I think the long and short of it is, if ERP’ers didn’t paint massive targets on their back and shamelessly self-advertise without repercussion due to moderation actions (or I don’t know, just human decency) and spent every waking minute of their game time looking for cyber, the community response would be nowhere near as volatile.
As per guild drama like infiltrators, bizarre underground OOC politics, shady RP event sabotagers, etc. That stuff is probably here to stay and it’s pretty unfortunate.
I don’t disagree with what you’ve said, but the excessive leniency on the vigilante attitude is one of the main causes of what creates divisions and toxicity within the community.
Praising and strumentalizing people’s sadism as a social weapon isn’t going to improve the community in the long-term.
Honestly, Argent Dawn’s always been a hive of drama; I’ve been here since TBC. Even in Waywatcher’s Twilight Highlands and Borderlands campaigns, the threads repeatedly capped out due to unending arguments, guild wars and squabbles. Red August and the Frozen Heart achieved the status of legends due to the OOC antics that happened during them. Guild sabotage was commonplace and an everyday occurrence in WotLK- especially in the military groups and the troll community.
ERP was rife in practically every guild I joined. Back then, I assumed it was normality and something you basically had to opt out of. In one of the server’s largest and most ‘reputable’ guilds in WotLK, you were coerced into cybering with the officers in order to gain any form of rank. I repeatedly declined (underaged and all), and was never promoted above fresh recruit level despite my solid attendance during events.
The main change I’ve noticed is the lack of server-wide RP-PvP campaigns and, honestly, I don’t blame people for refusing to run them publicly anymore. There genuinely has never been a drama-free public campaign; they’ve always had problems. Even back in the old days, balancing numbers was a precarious affair- and people frequently threatened to drop out on a mere whim to get their own way. Pasting forum avatar’s faces onto renaissance paintings after arguments was also common sport- one I miss dearly. Please bring it back.
As touched upon above, perhaps discord is partially responsible for the decline in these. Back then, you had to post your concerns onto the very much public campaign thread rather than the closed-off anonymity of a discord chat. From Ogrepowered, to Drums of War and the Howling Fjord, I remember there being moments where the chat was beyond at times, through no fault of the organizers.
Still, it’s not all that bad. The recent campaign ran by the Federation of Evil™ was 10/10 and entirely drama-free. Despite the current perceived ‘divide’ in the realm, the quality of roleplay you can find and the adherence to lore is better than any other server I’ve been part of (US and EU). Get out there, interact and form your own opinions of guilds instead of listening to rumours! The community’s much more open than people think.
Ah the glorious days of the Mok’lohn command, where ERP was the norm even when the guild leader was a minor (or Rickarla) and they had members who were Game Masters at the same time shielding them from ingame reports and tickets.
I do love small guilds the most as well. Only issue with them is that you depend on everyone to be fairly active, as just a few inactive players for a small period can result in the guild dying out (Happened far too often).
A lot of my favorite small guilds died out this way. Sad times.
Derailment is our speciality. But I think that’s the natural progression of any discussion or conversation; people will always latch onto sections of a post that aren’t necessarily related to the thread’s topic, then it just goes from there.
And regarding drama, I don’t think AD has improved or degraded. Online communities will always have an element of drama – I distinctly remember the magic beer from the Borderlands campaign.
I remember when that specific one was made about pop tops and the off realmer posts raging about it. I remember that one undead warrior from General forums in specific who tried to act like a big boy but he couldn’t handle the collective 'tism of AD forums focused on him
The server has always had cliques and groups that fought with each other over petty disagrements it’s just the older crowd tended to keep it to skype conversations, IM, or MSN chat. If your name was on a community pillars list regardless of how harmless the reason you would find yourself blacklisted. Popular community figures, guilds, even green posters, were complicit in this type of behaviour. At one point we had a court guild that tried to exile guilds it didn’t like to remote areas to kill them off. The only real difference is how dramatically the game has changed and that’s obviously affected the community too. You couldn’t really hide from others before in game like people do now with their bubble RP, the world was smaller and the game was literally developed in such a way that servers were supposed to have a villiage-like atmosphere in terms of realm pop. Our realm pop has gone from (yes I’m repeating myself) a small villiage to mega-city 1. Now that’s just one change of many hundred. All these incremental changes have affected the value of the individual player and atomized us.
With that said the community is definately calmer than it was, there was a lot of wild, very weird, degenerate stuff which went on back in the day which (thankfully) you don’t really ‘see’ anymore in the ‘respectable’ circles. Most of the old school community pillars were massive degenerates. ERP was very wide spread and actively happened in most guilds as Snake has pointed out. The Kalimdor community in particular which I’m intimately familiar with while always overly dramatic was a microcosm of the whole server. Behind closed doors the vast majority of the community had disagreements, didn’t really like each other, were extremely judgemental, ERP’d their brains out even though they pretended to be above it/vilified it on the forums etc. The image they portrayed was a complete falsehood. The word toxic might be a trendy buzzword that’s thrown around too easily but that’s the most accurate way to describe it.
In public they were ‘friendly’ and inviting (especially on the forums but we literally had blues monitoring our behaviour) and obviously the actual game itself required we work together to achieve goals but when they weren’t under scrutiny these people were dispicable. Most of the old school community pillars and the established cliques were massive degenerates that got up to things that would make most of the normies here vomit uncontrollably. I suppose I’m reiterating here but this is part of the reason why I always scoff when people get bent out of shape over the PCU, what ever you might think about the PCU at least they’re consistent in their views and don’t have that kind of weird atmosphere going on.
None of this is to say I didn’t enjoy, or like the community, I got to experience the ‘golden age’ as Aerandul and others described it. I would be lying however if I said the community was any less unpleasant. Publicaly? No, because the game required we worked together. It was a very different time. This was back when GM’s used to actually punish you for trolling roleplayers. Behind closed doors? Yes.
The only thing I would add is that the vitiriol and drama only really started to spill out in earnest in public Wrath onwards. Funnily enough that’s also when they gradually stopped enforcing the ToS, the RP realm rules and the game began to change as a whole.
Argent Dawn always been bit dramatic hence why it is usually called ‘‘Argent Drama’’ but the thing that have changed recently is that people build up communities through Discord and exclude people while before it was mainly in-game through guilds themselves and I can imagine it can get quite rough in some environments.
But overall it shouldn’t affect anyone too greatly as there are many great guilds and communities out there being created each week and plenty of new and old places to get in touch with others.
So the ‘‘problem’’ just changed platform and kinda gotten a bit ‘‘tighter’’ in that sense but there are ways to avoid it.
at times, through no fault of the organizers.