Can only agree with you there, you get awkward situations where there are those who for whatever reason, whatever perceived slight seem to hyper focus on that particular issue at the expense of what could be something constructive and entertaining for both parties. Some people are so enamoured with their own ego and vindication they can’t just step back and be like “okay, i’m sorry, lets put the past behind us.”
It’s positive reinforcement in action. People see a trend of big PR campaigns being done makes a guild look successful and popular, so they copy the same in hopes of getting the same results. The actual result? You end up with a bunch of egotistic and vain guild leaders not interested in roleplay but how they can “win.”
As someone who, as i previously stated, have had my own fair share of utterly bizarre accusations falsely thrown at me over the years, i’ve found there are just some people who want to create a scapegoat to foist their own problems onto. In the overwhelming majority of cases it’s just hearsay and rumor repeated enough time, and the rest have been doctored “evidence” to remove things out of context.
If only we could return to a time before the age of the paper-thin ego and just get on with roleplay.
Certainly, there’s always been people like that but its become popularised within the last five or so years. People give them too much stock and consideration these days, which is precisely what they want.
I miss being young and new to vidéo games I guess. I think WoW might have been also my first rpg, where you create a character and navigate the world through their eyes, and yeah, the first time everything is marvellous, and shiny, and I was “omagad giant trees! Omagad a griffon (it was the nest behind a flight master) Oooh can I tame the crocodile into protecting me? (I could not)”
(Or maybe I tried one Everquest before but I did not go far with it)
Even if it’s a new game, there isn’t quite that excitement any more now, I’m much more jaded, which is pretty natural ten years later but I miss it sometimes.
I don’t miss the RP though. I was very [edit autocorrect] YOUNG (not “wrong”, wtf autocorrect), and my writing was Not Good. I like to believe I’m more than half decent a writer now, and I like telling stories too much to miss what I wrote when I was 15 or so.
I miss my old guild, The Westfall Rangers…best military rp I’ve ever seen, and also interactions with Footman and Stormwind Royal Navy, great characters and great events.
It was an age when people looked past the ‘egos’ in the sense that they passively viewed the world and community as paramount. Even if it ended in #bdrp, things were allowed to play out. Conclusions were considered IC. Retcons of undesirable scenarios weren’t a thing you often came across, for example.
Most importantly, bubble RP was considerably rarer. There were a very few guilds that practiced it, such as the Maelstrom Syndicate. Not to throw shade at them; they had a very specific concept that wasn’t very flexible in terms of community interaction. It’s what they wanted to do, and they did it.
Sadly, this mentality of sequestering RP developed into something of a norm. Think of it like pre-Cata and post-Cata WoW, in terms of the open world being populated. There used to be hubs wherever you went - it wasn’t always so, but MoP was the climax of this era in my mind.
It’s why I never dedicated myself to RPing in other MMOs. All of them (to my knowledge) have a very guild-based RP scene. The guild builds a narrative for its player, separate from those of other guilds. There is no overarching community or world you exist in, merely that of your guild.
Now? Northrend is dead. Gadgetzan, Feralas, Razor Hill, Crossroads, Menethil, Arathi, Silverpine, Hillsbrad, Loch Modan - all dead. Even Duskwood, strangely enough. Booty Bay is on its last legs.
That is what I miss most. Setting out and going places, meeting people you don’t know at random and doing things with them. Getting involved in unexpected situations. Spontaneous RP.
Honestly? I just miss being new. Back when I started RP in late BFA (around 8.1/8.2) with Orgrimmar being filled to the brim with RPers. Now? There are nights where it’s completely empty or when there’s more people AFK in the sky…
RP-related is that I truly miss the days, when people were doing all sorts of powegrabbing-bringing OOC into IC, skype cliques and all that. All that was a thing back when the majority were in their 18-early 20s, it was a hit no matter the community on the server and it was fine, looking back at it now, akin to weird server culture.
Yet now it is quite weird and blatantly saddening to see that still happen around the same group(s) of people in 2021 - you’d think about character growth and just overall getting bored at this point.
It’s kind of a shame (despite the fun we had with it back then) how much unrestricted campaigns had this underlying relentless trashtalk culture and this unforgiving attitude towards players that found themselves outside their comfort zone and totally blown away & alienated by unrestricted PvP.
While it’s likely true the sheer amount of campaigns that started popping up made them less of a novelty as a whole and contributed towards guilds not feeling the urge to sign up to each and every one of them, the competetiveness petered out a bunch of players’ motivation and is probably part of the reason why it’s hard to find numbers for unrestricted or even restricted RP PvP these days.
That, and the insanely laggy servers these days. I like to share this vid around a lot in discords but to me its a fond memory of large unrestricted PvP without a single ounce of lag
I’ve had people follow me around the server to get me kicked from various guilds, as well as harass me OOC because of an in game ship/IC relationship. I can’t just ignore it.
Last night when making a new Allied Race, I saw some of the oddest and cringiest TRPs I’ve seen in a long time on Alliance. This is why I stick to Horde.
Missing a lot of people from my old DK guild and the people from a cultist guild which roleplayed as our rivals.
Alas life happened and people were too busy to run their respective guilds and now that roleplay has been scattered. Otherwise I definitely miss that awe and excitement of going to a massive serverwide campaign for the first time. Seeing all those people lining up in cool formations, marching down to single goals, or looking at the massive RPPVP campaigns which were just jawdropping in terms of scale.
Really? I went there for about four nights in a row, I think it was two or three weeks ago. I also /who g-Forlorn daily because I made a character I wanted to join with! It all seemed quite dead.
That said, the /who function has been kind of iffy for some time now. It could have just been bad luck?
No idea how active the guild in question is, but I wouldn’t look at /who. It’s completely broken and at times it’ll show me that a person stood right in front of me is not online.
We’ve been in Karazhan for the last few weeks on a haunted/cursed manor campaign, but other than that, we are around most nights of the week from around 20.00 to 00.00 realm time for either events or casual RP! So probably bad luck yeah
