Yeah. Because that’s true.
The game is nearly twenty years old and some guilds still active to this day have been here in some capacity since that time. Heck, even half of that time - guilds are turning ten years old.
The fact that I had a bit of fun with alliteration doesn’t change the fact that nothing shy of a server shutdown will ever truly kill retail RP.
I should note about this particular one in 8.3 that it had absolutely nothing to do with void elves from the organizers pov and was in fact purely focused on the crown of Stormwind, the calls about velves were an element added purely by randoms that decided to attend it, as was the /yell spam.
Turns out that hosting events in public is inherently uncontrollable, who’d have thought?
Damn, the plot thickens. Guess the whole void elf lynching kerkuffle wasn’t even orchestrated by the PCU, yet people bring it up to this day that way. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I think everybody needs to stop dragging up things from the past tbf. It’s tiring.
The ultimate killer is time; the game is 20 years old, did you think that the prime-time of Orgrimmar, Stormwind and Silvermoon being brimming with roleplayers was going to last forever?
Playing the blame game is all well and good, toxicity, be that from social media groups, blogs or extremely vocal people may drive people away. But people grow up, their interests change and they get more obligations and responsibility as they simply grow up. This has probably driven down playtime and retention the most.
There is minute Horde roleplay in any hub. There are guilds doing their own thing with each other some of which people may or may not enjoy.
Go to Stormwind in prime times and it’s still very to relatively. Orgrimmar? Not so much.
Retail RP isn’t what anyone’s argued, the Horde is a ghost town unless you RP in a guild that may not align with your preferences, or put the time and effort it to try and attract people to an event of your own which people may not want to do, and isn’t really a sustainable thing, lest you want to RP once a week.
I don’t have the solutions and throughout the thread I’ve proven that. And you might not like it but there has to be a cause for these things to happen. PCU never ate my children, Bobby Kotick didn’t come to my house and curl one out on my doorstep, but pretending these things AT LEAST did not help, I mean I dunno what to tell you.
I mean this is the actual answer, I suppose.
I was 17 when I began playing this game in BC. I’ll let someone else do the math to figure out how old I am now.
Also, this is why I’ve not the time or inclination to attempt running events which may potentially fail. I have to pay the rent, lol.
Agreed but then how do you explain Asmongold’s continued success?
(The explanation is that behaving like an absolute manchild for years on-end cultivates a following of similarly-minded manchildren)
I was half-tempted to reply to the post introducing the PCU and talk about how vicious, petty and hypocritical roleplayers are for people who partake in a niche hobby. And how X community is bad but Y community is good because they have my talking points. Be that on retail or on private servers it’s all the same, but eh. Didn’t feel like it was worth it.
Never really been one to watch streamers of any sort, but it is an odd phenomenon.
I won’t say I expected it to last forever and we should all be happy it lasted as long as it did but honestly it’s not unheared of, there are games way older then world of warcraft, warcraft 3 even, that still have living and thriving communities.
Age of Empires 2 is getting content updates to this day
And I do believe that wow when it initially came out placed itself among the greats such as for example, but not exclusively; age of empires 2 (because we already named its example)
I do believe that WoW could’ve been one of those games that lasted longer then it has, but a change in design philosophy changed it form the game it once was to a new type of playstyle (seasonal) and then later the writing also seemed to have undergone a philosophy change (lore character narrative focus rather then faction narrative focus, we’re not agents of the horde and alliance, we’re the personal assistants of the characters who are central in the lore)
TL;DR
I believe it could’ve if they played their cards right over the years
Maybe its copium, but I feel like games like AoE2 to draw back to it are legitimate examples to the questions of if games can be timeless and ageless and I feel like WoW could’ve been one of those games had things maybe gone differently.
When I received OOC hate and harassment from a Church of the Holy Light guild for disagreeing with their behavior (this was years ago, around Legion if not earlier), it was infact PCU members that did step in to tell them off for it and that it wasn’t okay behavior and supported me instead.
Which would be a strange thing to do if they were also involved.
In fairness, I remember several “golden times” of rp in Horde over the years, like:
Rp leading to and directly after campaigns like the Spine of Kalimdor, Borderlands and Legacy of the saurok.
Directly after goblins/nightborne/vulpera/zandalari were released.
And indeed at the start of expansions and major storylines, like legion, bfa and such.
There were plenty of “dead” periods between those eras too, but this drought has lasted for some 2 or so years now.
Iirc the o.g everquest is still going, wow isnt going to die. Not really. It’ll just get quiet. But eh, the point was more that a hobby that relies on chunks if spare time (in which you’re not actually playing the game proper either) is going to be harder to sustain when the bright eyed 14 year old who adored blood elves now has a child, is working and so on.
I mean to this end, direct comparisons can be made, OSRS, LOTRO, Everquest II all retain some degree of userbase.
And so does WoW, much more than all these except maybe runescape, but RP is a harder thing to quantify as it’s a niche.
I’ve admittedly softened up on the whole “us vs them” of RPers vs PvErs at this point. I was kind of swept up into the “WE MUST DEFEND OUR HOMELAND” mentality and in hindsight it was very melodramatic. End of the day we’re all paying a sub and as far as I’m concerned if people aren’t actively making an effort to deliberately ruin the experiences of others then it’s legitimately whatever to me.
I do think it’s easy to overthink roleplay and that I’m definitely guilty of it. You can talk about the hobby, hypothesize on it, or you could just do it. I’ve spent too much time doing the first two compared to the last one which is something I’m working on.
But all of that said, Asmon needed to be paid a thousand dollars to tidy his room and I’m fairly certain there were unknown/unidentified lifeforms in that LMAO
I think this is a big point as well; there’s new players joining WoW everyday. Imagine my shock when I see people say they started playing in Legion!
RP will get slow and then it’ll bounce back when there’s something for people to care about - I’m not sure if anyone’s mentioned Amirdrassil yet…
Hi it’s me
I mean that’s great if you’re a Night Elf or Alliance.
I know Horde can be there but I’m not sure why my Orc would be.
I can’t believe one lives amongst us
Point is, Nelf RP was dead until Amirdrassil (so I’ve heard). Maybe in the World Saga there’s a reason to RP orcs again and the RP comes again, just gotta be patient and/or try to host your own thing.
I think the most insane thing I remember was that someone (CoAD?) had come up with this conspiracy that the PCU was going to transfer half of it’s players into void elves to act as an antagonist guild for all the others in PCU.
We of course laughed at it at the time and I think it was either in 2020 or 21 when me and Megnarosh decided to take a piss on the whole thing and posted something like “BIG CHANGES ARE COMING” and “Can’t wait to RP a void elf in this community” in the main pcu thread in here in the forums.
And they actually featured that back then in CoAD. Sides being sent into orbit aside, none of the supposed conspiracy ever happened.
I have no idea if it is still there since I don’t follow the blog but it’d be funny if it is.