conflicts in the first place.

Let’s be fair here. Drama, toxicity and conflicts have always been part of AD. AD has never been a peaceful haven, as you describe it. Take these forums: it was a place where guilds would try to sabotage each other. It’s unlikely these conflicts will cease.

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As someone who is new to Argent Dawn, I’ve tried my absolute hardest to be respectful and learn the do’s/dont’s of RP. I’ve been met with strange suspicion, people using 3rd party websites on me to find alts (ask me questions about those alts) and even just straight up rudeness via whisper. I’ve never experienced any of this before on my original server (PVP), you get general toxicity but the Argent Dawn experience has been something else.

I have made friends but they have been few and far between. People talk about RP dying on Argent Dawn, I’m not generalising when I say this but a lot of AD residents are too much in their own head and need to open up.

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There are many things to be told and this can be discussed forever.

I appreciate the concern, but I can say, that recently, the inner tensions had been quite reduced compared to some time ago, thankfully. The current issues are mostly towards ERP, OOCers and such which is something most agree on, even with slight differences at times, but other than that things been mostly fine as I seen. People less dedicating their time to spread hate for nothing. And yes It actually happened in past months (last year basically.) Compared to then, it’s better now.
They seem to instead, focusing on their own, healthy fun, which should be the priority. (The healthy part covers adhering to rules, common sense and such)

Just treat the game as a game should be treated. Not more and perhaps, not less. Do what you enjoy without ruining others’ (which is a wide field, some which i mentioned above.)

Stay safe everyone.

Sorry for any weird spellings and wordings I’m about to pass out as I write this.

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As much as I enjoy the optimism, I definitely disagree here. I’d say the difference between then V now is, thanks to discord, the OOC and IC personas of people have blended in a sense of judging someone’s OOC personhood based on their roleplay actions and values (and no, this isn’t defending ERPers or OOCers, most people agree those have gotta go). Tensions between communities are high to a toxic degree, and whilst it’s all well and good for communities to stick to their kind, it’s led to something of a gradual death of the server campaign, among other things we took deemed “unfixable” as a concept.

In short, and I’ve said this before, but AD has become less about the RP and more about using RP as a vehicle for ego. Has this always been the case? Definitely, and maybe it’s just the advent of discord that brought the issue into a wider limelight, but I don’t think it’s plain nostalgia when this notion of “things are more toxic here now” is held by a vast amount of the community.

I’m a nerd, and lately have been using the wayback machine to scour fragments of the old, pre-purge AD forums. It made me sad about the fact you don’t see much discussion of roleplay itself here anymore; not much about your characters, or your concepts, and when was the last time anyone saw a guide around here? There’s the headcanon thread, but gone are the days of the majority of threads being discussing your OC’s and your interpretation of aspects of the lore. I used to be able to tell the concept/character of nearly every active poster, but I don’t think I could say with confidence a single thing about the majority of the forum regulars’ OC’s nowadays.

I’m not suggesting any sudden changes because that’s not how the world works, and I feel the majority of the issues follow WoW itself as a sadly dying game in terms of players. Most of us on AD have been here since 2010-2012ish, and stayed here throughout, which can definitely jade a person when they’ve seen as much trash as the average ADer has. I learned to stick away from discord communities on the server after having a 5 hour argument over casual usage of racial slurs, but that’s besides the point.

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In my opinion as one of the relics in Argent Dawn, coming from a time when Amarae and her Stormguard were keeping the streets of Stormwind safe (sarcasm intended), I too find that AD is changed every time I return from a break.

One of my most cherished memories on AD is the massive campaign in The Barrens led by a stout Dwarven general on Alliance side and a brutal Tauren warrior on Horde side. Sadly, I don’t feel that’s possible anymore.

People have been forming groups, but that’s something that has always been done. The hostility towards people that RP a different kind of RP than the cool kids approve of has increased though.

Unfortunately, I personally don’t have the solution, but I do clearly see the negativity.

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i think a lot of you who think it was better back then are looking at back-then with rose tinted glasses.

We had a lot of drama back then and quite a few; “I just don’t want to interact with X” groups. Which is fine, this is a game you’re supposed to do for fun and if a certain group is making you miserable then I don’t see why avoiding them is such a big deal?

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Definitely, and we were also a whole lot younger then, but I’d argue far too many people adhere to the notion for it to be entirely based on nostalgia.

I for one definitely don’t disagree here. “AD Drama Threads” have been a staple since AD’s infancy, but I think the difference is in tone. The average AD drama thread in 2020 is based on aggression, insults, and OOC personhood, as opposed to about the scandalous roleplay in question (again, ERP is as always the exception), and Id encourage more people to use the wayback machine to do a comparison (there’s a lot of archived threads from back then).

I don’t think it’s a question of “better” and more “different”. When old ADers and new ADers a like are saying “things are getting uncomfortable here”, it’s worth having a bit of self-reflection instead of outright denying any changes. After all, every community will always change with time, and it’s worth looking at whether AD changed for the better or not. Some people enjoy the more inward clique-based nature, others preferred a wider community.

