Isn’t the shallow setting kind of why it’s so good to RP in though? The barrier of entry is low, but there’s a lot of lore if you go looking for it and a lot of tidbits to draw inspiration from, while still not to the point that you’re really constrained by the lore. If things like the magic system were fully fleshed out we’d just have more mage RPers (yeah im calling you out) running around saying you can’t do X thing.
As it stands, you’d have to actively try to not adhere to the lore unless people are just really nitpicky (which they are).
What we have now is mage RPer 1 doing their magic in one way and mage RPer 2 doing their magic in another. I don’t feel like that is any less wont to create conflict. Less of a barrier to entry perhaps, and yet being better able to do research and know what you are about to do can be very helpful to gain confidence when doing something new.
I imagine fear of being judged by others is large for many new RPers, and the more you can be certain of is true before going in, the less you have to be afraid of.
Introducing alternate timelines to the lore was a mistake.
From my experience with the Dalaran community, I can confirm this. Different mage RPers have very different approaches to spellcasting. And that’s one of the most lore-rich classes — it just turns out that there are a lot of gaps that official mage lore doesn’t cover, as well as (of course, since it’s WoW) instances of it apparently being ignored in-game. What mage RPers do is roll with it and try not too step too much on the toes of each other’s headcanon.
there arent enough mmo settings where magic is laid down firmly with lore and rulesets. wow is definetly one of them. another was guild wars where you’d often see people argue regarding the Mesmer class (Illusion Arcane mage more or less) and everyones got a diffrent headcanon on how it should be used.
if your gonna make a magic-heavy setting. introduce some bloody set-in-stone lore on the topic so you dont get Thammaron’s spouting 50 pages of their own fanfics on the subject
Especially if one treats it as a gimmick and ignores the implications, throwing draenor and its entire universe down the memory hole once it’s no longer useful.
I’ve been working on my DnD custom setting a lot lately and I’ve come to see the shallow worldbuilding there as a feature, purely because DnD is built on the idea of making your own things, whether those are races, classes, or entire regions like I’m doing. There’s enough to go on that ideas are codified and present for newcomers, but not so much that themes are ironclad - leaving exactly enough room to explore how something can change over time or in terms of location.
Shallow settings can be good, but the problem is that when basic questions about racial lore, such as racial beliefs in the afterlife where we have only headcanon or scraps of lore from over a decade ago, or class lore are left open to conjecture (which is particularly egregious as a problem where allied races are concerned - I remember the near-weekly questions about Dark Iron Paladins in particular and Vulpera everything), the shallowness is less of a feature and more of a bug.
WoW is not a game built around inventing all your own details, it’s nominally a setting where people write books where plot-critical details are revealed, leading into expansions and quests which happen in one world. A book like Chronicles could not have been written for a setting which wasn’t intended to be at least partially set in stone and built up, even if it was sold under the excuse of unreliable narration. It can be fun to invent all your own details but the shallowness for a setting in many places - which is to say, anywhere Orcs are not present - is frustrating because Warcraft can write fleshed out backgrounds and lore. Most of the playable races are just wasted on refusing to do the bare minimum and often failing even that.
the two best i’ve seen are:
i): a mesmer that delves too deeply into domination and chaos magic must turn into a gen 3 dk/ old town rper and kill something to relieve the madness it brings
ii): a mesmer can shift mass across their body to change form like an ooze
Chronicles was not sold under this pretense. Chronicles was marketed as a de-facto “This is hardline canon” encyclopedia of the Warcraft timeline that both devs and players could rely on when it came to establishing what happened when.
About five months after the release of the third volume the writers tweeted out that the Chronicles were written from the perspective of the Titans which somehow made it inherently unreliable because the current writers are hack frauds.
Doesn’t help that lore still in the game is gutted pretty much word for word from D&D from way back when there was a 3,5 WoW RPG. Which gets really awkward on the subject of the School of Enchantment.