What is the WoW RP community currently like?

Argent Dawn
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Heya

I’ve been RP-ing on and off in various games in the past decade, having seen all kinds of extremes.

Having recently found my way back to WoW, I was drawn to RP again, against my better judgement due to past experiences and the things I’ve seen and heard. Allowing the benefit of the doubt, I felt it only fair to ask this openly before outright dismissing the RP community (or before setting up a full-on TRP with a big backstory only to realize that my work was unnecessary due to the community still dealing in… weird ways).

Without further ado:

1. How strict is the community?

I know that there’s a permanent conflict due to the nature of WoW being the way it is, with griefers and streamers running around. From experience, this often causes many to dismiss characters that might not be your average human farmer who freshly moved to stormwind. On the other hand, I’m also worried that people might be doing super light-rp, and have heard tales of Godmodders being a common and accepted sight.

2. Where are the hubs?

Is Stormwind still the place to go? Are there secret Taverns or meeting spots in order to avoid griefers? Is everything happening in exclusive Guilds or Discord channels, or only once a month at an event?

3. How do you guys deal with Griefers?

Given that there are no exclusive spaces where annoying people can be booted out of, and there doesn’t seem to be an option to just straight up hide an annoying character, is the only way to just block them, bite the bullet and deal with the fact that there’s a giant dinosaur right in front of my face? Are you moving out-of-game in case things get too annoying?

4. What’s the Quality like?

In my former experience, I’ve seen people who only speak 1-2 simple sentences, while also seeing people who take 5 minutes to write up a novel-inspiring text. I can imagine that it’s also very situational. But I’m wondering, in general, how people feel about it. Are you guys aiming to write stories, or are you just hanging out? Is there a healthy variety of people in both extremes and in between?

5. How canon is it?

Having been a big fan of the WoW lore since my childhood, I know how complex it is, especially given a bunch of expansions that went a bit… overboard. What lore-events are commonly played around? Do you guys have a cut-off where people just ignore what happened afterwards? Are certain events being ignored? Are you basically running things on a classic-wow level? Or should I go and rewatch good ol’ Nobble?

6. (Personal one) Are you guys interested in RP-ing with a character who has incredible depth?

I don’t do simple farmer RP, and my one experience in a Stormwind Guard Guild has been lackluster to say the least. Are people interested in interacting with a character for prolonged time in order to learn about them? Or are people more interested in just interacting with the simple farmer here and there without getting too invested?

Thanks for reading this far, I’m curious about your responses :slight_smile:

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The vibe I’m getting here is that you’ve only ever RPed in Stormwind and the guard guild you mentioned was pretty much your only guild RP experience.

Don’t think any of this has been an issue in…I don’t even know how long.

Stormwind is known for very wild and often questionable RP concepts, so no, I don’t think you will be dismissed there.

Never has been the case among more serious parts of the community.

Many Discord channels are public. When it comes to regular hubs, Stormwind, Duskwood, Stromgarde. Not sure if Horde has any.

In the very rare case one appears: Ignore them.

Depends on what you’re doing. You won’t find much quality with random people in Stormwind, for that you need to search for communities/guilds that are out in the world.

All RP is by nature non-canon. However, more serious RPers respect the canon.
While people don’t always RP around the game’s story, it is respected. You’ll also always find campaigns following the story of each major patch after it releases.

Yes, but again, don’t go to Stormwind for that. Join a guild, you’re not going to find some deep connections in a place that the more serious RPers often avoid or (if they RP there) mostly ignore its comunity.

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So…

Avoid Stormwind for anything serious, and go find a guild?

Are the guilds tight-knit then, or are they big and it’s common to meet new people in there?

Is it reasonable to find a guild by just naturally RP-ing ingame on hubs, or should I rather find it proactively outside the game?

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Griefers and streamers are rare from my experience, and Stormwind City has become something of an “anything-goes” hub. Every game has at least one of these, where trying to apply logic and lore to what people roleplay there is an exercise in futility. I don’t consider this a massive issue and think that it’s just what realistically happens in any open roleplaying community, but it might not be to your taste.

Assuming that you’re interested exclusively in the Alliance:
Stormwind City is the “anything-goes” hub where people play whatever they want and where roleplaying standards are relatively relaxed.
Duskwood is the “high power level and edgy” hub where characters tend to be very powerful but also tend to be more grim, dark and edgy.
Stromgarde is the “low power level and grounded” hub where characters tend to be humans, dwarves, high elves and other traditional fantasy concepts.
As always, the highest quality RP can be found in a guild or closed community of like-minded roleplayers, not in these public hubs.

They’re extremely rare, just ignore them.

Depends on the roleplayer. Some roleplayers can’t resist writing up essays every time they post, some roleplayers tailor their post length according to the situation, some roleplayers keep their posts very short and swell, and some roleplayers are dyslexic. There’s no universal standard in my experience, though I’d consider it good manners to keep your posts short, sweet and swift when roleplaying in a crowd.

There’s a few common standards, like “anyone who talks about the Shadowlands IC will probably get ignored by other characters or treated like they’re crazy” and “anyone who plays a dark ranger or a man’ari in Alliance settlements will be attacked on sight even though they’re valid customisation options.”
Argent Dawn’s server canon leans in the direction of racial archetypes. People seem to prefer characters with a very strong focus on their race who don’t deviate from their racial fantasy or racial territory. For example, night elf characters should mostly be found in night elven lands, doing night elven things. A night elf engineer in Stormwind City? That’s bad and not serious RP, at least in the eyes of Argent Dawn’s community.

