Additionally, I think our society today has also left its mark on people. In today’s digital age, I think instant gratification is the norm. Social media, short-form content, constant notifications, instant messaging platforms etc. have trained people’s brains to seek quick rewards and quick response, making it harder to engage in deep, meaningful tasks. Like reading a book. Practicing a new skill. And you guess it, staying focused on roleplay for hours on end.
The issue isn’t just shorter attention spans, either, it’s how we use our mental energy. I believe a lot of us exhaust our dopamine endlessly scrolling online, binge-watching YouTube/Netflix/streamers, checking notifications, checking people’s reactions to XYZ, checking the news and Discord, etc. All that quickly makes patience-driven activities less appealing. Platforms profit from our distraction, reinforcing the cycle and further eroding deep focus which also means reduced creativity. Which means many things related to roleplay feel more of a chore than it used to.
When I first started WoW, it was common for guilds and communities to have their own forums, and otherwise you stayed mostly connected through the game itself. And maybe Skype for staying connected with some people, but it was a far cry from how Discord servers have obliterated the need for forums altogether. Sure, getting older comes with responsibilities that create distractions too, but I remember fondly how much easier it was to stay focused on roleplay all night long.
After being conditioned this way for so long, reclaiming focus requires a conscious effort. I haven’t been active in guilds for a long, long time, but I’d love to hear from Guild Masters and Officers - have you noticed a shift in attention spans, distractions and members craving instant gratification over the years?
I cant speak as one myself as ive not been for some years but i’ve some friends who still are and they do tell me occassionally that universally yes this is showing up. Not with every new player or rper mind you but theres more of a shift to needing gratification in RP now than there was some years ago.
As everyone else has said, the “Golden Age” is subjective from person to person. For me it was back in Mid-MoP to the end of Warlords because I had no responsbilities at the time, I was younger, had more free time, family was in good health, money was no concern. I was free to devote my time to what was a new and beloved hobby. Were they perfect times? No, some of my initial experiences werent always with the best crowds but overall they were halcyon days, truly.
I cant devote near enough time anymore but I am still glad to see some of my friends can and that the server is still going strong a decade after I came too it. Seeing how dead RP is in other games unless its on specific days or in specific guilds and locations, the fact its all still so cohesive on WoW warms my heart.
For me personally, it was Wrath. There were so many concepts coexisting, and Stormwind felt so alive, like an actual living, breathing city. The Stormwind City Watch was active back then and had a stellar reputation for its high RP standards. There was constant experimentation with new guild formats, like the High Court of Chancery.
Meanwhile, across the Great Sea, the Kalimdor Project thrived as a cooperation between many guilds. To me, it was certainly a golden age of Kalimdor RP, with interests unmatched before or since. Alas, it slowly petered out.
I also fondly remember late WoD, post Legion announcement, with a resurgence of interest in night elf RP and the Frozen Heart 2 campaign, by far the most numerous and ambitious campaign that I have ever witnessed.
Not a GM but tend to be heavily involved in guilds I stay long term in, I’ve certainly seen (and frankly this goes back to other games as well so it’s not just a WoW thing), a greater tedency as the years have gone by for people to just not show up.
Vote for things, then not go to them, generally ignore chat, ignore calls for rp etc. Events and such that used to get a indication of 20 attendents would get say 13, now those same events with an indication of 20 get like 4.
Not universally or all the time but it’s a general trend I’ve noticed. Frankly I’ve just put it down to much of the mmo player base not being ‘kids’ anymore. Life is draining and rp is a hobby that needs a degree of focus to enjoy. As an adult with job, kids, family, that can be harder to find.
Uni kid? Study, drink, stay up till 4am etc Adult with all of the above “time to rp, but first taxes! And make sure Jenny brushes her teeth! Then the significant other will want to talk for an hour! Time to rp… I’m too tired”
For me I reckon my personal “Golden Age” was the time from MoP to Legion, since mid-MoP was when I came to AD.
However, I realise that that is probably because I was alot younger then , had more time, and was relatively new to RP then, so it all still seemed like a mystery to me. For the same reasons I never really managed to get back into WoW vanilla, seeing as I’ve seen actual Vanilla at the time, just not raids. And I realise that most of my memories of that time are probably also just rose-tinted goggles from a time when I was younger and things seemed alot simpler.
These days I am glad that I can still go on adventures in Azeroth with like-minded people, even if things aren’t entirely as they were before.
And I think that’s okay, it shouldn’t be -entirely- the same as when I was still 14-year old Desartin.
You’ve no idea how true this is! Even the most well-meaning person can commit to an event, only to find themselves too burnt-out from RL to show. Not saying that’s how it is in every case, but I’m certain it’s a factor.
I will admit to dropping off mid-event more than once. Sometimes because I had to genuinely go because I had work the next morning, other times because I was just bored out of my mind in an event.
And this is not a slight at the person who made the said events, those said events just weren’t relevant to my character, even if the premise was interesting. Sometimes the execution also fell short.
I do admit though that, at least irl, my attention span has suffered over the years. And likely in game as well.
Come to think of it, I suppose my personal Golden Age is now! Coming from someone who began fairly recently, during the middle of Dragonflight.
My fondest memories are still pretty fresh ones, during the Summer of 2024- after finishing up a several month long guild campaign, where I explored Northrend for the very first time through my character, then returning back ‘home’ to the Eastern Kingdoms to attend a string of large community events. It was a lot of writing, but a lot of fun. I look back on the photographs I took very fondly.
Things have slowed down rather considerably since then, mostly down to my health preventing me from participating as much as I’d like to, but I’m looking forward to all of the things I will do and people I will meet in-character once I recover. I’m very optimistic about the server’s future.
