I’m a returning player since of the pre patch of Shadowlands. I’ve never seen the Horde casual RP community in such a desert state.
I went from Alliance to Horde on Argent Dawn EU during Cataclysm. Back the RP was approximately around 60% Alliance vs 40% of the Horde. It went down during Legion as well but not too bad I would say. Trade chat being as active as the Alliance one and people doing causal Roleplay all over Orgrimmar everyday no matter the time.
But now when I logged in on a Monday it was completely dead “Alright it’s Monday people are busy and everyone either working or spending time with their family” I thought to myself. Even though people started doing casual RP 8 PM over at the alliance I gave the Horde the benifit of the doubt.
However once the weekend came it was the same, trade dead people not talking and horde players just doing PvP.
I’ve been inactive for more than a year but I wanna know the hell happened? How did this go from 60-40 to 90-10?
The general state of the playerbase after Shadowlands combined with highly Undesirable “RP” at a time when the casual crowd was already thin.
It’s like a river in the middle of a drought that in addition has toxic waste poured into it.
There is not much point in remaining in a place like that when guilds do just fine.
Remains to be seen if the casual crowd can bounce back in Dragonflight.
BfA was problematic which cast a long shadow. The Horde was (again) forced to bear the mantle of warmongering tools during the War of Thorns, which did little to encourage RPers to stick by their Horde characters. I know this didn’t apply to everyone and that many players were fine with the plot and subsequent war… but I knew my fair share of friends whose interest in the faction suffered as a result of the writing.
And then in Shadowlands,
The hubs were gradually falling prey to increasingly odd and/or inappopriate RP. I won’t beat a long dead horse by name dropping, but it did no favours to the overall health of the remaining Horde RPing community.
At this point there are a few guilds still kicking and I don’t doubt that Dragonflight will revitalize RP somewhat. We’re in that phase of an expansion where the overall interest in current gameplay is overshadowed by the expectations of things yet to come, which is usually reflected in the overall RP activity as well.
Will the Horde ever be the same as it once was however? I myself doubt it very much, but respect those with the time and energy to set up the occasional open events. There have been culture nights and storytelling as I recall, and the kosh’harg might be a good “in” for you to reconnect with the Horde.
It has been quite a while since I attended one myself, but the format seems to (mostly) remain as it was then. I might dust off my orc for the occasion as well!
Starting to think we need a pinned topic just saying “Horde Casual RP is in shambles and this is the reason” so we don’t need to talk about this mess every second week.
