I’ll be honest, my interest in WoW dropped pretty much completely the second Guild Wars 3 got announced as I’ve been looking forward to that for years and following various crackpot theories ala half life 3 subreddits. Issues with RP aside since those can be more or less dealt with easily in a sense, I just don’t really find the game to be particularly engaging or fun to play with anymore. I’m really tired of the endless treadmill design where I feel like I constantly have to do-over everything not just every expansion, or patch but now every season. I might have had time to invest a large chunk of my time back in my youth into a single game but now I just feel that whatever time I might have spent on WoW is “wasted” and would be better spent elsewhere, even if it’s playing other video games and there’s a lot of great ones coming out lately. I’ve felt absolutely nothing about Midnight and found it to be the most “by the numbers” expansion Blizzard has ever made and I already felt similar about War Within and I’m pretty sure I’ll feel even worse about The Last Titan.
The setting also just has way too much baggage piled on top of it - too many races to deal with, classes, concepts, ideas that do not really mesh well together and have to be taken in isolation to be able to tell a half decent coherent story, which hardly ever happens in roleplay.
It’s less about the server as a collective whole and more about finding or creating a smaller community within it, really. If you are open to the idea, great, probably good times are coming. But the crux of the issue is - the server or even roleplay at large has changed a lot (discord era is often discussed) and this was talked over to death with how there are many factors to this. I certainly don’t really accept this change and never vibed with it, there’s bound to be people who do and maybe even find themselves thriving in this new reality of splinted and isolated communities.
As bad as the setting/game may be, WoW is still one of the most approachable and accessible MMOs to RP in and I doubt that’s going to change… ever, really, because I doubt any future MMOs will be built with roleplay as we know it in mind. And there’s undeniable appeal in that.
I think certain people are but it’s not a hivemind as not everyone seems to share the sentiment, which is a good thing tbh. It would be really boring and lame if everyone coming to a forum would have the same kind of opinion and would express it in the same way.
The forums always had a rather bleak outlook on WoW and the RP community.
I do believe the situation has become more tame, if anything there are less people out there crying out wolf.
For example, anyone remembers the time in which the forums exploded with the topic of OOCers and how they’d destroy all RP? Most people will now find that theory a bit of a stretch, and yet at the time people were absolutely positive they had to do something to save their server!
This is not to say that WoW does not have its own set of problems, but I still see events and communities working hard to create things for other players to enjoy, in spite of all their IRL commitments. So I believe as long as there is the enthusiasm, WoW RP is going to remain alive.
I’ve seen toxic positivity be thrown around a lot here lately, and more often than not misused. Toxic positivity is a term used primarily in psychology and refers to an unhealthy suppression and mismanagement of negative emotions, like staying distracted with happy thoughts instead of allowing yourself to grieve the loss of a loved one, for example. However, here on the forums the term seems mostly to just be used as a way for the doomers to try and discredit others for pushing back on their interpretation of something being bad. They believe such pushback to be either performative or forced, like they’re so deeply embittered in their own negativity that they can’t even fathom that someone would genuinely have a positive outlook on the state of the server/game.
They way it’s used by some people on the forums is basically “If you don’t agree with me that absolutely everything about any topic sucks or disagree with me flat out insulting other people, then you are spreading toxic positivity!”
It’s a perfect copy of that meme with the happy little guy going “I like X thing” and someone else behind them wishing they would be dead because they hate them.
Speaking of things being misused for when you don’t agree with someone, it seems my posts in that other thread have all been mysteriously mass-reported and flagged as trolling
I’ve been called a Blizzard shill and been accused of toxic positivity essentially for just liking the game.
WoW isn’t above criticism and I’m not above calling parts of the game bad when i think they are bad, but I’ll also tell people to stop playing if they don’t enjoy the game and it’s then that I’ve been accused of toxic positivity.
There’s always that sense and feeling of AD being ‘home’. I learned to roleplay, improved my writing, and developed an addiction for storytelling and world building as an adult on this server and amongst its communities. And it would feel a bit strange if it came crashing down or went away completely. So I think there’s always going to be a bias for everyone who ever got stuck into the community on any level to want to be hopeful.
