Since when did the SW Harbour become Goldshire Lite?

Argent Dawn
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Maybe I’ve just been naive before but I’ve noticed in the past year or so but especially in the past few months that the Harbour has basically become Goldshire Lite - whilst there’s always been people interested in that RP and there’s been many criticisms of Stormwind RP for being a Dating App simulator, it’s not completely in your face and is for the most part avoidable, the Harbour seems to just be completely open about it however.

I often see characters lingering against the edge, I check their profiles and they often have the ‘/c/’ at the bottom of their page, 20/0 lust bars, extremely suggestive profiles, and there has been a notable increase of Trial Accounts, stereotypical erotic tropes and so on.

Some examples I’ve seen include ‘bulls’, very suggestive TRP’s with typical keywords. Erotic dice game characters, and today I even saw someone RPing as a High Elf ‘Schoolgirl’ wearing a uniform, caked with makeup and a collar. It’s just repulsive and it drags down the server RP quality and reputation.

It’s nowhere near as bad as Goldshire but it’s no doubt getting worse. I’ve no problem with people doing that kind of RP in their own private chats and private places, it’s when it’s so flagrantly on display for the whole world to see. It’s just repulsive really.

I have to wonder why these sorts of people come to the city for this type of stuff, instead of Goldshire?

Just to clarify, I am talking about Argent Dawn - this character is a Heritage Armor gamer on a random RP server.

Edit: I’m not really talking about the people are are relatively competant non-sexual RPers, that divert RP toward that eventually. I mean the people who are genuinely extremely overt in their profiles - to the point where they genuinely wouldn’t look out of place in Goldshire.

TLDR:
Lots more lewd and erotic profiles in Stormwind - although especially in the harbour area, more trials and so on. Makes server worse.

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Unsure. Is this a Moonglade experience, or are you talking about Argent Dawn?

If Argent Dawn, it has been like so, coming and going since forever but still not that bad or even close to, as Goldshire.

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Genuinely wondering this myself, I was surprised when my character was on a stroll in SW and went through the harbour about a month ago and saw a bunch of players with Goldshire-tier profiles stood around.

I was even more surprised when about two of them whispered me the usual sort of opening messages that ends in ‘~’

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AD. This character is a Heritage Armor slave on Moonglade, but I rp on AD.

Whilst I know this kind of RP has been happening for ages, and likely will happen forever, it’s the frontness and openness about it that has caught be off guard - and very specifically people congregating in the Harbour for it. Goldshire style profiles within the city is not something you used to see all that often - yet nowadays if you go to the harbour it’s very common.

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I have seen it get progressively more and more overt over the last few months too. It’s really quite annoying as I love the space around the docks, it’d be a perfect place for sailors and the more nautical sort of player to hang around - but no, it’s just full of sweat and grime-coated Draenei Bulls and all that trash, or rather blatant racial stereotypes.

Truly sad! They’re only going to spread.

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It’s been a problem for a while. It’s more prominent in Lion’s Rest. There’s a lot of sleeper ERP’ers who will get obnoxiously close to your character before sending the ‘so do you erp??’ whisper.

I’m not really sure why it’s escaping from Goldshire. It could be overflow from Goldshire. When we talk about ERP’ers we tend to throw them all on the same pile but there’s about as many varities of ERP’er as there are RP’er. Could be for a large amount of the ‘ERP community’ that Goldshire is even too much for them, or maybe not enough.

I included a somewhat satirical segment in one of my old ‘guides’ called ‘How to RP in Stormwind’ or something around those lines, a few years ago, where I slightly embellished something that actually happened to me. I’ll see if I can dig it up.

Ah, here it is;

Despite numerous attempts to strike up conversation with the many pregnant walking corpses, jinyu, presumed fem-boys and humans ranging from 7ft to 12ft in height, I eventually come to the canals near the bustling Dwarven District.

Ah. I can already smell the Ironforge spirit in the ai- actually no, that’s just the camel poop I’ve stepped in, because the ‘Tanarisian’ riding ahead of me atop his mighty camel didn’t bother cleaning it up.

It’s here that I meet my first sociable RP encounter. She’s a lovely girl by the name of [redacted]. [redacted] and I spoke at length for a good thirty minutes.

After we stopped for a quick drink and got to know each other, it was clear that we were both striking up an intimacy on the level of trusted friends that could go out and journey together, developing and expanding our plot circle as we go. Naturally, the beautiful, stunning [redacted] promises to show me something excellent in a surprisingly, aptly named locale. ‘The Cut Throat Alley’.

[redacted]'s attitude has shifted slightly from composed and confident, to surprisingly needy and impatient. The burly, young void elf female leads me into the house and takes me upstairs, where she immediately asks me if I’m ‘feeling the mood’. To which I respond, ‘Oh uh, yeah. I’m in a pretty good mood!’ and then we both sit on the bed. I presume because of my gnomish heritage, it’s so we can sit at eye level.

This is where it gets weird. Her tone becomes more flirtatious. The chaste, confident and dynamic [redacted] I thought I knew is suddenly very promiscuous, and lacking in any sense of personal space. She closes the distance between us. Her warm lips are inches away from mine. I look down at the bulging, enormou-

“NOPE, **** IT. I’M OUT.” And then I ran. I ran until my little feet could run no longer, until I was as far away from Stormwind as remotely possible.

