On one hand, I have somewhat always disliked that you ‘need’ an addon to actually RP, and if a new player wanted to try out RPing and didn’t have a RP profile addon other players would be less inclined to RP with them…
On the other, much larger hand, TRP3 and other similar addons have provided players with much-needed customization and control over their characters that Blizzard themselves have also advocated for. You can try to argue that people should try to advocate for better customization in return, but… very clearly that is just ten new hair colours, not things like first glances, naming not beholden to character names, description etc.
Overall I think - if this does happen and will kill addons like TRP3 and Musician - this will damage the RP community a lot. Unfortunately, I don’t see it very likely that any stink raised on AD forums or even US forums is going to matter, Blizzard very rarely hears our complaints or wishes.
Although there are cached profiles for existing characters this will severely hamper efforts to meet new characters and I do hope it is just a PTR thing.
Though this is a chance for Blizz to integrate their own version of character profiles for RP servers. Will they do that? Probably not, but we can all dream…
For an RPG MMO to not have basic RP functionality still annoys me to this day.
City of Heroes, a WoW contemporary back in 2004, launched with a ‘Character ID’ system. One that got upgraded further down the line. It was a relatively simple description box, but it did the job, and had the same UI as the enemy Info box (Yes, you could actually get a little text blurb about enemies too. Just imagine ) so it kept things nicely consistent.
Well, I think people standing in the Stormwind trade district are usually not RPers, or RPing at that moment, same with people standing on mailboxes or roofs. Those running past you with mach 6 are probably not RPing at that moment either!
And not having a scanner isn’t going to kill RP either, people will then just have put more effort to find RP and stay in touch with their community.
All in all, RP will continue on, will it be harder to find RP? Probably not if you’re already part of a community. To me it sounds like people will just have to put more effort into finding RP and RPing itself and its something they dread to do, apparently?
I get it that rp addons are super convenient and easy, but I doubt its going to kill RP
I used to use XRP, but TRP was the Microsoft of roleplaying addons with its “embrace, extend and extinguish” approach. They took the standard (the Mary Sue Protocol) and added their own extensions incompatible with everything else, and after TRP became the most popular addon, minority addons like MRP and XRP had to become bug-for-bug-compatible with TRP’s implementation of the protocol, or be sidelined.
I abandoned XRP when I found out that there was a bug in one of the addons that had my character name duplicated when her XRP profile was viewed by TRP users.
I think many people have echo’d / will echo that one of the major points of appeasement to a role playing hobby set in World of Warcraft is attached to the ability of RP addons
Sure other games have communities, and they roleplay as well… But you do know they result heavily on OOC communities such as Discord servers to build the aesthetic of their character? It’s just extra steps.
Perhaps not directly, but you have to think of the consequences, some will maybe stop playing, they maybe had friends who liked playing with them, maybe had a character that was heavily tied to the player that quit, and so when thats gone, maybe they dont want to play anymore.
So on and so on, theres 0 positive things to come out of this, and I dont want to spend 4-5 minutes to load 1 profile, let alone maybe 30-40 in an area.
This, unless Blizzard can give us a word for word confirmation they are building in something to support those actively roleplaying on the subject of customisation and the ability to immerse onesself into an OC…
I feel that would already change a grand deal to the obvious reaction of the RP Community on this patch update.
Let’s also not forget… in a hobby isn’t it nice to have convenience? Surely it is not the end of the world…
But I’d rather have Blizzard looking into this and see if there’s any way to find a loophole around, so it doesn’t affect.
Then just shrugging shoulders and going: it is what it is.
There’s also been some suggestions that it is a measure that has been taken solely on the PTR, in order to optimise the use of server resources and save a little money on running the PTR servers, since those sorts of mods are rarely ever used on the PTR anyway.
I do not expect it will be much more difficult? Just that people have less RP hooks to go on
Time to find one?
Eitherway we will have to see how it al works out anyway before we can decide the best of course of action then, perhaps they’ll fix it before it goes live
FlagRSP was popular in Wrath. There was also MRP and another addon whose name I don’t remember. They all originally used a chat channel, “xtensionxtooltip2”.
The Mary Sue Protocol was a replacement for this (fragile and inefficient) method of communication between addon instances. It used the SendAddonMessage() function to implement peer-to-peer communication in background, invisibly to users, without spamming chat channels. My understanding is that this is what’s being throttled.
I’m not crying “the sky is falling” just yet. Last time Blizzard cracked down on addon communication was 8.1, where addons were blocked from sending messages to community channels to combat spam, but it had the unfortunate side effect of breaking the CrossRP addon as well. When roleplayers complained, they got something even better: the Elixir of Tongues, which works without any addons.
Maybe, just maybe, something like this will happen this time as well. I’m not holding my breath, though.
(Because Blizzard limits me to three messages in one topic… I’ve had to resort the desertion)
But I do feel this take, I atleast hope with the Community Council giving feedback they’ll connect with the playerbase and give us more insight before just hitting the button
I do hope it’s just the PTR because ew. Some of us have details in our TRP that need to be known in RP. Can’t just do the whole “what you see is what you get”
For someone who was once in those shoes, making walk-up RP even harder to do, especially for those who might be anxious or nervous to start role-playing towards someone… Its bad. Really bad, searching for hooks was the only thing I felt I could do, and still it took 30 mimutes to approach someone.
) so it kept things nicely consistent.