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It’s a weird one. To me, the forums look more spiteful/hateful (and I also trust Mogi’s comparison though I haven’t actually looked to compare myself) and I think it does drive some disillusionment in the server in general. Obviously back in the day we had Hrothgarr and the like as well as constant rage-fuelled arguments so it’s not like any of this is new, to me at least it just looks more wide-spread.

At the same time, though, I think that at the time I was also more invested in this stuff and was considerably more of an unpleasant idiot myself, so it probably didn’t feel as bad in that case. Not to go patting myself on the back now, but I think I’m more aware of when stuff like this is bad these days than I was as an edgy teenager. Hell, I’ve better at managing losing my cool now than I was even a year ago.

I do think there’ve been considerable changes to the server community that can help fuel this stuff (Discord is a good point) that aren’t really anyone’s fault - I don’t think this is the result of anyone doing anything in particular, more just the effect of the game and RP’s stagnation.

There are things I think could probably change to make things a bit better, but it’s unlikely to happen.

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Sounds like a them problem.

Yes, we’ve all gotten older, but perhaps these people have grown out of RP on AD on WoW?

The only real change is that the forum trolls are less fun and quite frankly boring.

That and Goldshire leaking out into Stormwind. Which is bad.

Also, before there was discord, there was skype.

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I wouldn’t say that’s totally fair - imo it should be on people to be less toxic than for people to get over it. Obviously this goes to an extent and you should expect some level of toxicity on the internet, but at the end of the day WoW and RP are a form of escapism so it’s discouraging to see the level of unpleasantness you see regularly on AD.

That’s a fair point about the old Skype cliques, though I feel like Discord has had a bigger effect than that with how large servers can be.

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Incomparable tbh. Skype was used for cliques yeah but it wasn’t an app with thousand-member servers and the like. Skype cliques were half a dozen people at most as opposed to entire communities.

Sums up the issue

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Hm… Isn’t as simple to grasp. I would really like to engage more with the community, but there’s some odd boundaries. Some are inward, some outward.

Sometimes I just walk past RP that just seems…weird and uninviting. Maybe I’m too old, but just taking a walk through Stormwind makes me want to Hearthstone back to Westfall quicker than anytime else, and that says something from a ret main. I mean, each to their own, but the rampant appearance of Velf teens, Demonhunters backflipping everywhere, casting immolation aura in public with no care in the world and threatening the general public.
The weirdest I’ve seen recently was an argument about “who shot first” in a passive agressive manner via emotes. (Just agree beforehand or roll?)
At other times I’ve been met with straight-up hostility IC and OOC without even having said anything yet, which strikes me as odd. Let IC be IC, and if the character doesn’t like humans, that’s fair. Kind of odd to run around SW then though.

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No, the death of the RP-PVP (and RP-PVE) server campaign is people shopping for free content and then thinking to complain to organisers when they didn’t get their win.

I also thought on your previous statement for a bit, disagreeing with Kump, and think you must be completely out of the loop as far as the root of recent drama is concerned, probably in part because:

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But there are still half a dozen people using Discord to try and muscle in and take over events.

or there were when events were more open.

Also, I don’t think letting a person you don’t like walk all over you is good. Especially if this person comes to the forums after and starts being a two-faced liar about it.

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Not only common in RP-PVP, bigger DMed events have those instances occur aswell.

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I’ll take this to be true enough, though I haven’t actively attended one myself in a good long while, word of mouth from friends had me thinking much the same.

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I only left a week ago because I didn’t enjoy the casual racism, I wouldn’t call myself out of loop for missing out on that.

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I imagine it’s not as bad as on the RP-PVP spectrum, as you guys actually have other players to argue with who each have their own agendas (sometimes).

In the case of DMed events its mostly people trying to argue with the DM why they can’t have an auto-railroaded win.

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As a blood elf player, I’ve learned to live with being hated by basically everyone

I say this partially in jest, but also partially seriously. I remember once when I was on my hunter and I saw someone advertising your typical mercenary guild in general chat. I whispered the GM, had an entire, positive conversation, then just before he was going to invite me to have an IC interview he said “wait, your name. You a blood elf?”. I replied that I was and he immediately said “oh, sorry, we don’t want any blood elves here”, but gave no reasons. It’s not like I was trying to apply to a themed guild, it was your generic mercenary guild that could have had any race in it, but nope; no elves allowed.

Going to be honest, it’s moments like this that have pushed me more towards the Alliance side, though I am not saying the Alliance is perfect; far from it, I assure you! It’s a shame, as blood elves have always been my favourite since WC3, but all I tend to see whenever I try and integrate as a blood elf player is that I get pushed back to the blood elf/nightborne guilds, despite preferring to RP with the wider Horde as opposed to this cliquey faction divide.

There will always be drama. There will always be egos. I don’t really get exposed to too much of the wider drama as I often find it difficult to integrate into the RP community, but I hear much of it through word of mouth. I don’t think we will ever completely squash drama on the server.

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