In spite of the (mostly fair) criticism of AD as an online community – or a great many online communities, as it has now become – I’m still inclined to say yes.
Argent Dawn is a bit of a whacky mess at the best of times, full of old feuds and grudges, but it’s also full of excellent and friendly RPers. You’ve just gotta decide for yourself which group is for you and which people you’d like to share this space with.
It is, and remains, the biggest and most active roleplay server on World of Warcraft – I’m fairly sure both Wyrmrest Accord and Moon Guard US are distinctly smaller.
Now I’m wondering if this holds up for current days too.
As for getting along with people, I try to keep an open mind, ignoring someone is something I only do as a last resort. It’s sometimes difficult though when you know people who actively dislike one another. ( PCU vs non-PCU being the easiest example).
Very true. It’s mostly that toxic players and behaviour will always be louder than the nice, average people who are just getting on with their time in the game, so it can be easy to assume that it’s the toxicity that’s the real average.
Even those who are toxic here though can be pretty chill and willing to get along in game. It’s why (for the most part) it’s best to give anyone on the forums the benefit of the doubt.
I’ve met people in-game who I assumed would be pretty unfriendly from the forums so it does just go to show that first impressions aren’t necessarily always true, either.
To put Perroy’s point into perspective, a very prolific guild at the time (a relatively well-regarded one, too) outright had an enforced rule of every female character joining having to ERP with the guild leader. Can’t say any passable guild could ever slip a rule like that past the radar today.
In my view, it’s just changed. Open forum flame wars slowly shifted to cloistered communities via Discord etc., and now instead of guilds washing their dirty laundry in the open (or god forbid, their leaders whispering it out like adults) they just duke it in a few shared discords.
In any case, is AD worth the effort? Probably. RP works much like any other MMO feature, you just find people you like and play with them. You might not like everyone around you, but no one’s forcing you to interact with them if you can’t handle the heat. Bit of a hassle, but it’s quite unlikely the cliqued mentality of the server will change all that much after being like this for so long. Some cliques expand, some cloister more, but they’ll always be around.
To be fair it wasn’t even passable back then. The moment people found out about it that guild’s rep went down like the Titanic and has never recovered.
I have been argent dawn for a while and i gotta say, its a good server and makes it shine than any other but sadly it gets attention of some really shady people that destroys peoples fun.
But in my experience back in days things was quite harsh, roleplay blacklist was a big thing apparently, And drama spread like a wildfire - specially in large scale rp-pvp, heck there was even dedicated Facebook groups that talked back on and other on the server.
We still have that toxic gatekeeping sjw extremism people on here but these days what i have notice things are bit calmer than usual.