I’ve deliberately left several areas of the map uncovered and unquested in order to experience them for the first time through in-character means. That way the world still feels just as mysterious and expansive as when I first started.
I’ve been RPing for a while - and I’ve seen quite a few different ‘ages’ - objectively, I would say TBC and Wrath were ‘golden ages’. RP was everywhere.
You could go anywhere and find communities, events, Organic RP and Immersion. Elves fighting Orcs in Ashenvale, Dwarven clans in the mountains, Blood Elves politiking in Silvermoon. You’d meet other adventurers travelling on the road and join them by the campfire.
But for me at least, I’m definitely enjoying a ‘golden age’ right now. I’ve taken everything that I’ve learned about RP and writing and used that to gradually improve my experience and immersion.
I’m having more fun RPing on my current character than ever before.
God I wish it were so. University has actually put me in a position of having less time for RP than I’ve ever had before.
Subjectively? MoP, WoD, Legion and BfA were all immensely thriving periods for Argent Dawn. You could go to almost any city and find at least a couple of Guilds RPing in them. Weekly and monthly publicly-advertised events and campaign were dime-a-dozen and would normally always breach the 100-150 player mark irregardless of how long or short they were.
I know friends who only came to AD/started RPing at the tail-end of BfA and its really strange to be able to tell them about how you used to go to any zone and find RPers or a few guilds there, even if only for events. Because it just isn’t a mentality that exists on the server anymore, similar to how monthly public RP campaigns are, essentially, extinct in the way that we used to think about them.
That’s not to say things now are doom-and-gloom, TWW has arguably brought back a chunk of RPers and things are - if not a golden age - at least somewhat, relatively steady given how long AD has been enduring now. I think it’s sometimes difficult for us on AD to grasp just how rare this server is, its the last remaining active EU RP server, all the others even on different regions have all just slowly but surely faded into obscurity. Wyrmrest Accord on NA, which used to be central for Horde RP in the Americas, is now starting to fade w/ its players largely transferring to Moonguard. Outside of more niche or known forms of RP such as Dungeons and Dragons its hard to grasp that We and Moonguard are like the two remaining castles being maintained in a sea of crumbled ruins.
I think it’s rather silly to completely dismiss the idea that once upon a time, on the realm of Argent Dawn, things were doing better roleplay-wise for a variety of reasons. It’s strange to say it’s all “rose-tinted glasses” or “you just say x expansion because that’s when you were most active” in the same breath as acknowledging that the population has dwindled or that the community is more fractured because of discords or that the server has certainly been more active in terms of roleplay initiatives in the days the majority of the posters highlight (and the few ones who don’t weren’t there on the server).
I don’t know why this sentiment of “better times” is oft rejected in on the forums (usually by the same group of contrarians) but it’s not exactly a secret that roleplay hasn’t been doing that well and not just on AD. Meronspell above makes a good point about how roleplay in general has been on the decline for a while now, with a lot of people simply getting bored of it and moving on or simply becoming adults with too little time to spare. People drop gaming or other hobbies all the same for those reasons, roleplaying isn’t immune to that. Have any of you had friends or maybe even relatives who dropped RP for any reason? I know I have a few.
I also don’t see that many new people joining the hobby. The “Fortnite” generations for a lack of a better term don’t seem to be generally that interested in it, I’d also argue that fantasy has lately been struggling with some good representation in media and writing in general has been impacted heavily by MCU-tier slop (you can see it reflected even in this very game or in some roleplay) without being able to recover from it. Most of us come from a time when banger video game RPG releases or great movies were around every corner, now it’s a much rarer occurence and even the ones that still come I doubt manage to attract new, younger audiences. I dunno, I think we’d need a bunch of big shot streamers getting involved in it and being serious about it before the kids give it a shot.
But hey, it’s not all that bad, I guess. The server still stands, so does the game, people will get housing and that’s been asked for I don’t know how long. So go out there and roleplay until there’s still opportunities for it and you yourself have not grown bored of the hobby or found yourself lacking for time.
First, people who talk about those better times often (and this doesn’t mean always) do it to crap on current times. The talk about “better times” isn’t actual reminiscing about those times, but rather a badly veiled attempt by people talking about them to bring down what’s happening now.
“Look at these cool screenshots of our 60-player campaign.”
“I remember when we had 500 player campaigns, it was epic, AD has fallen, millions must die.”
At certain point people will start lashing out.
Another reason is the knowledge of what was actually happening back then, behind the secenes. One personal example is how everyone praises early BfA RP-PvP, how epic and awesome it was, how the community wasn’t divided (I know, but I’ve genuinely seen such points being made). And yet, when I was starting RP in BfA, the usual situation in those campaigns was “Everyone behave, there are guilds on our side that hate us and will want to use anything we do against us OOCly”, combined with a ton of drama between the factions too.
It’s hard to accept the “good old times” rhetoric when you’ve been there for at least some of those times and remember them without rose-tinted glasses.
Which brings me to the last part, and that’s nostalgia. I’ve often seen people talk about how X or Y expansion was the best for RP and then found out they were new player or a teenager back then. Of course you’re going to view an expansion where you started RPing or the times when you had no worries besides grades in school as the best time.
All that doesn’t mean that RP hasn’t been more popular or in better shape back in the day. But the dooming that often comes with the talk about the old times is over the top.
Honestly, this hits really close to home. My frontal lobe must’ve been severely underdeveloped at the time because it took me a good part of BFA to just stop and think, “Why in the seven hells am I partaking in campaigns full of people who make events and camp miserable, and who will take everything I do in-game, or say in Discord, in the worst possible light and use it to create drama?”
Massive server-wide campaigns are dead and we killed them tbh.
I’m very optimistic about the server’s future.