But at the end of the day there’s other ways to tell stories, character concepts can usually be quite easily adapted into other settings and games. And I’ve done that plenty of times before, taking characters I created on Argent Dawn and plopped them into TTRPGs and other MMOs.
You walk into any forum or community that has a way of discussing things by text you will get contrarians, forum trolls, people with grim outlooks on life, and those who just want to stir the pot. I’ve learned fairly well to leave things be, since some people simply do not want to listen.
And I don’t think it benefits any community to pressure its members socially or otherwise into only thinking happy thoughts out loud. Complains and discussions of a negative nature are necessary for any community (unless said community were to be perfect, which will never happen as long as humans are involved), and you cannot please everyone.
If done in a civil and adult manner, I think negativity can be a great thing for positive change, if nothing else just in the way of people being allowed to express such things and be heard.
I don’t think one could ever really answer the first question in a way that would satisfy, or in a way that would not cause the question to turn into a hydra.
Battles that can’t be won is a toughie. Argent Dawn has been through some strange times (we could say dark times, depending on who we ask) and I think the battle that cannot be truly won is the one regarding the ‘soul’ of the server and community. This is always a struggle in online spaces, the unfortunate consequences of the world we now live in where manipulation and disinformation is a daily happenstance. I work a profession where we face it constantly, and you learn to see the signs early. Looking back on the “old” days, it is pretty clear what was going on in some circles on the server.
I think it’s okay to fight fire with fire in circumstances where you are left with no choice. If hatred, delusion, deception, and blame are tools used by people who want to control others or being down a community or its key people for whatever reason, I think it is perfectly okay to return the behaviour.
Impossible to say. I don’t play the late/end or pvp content these days, I just don’t have the time, so on a purely mechanical and endgame/pvp level I have no clue at all honesty. I level characters, I roleplay, I collect mogs, explore the world, and I’ve gotten into the housing thing. The roleplay and community is why I play retail again, and it’s been a very nice welcoming atmosphere from all people so far on both factions since I came back to it. It is incredibly heart warming to see.
So for me, WoW is worth playing as it is right now. For some time it wasn’t, and before that it was. Each person should ask the question themselves and try to not worry themselves with the opinions of others. If you enjoy the game for whatever reason, play it. If you enjoy the roleplay, get in there and make some stories.
And yes, Argent Dawn is worth the effort. I’ve met so many people eager to be taken on fun adventures and storytelling journeys, people who want to just talk both IC and OOC about characters, events and lore. That tells me that there’s something that is worth getting invested in still. I suppose it all does depend on the future of the game itself, and I guess we’ll know that for sure by some point next year or the year after.
The forums have never, and will never, be a reliable way to gauge the feeling on anything. Forumgoers are a minuscule part of the server, and don’t represent the vast majority of people.
People need a psychologist if they are being consumed by these. That’s a personal issue if a game affects you this deeply.
No.
As a community? Yes. But it won’t be, because people need to learn to move on.
A lot of them and that’s okay.
It feels like you are hiding something deeper that needs to be spoken with a professional.
If you enjoy the game, yes. If not, no. WoW is not dead, and it will never be dead. The “WoW is dead” card has been played literally every expansion, yet despite Midnight’s lows the RP space has remained strong. It’s just not the kind of RP that people did 10 years ago. We are past the Racial RP Bubble Era, nowadays people drift towards adventure and chiller vibes with less commitments, and that’s okay!
Finally, a fellow forumite antique returns to speak sense.
I think some of the younguns here think these forums are reddit or something sometimes because ‘oh no you sound annoyed’ is apparently worth trying some vanity project of farming likes as if it’s the big K points.
Maybe if Blizzard wasn’t completely without the stones of fortitude they’d give us dislikes back. You know what real toxic positivity is?
There is a fairly active one that switches out words they consider problematic with an “edited by moderator”.
On this topic, Crossjaw can you hand on the bible say that all these posts you’ve made the last six months or so were done completely without any form of tool assistance like an LLM or similar?