The “simple farmer RP” that you reference isn’t a common thing at all, anywhere on the server, not even in more grounded areas like Stromgarde.
Anyway, hubs aren’t suitable for prolonged character interaction and it’s best if you find a guild, a community, or friends where your character fits in and you will be able to explore your character’s depth together.
But really, it’s more standard to start with a simple character concept and build depth as you play it, rather than starting with a character whose backstory is more interesting than anything they will ever do in RP.

Some guilds have almost no presence in hubs and stay far away from them most of the time.
Some guilds have almost no presence outside of the game, on Discord or these forums.
Your best bet is to do both if you want to find a good fit for your character, or you could just roleplay your character organically and see where they land.

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Thanks a huge lot for this!

I’ll definitely give it another try then and am looking forward to exploring things :slight_smile:

Massive thanks for this one, as this gives me some good pointers as to where to go.

I’m excited, looking forward to meeting new people ^-^

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I feel like this take has gotten a little out of date these days, in comparison to the past?

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I’d say it’s not as strong as it was in the past, but I still encounter my fair share of roleplayers who believe that deviation from racial archetypes is indicative of a bad roleplayer.

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While that might be true its still very vague on what the stance on the Man’ari actually is. Given that there isnt really anything suggesting that the Man’ari are tolerated or welcomed outside of the Exodar its reasonable that they are seen and treated like any member of the burning legion

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I wasn’t disputing that, my comment was just to make it clear that even that you can customise your character to look like a dark ranger or a man’ari, there are people who will attack your characters on sight if you use those options.

As the OP made it clear that they weren’t familiar with recent lore developments, I thought it was best to make that clear. Without that knowledge, they might have made the reasonable assumption of “if Blizzard allows me to customise my character to look like X, it’s okay for me to roleplay X.”

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I’ve recently returned to the game having not played since I was a bit of an idiot teen in Cata/MoP so I’ve had similar questions. RP in my old game (SWTOR) was practically exclusive to guilds anyway so I’ve been researching guilds for a few days now.

From what I’ve been able to find out myself, on the Alliance side, finding a guild is a real pain as there is no centralized discord server with all of the guilds listed. You need to join each community, including but not exclusively the Draenei, Stromgarde, Gilneas, Amirdrassil, Light’s Hope and Diaspora of Dalaran. First find the guild channel there, and then find the guilds that are still active by doing research in those discords, and then find the ones which seem to have a quality you find satisfactory which may require reaching out to their recruiters and asking questions. This is made more complicated by the sheer size of the Alliance community as you have to dig through so much to find what you want. Having said that, I have found a handful of guilds who have really high quality material posted on discord servers and in-character pieces on Argent Archives. I spent a good while reading an IC paper making proposals for the future organisation of the Kirin Tor that I found on there and enjoyed it, so the quality can be very high.

This isn’t as complicated on the Horde because they have a centralized discord where guilds of all themes post, as well as theme specific discord servers. You still have to check they are active which takes some work, but this coupled with there being fewer guilds makes it less of a challenge to find a guild that has a quality you find acceptable.

I also know there are guilds in-game who don’t seem super active in discords or have recent forum threads but seem to still be active and have Argent Archives pages.

There is also a few threads maintained on this forum that have a list of active guilds for certain themes. I believe Acrona keeps one updated for the Night Elf community?

To sum up, find a guild with some of the methods I’ve mentioned and you should have a good time. Don’t waste your time in Stormwind and dedicate some time to find guilds that suit your needs.

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As others have pointed out, guilds are the way to go if you want to enjoy the company of like-minded players and a tight knit community. However, don’t let a bad encounter discourage you from interacting with the wider community. Whether it’s forums, discord servers, or Argent Archives, there are many avenues to find out whats going on and engage with the community.

Different hubs offer different flavours and even within those hubs people tend to deviate and offer a nice variety. So, really, best way to find out is to go out there and RP! Welcome back and have fun.

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Which is true. Although if you want to RP as an Eredar, perhaps it makes more sense (and fun) to not even try the Petinent route and seek out Legion-aligned guilds instead?

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Thanks a lot for this! And I assume, given your personal research, it’s all just splintered then… I just hope there’s a guild out there who doesn’t just focus on one or two races, as I’d wish to see some diversity in the people I RP with, especially if it’s just a handful (which is a given when considering the context of a guild, unless things changed).

Good luck in finding something to you too! :slight_smile:

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I’d like to state a bit of a counter-point to a lot of the poo-pooing and sneering tone I’ve seen in quite a few replies here about Stormwind based guilds and Stormwind RP.

Whilst yes, I agree there is a lot of awful nonsense that happens in the city I’d say from my own experience over the past 3 months of re-creating and growing my guild that the majority of RP has been very positive and fun.

In specific answer to your questions though (and this is purely an alliance based perspective):

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The Stromgarde community is pretty active, for the current state of WoW rp anyway. I think the discord has nearly 1000 members. The discord is not only a communal space to meet but also hosts a lot of IC functions such as listings of active guilds and relevant information, character sheets, noticeboards and active community events etc. Active guilds range in power level, though as said above the majority tend to be low to mid power level, yet generally respectful towards the high fantasy state of WoW’s setting. Worth checking out.

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