Gods damn it all, devs, we don’t want rose-tinted nostalgia glasses, we (I) want substance! Coherent, long term writing! Actual WORLD building!
People get 
mad about “Bluh bluh, wHeRe’S mY WARcruft?!”, nevermind that what about the WORLD aspect?! 
3 Likes
I will admit, I did go “Ooo!” at a lot of the shiny new models. Me like.
Now do all the other horrendous number of 2004 looking blocks out there!
I feel like they tried, but did not deliver for obvious narrative reasons that even an apprentice writer would know.
IE. The Legion had its roots in years of Warcraft lore established since Warcraft II. The orcish warrior Garrosh was likewise very “on brand” for Warcraft. The Shadowlands were not however, and no amount of Vol’jin’s vague nothingburger quests could deliver the same thing.
A questline where Wrathion shows infernals destroying Azeroth and telling us he thinks the demons are the real threat is a call back to a threat we have faced and consider a big deal, and always have. Sylvanas screaming “everyone will serve death” is a bit of a stretch to think it foreshadows a whole new world, with a whole new story and conflicts that reach a cosmic scale.
That is pretty sick!
You’ve nailed it.
I want World of Warcraft, not Marvel’s Avengers of Warcraft. I want nations, cultures, meaty lore. I want locations that make me think “I can’t wait to explore that place!”, that make me want to RP there, even if I have to create a new character for that — like I created Lintian for Legion to have a character with an IC reason to explore the Broken Isles.
I want a world that feels like a place where people live, and that feels large and full of nooks and crannies to get into, and mysteries to uncover.
And I want an expansion that picks a theme and sticks with it instead of using a MacGuffin to make the flimsiest connection between completely unrelated locales.
17 Likes
The Monkey Paw curls. Wish granted but you’re only allowed to have this when you play Classic / Season of Discovery / The Coming Classic+.
2 Likes
If there was RP in Classic or SoD, I’d play it in a heartbeat. Alas, Hydraxian Waterlords ran out of steam really quickly and became a dead server.
Even if there was RP there, it would be just a fraction of the retail RP population.
5 Likes
Hey its okay the current retail population is just a fraction of the Legion RP population!
2 Likes
This anoys me the most with the current expansion(and with BfA)!
So I hope they’ll smooth it out once TLT hits(or whatever the next one is called)
2 Likes
Lord, the Paladin one looks amazing. Time to become Roman Centurion!
1 Like
As Mucous pointed out, the person in charge of the expansion´s story was replaced halfway through its development.
I don´t think people have internalized the idea that War Within was going to be Shadowlands/Dragonflight 2.0 enough. We don´t even know what kind of BS Steve Danuser (the man in charge of Slands patches and entirety of DF) was preparing with Haranir, Beledar and whatever place the Coreway leads to. The fact that TWW is disjointed is pretty much the result of person in charge of patches not being the one who was in charge of creating the base zones as he came in over year into the development.
And I have a feeling that if we got the original War Within, there wouldn´t be dooming about some old TBC sidequest-tier lore being retconned, but instead dooming about Azeroth, Titans, Old Gods and Void Lords lore being retconned by Fractal Man, and the fact that the expansion would feel connected (like Dragonflight was) would be ignored due to another complete retcon of WoW lore.
So, Undermine?
5 Likes
Unfortunately so.
And while this is attributable to many factors (the double whammy of BfA and Shadowlands causing a mass exodus, the aging of the RPer population while youngsters prefer trendier games, etc.), I don’t think that it helps that the current expansion, post 11.0, is scarce on things for John Q. Adventurer to engage in. There was a burst of activity in Khaz Algar (mostly Hallowfall) early on, and it ceased as 11.0 content slid into irrelevance. Maybe that’s part of the reason while all the public events have been endless parties, festivals, and tournaments (and the occasional RP-PvP campaign, which is not everyone’s cup of tea).
K’aresh is called Argus 2.0, but Argus had a massive Azeroth-wide military campaign against a world that represented a clear and pressing threat to Azeroth. There was plenty of stuff for average RPers to do, and even if they didn’t go to Argus, it was hanging in the sky, clear as day. With K’aresh, it sounds like only the Avengers and the Champion of Azeroth will be involved.
3 Likes
I´ve heard of multiple campaigns in Khaz Algar in 11.0, then multiple campaigns in Undermine in 11.1, and now Stromgarde RPers are organizing campaign for 11.1.7, and there´s plenty of RPers salivating for 11.2, I´m sure.
Just because you haven´t seen them doesn´t mean they don´t exist. In fact, I´d say that this expansion has been the most conductive for RP since BfA.
2 Likes
I’m not giving you context.
4 Likes
Save me Mayonnaise!
Undermine was good! I want to see more content like that. But it was focused on goblins with little to offer to non-goblin RPers.
As for the campaigns, I didn’t know. I know there were campaigns in Khaz Algar in 11.0, but I wasn’t aware of any post 11.0 campaigns. I mostly learn about RP events via AA and the forum, and miss the ones that you need to be on some secret handshake Discord to know about.
3 Likes
This is basically what I feel like the ethereal lore from the Burning Crusade amounts to, which is why I can’t bring myself to care too much about retcons regarding it. While ethereal lore is being rewritten, it’s so minor and inconsequential that I don’t see anything that bad about it.
For me, the most valid criticism focuses on the Burning Crusade nostalgia baiting (we have to have eco-domes and mana-forges and remastered nether rays to trigger those Netherstorm memories) and the lack of consistency in this expansion (there should be a strong thematic connection between the zones of an expansion, not just a plot device chase).
2 Likes
Which is kind of a given in zones that belong to a race. Unless we want Blizzard to turn every single part of the new expansion to be some multiracial melting pot, we have to accept that the zones we see will be centered on races that inhabit them.
So, for Undermine, it´s goblins, for Quel´Thalas, it´s going to be blood elves, if we get Zul´Aman, it´s going to be Amani.
And? It´s kind of natural that people will explore the 4 new zones we get and at certain point will return into the 50 others. The Khaz Algar campaigns focused on the story we got, and once the story moved away from it, so did the large campaigns that usually follow the story.
Should a zone´s success be defined by huge public campaigns happening in it constantly? Because by that metric, much of the world is a failure.
The Discords are often publically accessible and even advertised on the forums, but you actually have to join them to see what they are doing instead of ignoring them and then talking how nothing is happening because the organizers didn´t use an antiquated page or the forums that majority of the server doesn´t use.
1 Like
Discord should perish actually 
. I hate having to need 12 WoW RP discords and actively search each one.
14 Likes
I prefer not to return to the times of 12 WoW RP forums, Skype chats and playing game of telephone because trying to get information to people was orders of magnitude harder than before Discord.
2 Likes
Trying to get clear information out of people is still a sissyphean struggle with Discord.
9 Likes