A LOT of people adopted this. Even people who I presumed were very good with following the lore decided to flip the bird at it and everyone who touched it. That lead to a lot of hostility and IC/OOC memeing that only damaged the RP scene more as people shifted into their bubbles.
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All roleplay I don’t like should be destroyed.
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True and real.
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goofy aaa standard limpwrist epsilon tier response
Let’s call them badrpers, the ones Terrorizer described. These have been present on AD for ages, particularly drawn to places like Duskwood and certain nooks of Stormwind in the past but were not the norm up until the huge server shifts late BfA and Shadowlands.
Why were they not the norm? Because the majority tried to take RP seriously, and a sort of RP standard was enforced. There was a base level of RP decorum expected in outworld interactions, some guilds/hubs being more rigorous and some more lax.
Shadowlands featured both a heavy player drop as well as all the internal server drama at the time. A lot of people stopped playing. The world was no longer as vibrant as it was. People looking for quality took longer breaks from WoW than they had in the past. For a whole decade prior, you could leave for a couple of months or even a year and come back to find the AD ecosystem still thriving albeit changed. Late Shadowlands was the first time I logged back in and felt that the server was no longer what it once had been.
Adding to that this weird new online mentality about enforcing niceness which poured into RP in the form of NO KINKSHAMING NO GATEKEEPING YOU DONT PAY MY SUB I CAN RP HOWEVER I WANT AND BE AS DISGUSTINGLY ILLITERATE OR OBSCENE and everybody just ignored it. The supersrs RPers that were left turned to their own bubbles, and in poured the absolute garbage you see on the streets of Stormwind today.
I remember my first character - edgy death knight - and I wonder how I would have turned out if certain people hadn’t called me out on a couple of mistakes.
Tldr
If you think the absolute garbage dogpoop RP you see in Stormwind today is a result of people going “oh pschww ah well if Blizzard has no respect for the lore, I can do whatever I want. I SHALL CEASE THIS VERY LITERATE AND VERY COOL AND VERY LORE-ADHERING DEEPLY COMPLEX CHARACTER RP THAT I’M DOING, CHUG A GROWTH POT, REROLL DRACTHYR AND START SITTING OUTSIDE THE LAMB.” then I don’t think you’ve been paying attention.
Also Witcher and Game od Thrones RPers are cringe. This is Azeroth.
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To be fair, and balanced, I emote that the floor of every tavern is sticky because every bar I’ve been to IRL has had sticky floors.
I don’t go to many bars which I guess is implied, I RP on AD
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There’s also the issue of conflicting canon sources and absurdly lackluster worldbuilding coming out in recent years. People can keep complaining about Exploring Azeroth books being garbage and all that, but they’re still official Blizzard lore books. However, because people making them didn’t seem to care, some are mostly a flyover description of the in-game zones, including the battles between Alliance and Horde post-BfA.
So, we end up with an absurd situation where the most recent lore about Ashenvale makes it a warzone, while at the same time Tyrande allows Horde to visit Bel’Ameth. Sure, you can headcanon an explanation, but nobody is (or should be) forced to accept it.
The problem isn’t just RPers ignoring the lore, it also lies with the lore itself being an inconsistent mess.
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I swear this is an american RP thing. I have never experienced this before I had to interact with US RP
It was absolutely a thing here too with people very frequently demonizing gatekeeping and how it might relate to the dwindling number of the RP community. To them you can’t afford to be critical and negative about what others are doing because then the precious community will have more infighting, more drama and less incentive to play nice or interact with each other.
Meanwhile enabling the masses after feeding them the aforementioned lines of “You don’t pay my sub”, “You aren’t a person of authority”, “Blizzard doesn’t care about the lore nor should you”, “I’m having fun and that’s all that matters” has led everyone with a lick of sense to evacuate from the more populated public RP hubs and then forming their own bubbles.
You’re mostly experiencing the aftermath and consequences of this mentality (a result most sane players had predicted years ago) hence you probably don’t see it on display these days.
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Never understood why people get morally outraged for calling something bad. All of a sudden you get fifteen forumites crawling out between the floorboards to remind you that just because you don’t like something doesn’t make it bad.
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Moon Guard and Wyrmrest Accord have gone through something similar because at the end of the day, as much as we’d like to pretend otherwise, all three roleplay realms across the ocean are pretty similar. It all boils down to what Hatescale has just mentioned quite eloquently; the mentality of how you can do anything you want, because you aren’t physically barred from it, since, you don’t pay their sub, and so on.
In NA, especially since the launch of Shadowlands, and in EU as of recently, this attitude was answered in kind. You don’t pay their sub, yes; but they also do not pay yours either. If they have no respect for a setting you love, your writing, or even you, as a fellow roleplayer; why should you have any for their roleplay? If they are willing to ignore entire factions and their presence, what’s stopping you from ignoring them in turn?