Thoroughly dehydrated from my journey, and bereft of supplies, I’m forced to consume my own urine for sustenance. I am visibly anxious, and prattling about the bushes leagues from the city, shocked and horrified by what I have witnessed.

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I’ve found Lion’s Rest to have a mix. There’s normal RPers there and the main populace has shifted toward it ever since it opened - as people used to hang around toward the Shady Lady and Old Town way more than they do now.

The Lion’s Rest people aren’t as overt in their profiles. They don’t look like they are Goldshire overflow -wheras some of the Harbour profiles genuinely do look like Goldshire style profiles.

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From what I’ve seen their profiles are still trying a little to keep up some sort of pretence that they’re legitimate RPers rather than strange little gremlins grunting at a screen.

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As of late it feels like some of that pretence is gone. It’s genuinely just on the nose Goldshire style profiles in many cases, and then there’s a step below which is overt but still could act as a ‘real’ character.

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There’s a certain group of people on AD that engage in ERP that have two different variations:

  1. The “I’m not an ERPer! I’m not!” player that, despite constantly searching for it and engaging in any mount of it they can scrape, continues to vehemently insist that they in fact are not an ERPer in the fear that whatever ‘reptuation’ they might have goes down the drain
  2. The “I don’t really know if I like RP or ERP more” player that is pretty obviously not nearly as conscious about their ongoings as player #1, but since they can’t really decide, they occupy spaces such as Lion’s Rest or the docks in search of both

I’ve had the latter stumble upon me a good few times over the years that I’ve been on AD, and usually when I was guildless (being part of my community thankfully tends to drive attempts off) and pretty much exclusively in Stormwind. The person in question would approach me for roleplay and it would seem reasonably normal and actually quite fun at first, because ironically enough, a lot of these people are actually quite capable of some decent, non-sexually driven roleplay, but after about 20-30 minutes, they’d usually make their intent pretty clear by trying to divert the conversation to more provocative topics.

Ultimately, I think both of these types of people simply can’t make up their mind about what it is they actually want, and unlike the people at Goldshire, some of these specific players probably do value legitimate, normal roleplay to some extent. All the same, I’d still avoid them like the plague; I literally do not care if you ERP outside of the game even 0.1%, but as myself and others have relentlessly repeated in the past, this game is not the platform for it

OK this is basically the TL;DR of what I was trying to say … hehe

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This sort of type has been around for a while, I’m specifically wanting to discuss and query the very overt profiles that would not look out of place in Goldshire that have been popping up way more frequently recently in Stormwind - especially the harbour. Not just general Anti-ERP stances, which there have been a thousand threads on.

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I think the post I’ve made remains relevant to the topic tbh - it’s the exact same people as is, excluding maybe my first of two examples, but they’re still an issue all the same

As for the fact that profiles are becoming more and more overt, I’m pretty sure it’s just a case of them largely not receiving any pushback of significant force; if there’s no resistance, they’ll just continue to be more and more blatant about it until the harbour really is Goldshire Episode 2. The most that can be done is reporting them through the option we’re given with TRP - Blizzard does claim that this gives them their profile to look through, so even though we usually don’t see much in the way of actual progress, it’s still likely the best and sole route to go with

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This raises the old concern of spots like lion’s rest and now the docks becoming abandoned by regular RPers concerned that RPing in these infamous places will brand them as perverts.

Thus more ground is ceded to OOCers and fetishists in gradual erosion until we don’t recognise the server anymore. Don’t let that happen. Be assertive and RP wherever you please.

Not one. Step. Back.

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catch me in stormwind like it’s verdun and a funny man in a blue coat just shouted “on ne passe pas!”

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This, basically

I continue to RP in Lion’s Rest and the docks because normalising the fact that it’s partially inhabited by people like this will only indirectly encourage them further. I wasn’t there for it, but I’m pretty confident in assuming it to be the same way Goldshire happened

I even think that the only slim chance of ever driving unwanted traffic out of Goldshire is to simply have a lot more people roleplaying in Elwynn again, as opposed to being worried about what the people on your friends will think of you when it lists you as being in Elwynn Forest

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Yeah this. If every regular RPer quits RPing in the place it’s just left up for grabs for these weirdos and I’d rather not see that

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Always feels like lip service to me, especially when you see repeat offenders time and time again. The worst part about it is ERPers have managed to lodge themselves in places where people are going to get some of their first exposure to roleplay. Honestly wish Blizzard would just go nuclear on the dumb coomers.

Hate it, hate it, hate it.

This is a big problem too, how many people actively avoid - say - the Bazaar because of what’s associated with happening there? Always been a fan of Oath of Silver’s tavern nights because it actively shunts the weird tauren and level 1 belf females away for a short while. But I think it’s pretty hard to actively try to dislodge these melts if you have people constantly reinforcing the idea they’re “no go zones”.

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From RP prespective It is… kinda understandable, harbors were always the heaven of the shady dealings and persons with… uhm… special servicies cough
But I gues this is nothing to do with real RP (yes, I know, ERP is RP too, its in the name E+RP… but you know what i mean)

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Yeah, some dude with a relatively normal profile whispered me in stormwind when I was RPing one night and straight up said “i bet you’d be more fun to breed than my nightsaber”

I was literally taken aback. I wasn’t scared just… wow.

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Reads thread
…

Right, someone go call the Horde, tell them “Sorry, you were right the first time, come and burn it all down again, please.”

I despair :frowning:

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