This realisation, in my honest opinion, as someone who’s kept an eye out on the NA roleplay scene, has done nothing less than save their roleplay community. It’s why the Moon Guard Wiki fell in disuse (amongst other reasons), for example. If you go to the Moon Guard forums right now, you’ll see that most of the posts are simply guilds, with the occassional chatter. Most social interactions, and exposure of ideas, happens through Discord and guild wikis and websites.
A lot of the times, this has done quite a lot of work when it comes to happiness for all parties involved all throughout. Those who simply don’t know much about the lore find their footing, with fewer than before getting drilled-in that the setting is a parody of itself, with roleplayers who enjoy the lore and treat it with some degree of sanctity simply go on about their business.
In the meantime, all those who do these things we’ve mentioned, simply end up moving on, be it in spirit or to other settings. A lot of these people do these things for the simple enjoyment of the idea that folks are cartoonishly mad at their presence, rather than simply peeved off enough to be vocal about their annoyance.
When you take away that attention from them, and they realize they’re simply roleplaying on their own, in a setting they don’t like, in a videogame they don’t like, on a monthly fee, they simply disappear, because they don’t expect you to actually walk away when they tell you that you don’t pay their sub, they just expect you to suck it up, and still show up to the same roleplay spot in Stormwind tomorrow.
Proof to this is how AD-EU Stormwind started hemorrhaging numbers at an insane pace the moment most communities and guilds in it realized they could simply roleplay literally anywhere else.
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Couldn’t have said it better. WoW lore may not be deep but it is vast. If we have to go by the rules of adhering to lore such as ; The more recent it is the more valid and if recent lore contradicts old lore, recent lore takes primacy unless it dramatically shatters the setting. The exercise is bound to be frustrating.
Not only having to make a sense of this mess and making your character being part of that mess even on a retroactive level in some cases like BfA… Man this conjures up imagery of the conspiracy board with threads linking everything.
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making the ff14 rp discord start a witch hunt on me because I dared to say that “bad roleplay exists” is one of my proudest bonkposting accomplishments
Oh don’t worry, now they go on world tours across Azeroth and infest every other hub with their garbage. No place is safe from the Stormwinder so I wouldn’t really agree that they just give up when Stormwind becomes a little more empty. They try to find that attention in those other spots.
I considered Stromgarde to be a pretty promising hub but after spending some time there at times it doesn’t really feel that different from Stormwind, which is a shame.
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I think it was Demoniaco who mentioned people not treating the world with distance and proportion and Arathi is a perfect example of that. Did some RP on my dwarf one night, saw some monopod Stormwind memer dampening the mood with his city elf archmage housewife friends. Wrap things up, log over to my Draenei in Stormwind and see the same character walking around.
MAYBE HE TELEPORTED BECAUSE EVERYONE WENT TO SLEEP IN STROMGARDE AND THERE WAS NO ONE TO TALK TO
Listen, I’m not some low fantasy Tide Raven weirdo who can’t stomach magic or teleportation. In fact, I’ve on several military campaigns been a proponent of it for the purpose of efficiency. But this is another thing altogether. You’re not RPing a character if you just hop from hub to hub doing second life tavern RP, man. What the hell.
On the one hand I can, to an extent, understand this approach, but it’s still an issue with the mentality. Blizzard has all the rights to defecate over their setting and as they’ve been doing that quite regularly since Orclords of Orcnor, it becomes increasingly harder to enjoy canon lore.
However that’s not a valid excuse to dismiss said canon lore, replace it with your own and admonish others others who tell you that your headcanon sucks (not you specifically btw). I don’t feel it plausible to justify someone’s take on how the afterlife works or how their necromancy magic is deeply rooted in the RPG books just because Shadowlands is bad.
These are at least the situations where it’s not clear cut who’s in the right mind you. When I see the usual Stormwind Dracthyr and the Stormwínd regulars that infest the city I absolutely do not see any positive side to people blatantly ignoring the setting and I only experience the negative side of it.
one of those was an illusion you doofus
yeah.
one corner - housewife city elf with titles like | cat momma, PSYCHO |
the other corner - aragorne from j.r.r. tolkien’s azeroth grumbling how his sword glows blue so “argH… there must be trolls around…”
maybe I’m the dummy for not playing a meme character or something that isn’t completely different from some piece of media I like. why won’t I just roleplay Jeyce as Max Payne?
Yeah, the big strength of RP in WoW, and MMOs in general, is that you make your character that you play in a setting with other people where the setting is already pre-established and everyone should, logically, adhere to the same setting’s rules and established details. It’s the baseline around which it all involves.
well?
I mean
you do just with daggers instead of guns
spoken like someone who never played max payne smh
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It’s a bit of a flimsy baseline though. We can point at the thankfully now defunct Uldum community with its ghoulish menagerie of concepts and still see that with enough mental gymnastics everything they cooked up still adheres to the pre-established setting of Warcraft.
are you telling me jeyce hasnt become a washed up alcoholic selling his services as a bodyguard in Pandaria after the timeskip?
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