7MMO
Moderator
I've been stuck into World of Warcraft: Forever—at the time of writing, I'm around 15 hours /played (and will likely be 20+ hours by the time you're reading this) on my warrior. I chose the roleplay ruleset because, well, I'm a roleplayer. I've been writing and being cringe in videogames for over 15 years.
RP in WoW is, actually, what got me into writing in the first place. My clear and obvious mastery over the written word was hard-won by being a terribly annoying edgelord death knight, for which I apologise.
I was curious about the implementation of the roleplay ruleset back when it was properly announced—back then, I thought it was great that we're being given our own place, but being completely split off from "normal" ruleset (which I'll be calling PvE for simplicity) didn't seem necessary to me.
Having played in the roleplay ruleset for a little while, my opinion has only been vindicated. Splitting PvE and PvP rulesets does make sense. For instance, a resource node might be easier to gather on PvE, throwing the economic balance of the PvP server out of the window. But beyond technical limitations, a complete, strict divide between RP and PvE just has me scratching my head.
There are things I like about having our own little nook of the Forever servers to putz about on. For starters, the vibes are a lot chiller. I don't want to cast generalisations about players, but I do think roleplayers are just smarter, sexier, have bigger muscles, and will solve climate change.
In seriousness, I do think thinking about your character's place in the world and having a bent towards immersion does make you a chiller person in general. I've experienced vanishingly little toxicity or hostility. The absolute worst instance was a tank getting a little passive-aggressive about mining nodes in my Deadmines run. That's it.
But what I foresaw is bearing out: Nobody is really roleplaying in instanced or group content, and that's because we legitimately never have done so. Most RP takes place either spontaneously out in the open world, or in dedicated hot spots. Even in the most diehard MMO communities, people aren't talking in ye olde English while pushing Vancleef's face in.
There are some people who are always in-character, sure, but that portion of the playerbase is incredibly rare. We're talking a sliver of an already-small population of a videogame, here.
(Image credit: Blizzard)
As for the strict rules on naming conventions—yeah, I'm seeing a lot more lore-accurate names, but I'm also seeing plenty of joke ones. And if I'm being perfectly honest, these gag names really haven't ever bothered me; people being disruptive or annoying when I'm roleplaying are a massive pain, but if Tsundere Cowbell the paladin wants to watch me write, my immersion isn't shattered.
Overall, I think keeping us on our own server architecture for the most part is the smarter plan, especially given layering would dilute roleplayers so much that RP would be hard to find. However, I don't think there's any real reason to disallow us from jumping to the Normal ruleset servers when we group up with someone from there—or giving us an option to travel between them of our own accord.
Just as we tend to swap between in-character for roleplay and out-of-character for, y'know, playing the videogame—I think most of us would be happy to have the choice as to whether we want to futz about on the roleplay layer or go hang out with our non-theatre kid friends on the PvE ruleset.
Especially given, as time goes on, population might become an issue. Believe it or not, roleplayers still do like to raid and gear up, and if they should be able to migrate on characters they've invested literal dozens of hours into, rather than having to start all over again.
Best MMOs: Most massive
Best strategy games: Number crunching
Best open world games: Unlimited exploration
Best survival games: Live craft love
Best horror games: Fight or flight
Continue reading...
RP in WoW is, actually, what got me into writing in the first place. My clear and obvious mastery over the written word was hard-won by being a terribly annoying edgelord death knight, for which I apologise.
I was curious about the implementation of the roleplay ruleset back when it was properly announced—back then, I thought it was great that we're being given our own place, but being completely split off from "normal" ruleset (which I'll be calling PvE for simplicity) didn't seem necessary to me.
Having played in the roleplay ruleset for a little while, my opinion has only been vindicated. Splitting PvE and PvP rulesets does make sense. For instance, a resource node might be easier to gather on PvE, throwing the economic balance of the PvP server out of the window. But beyond technical limitations, a complete, strict divide between RP and PvE just has me scratching my head.
There are things I like about having our own little nook of the Forever servers to putz about on. For starters, the vibes are a lot chiller. I don't want to cast generalisations about players, but I do think roleplayers are just smarter, sexier, have bigger muscles, and will solve climate change.
In seriousness, I do think thinking about your character's place in the world and having a bent towards immersion does make you a chiller person in general. I've experienced vanishingly little toxicity or hostility. The absolute worst instance was a tank getting a little passive-aggressive about mining nodes in my Deadmines run. That's it.
But what I foresaw is bearing out: Nobody is really roleplaying in instanced or group content, and that's because we legitimately never have done so. Most RP takes place either spontaneously out in the open world, or in dedicated hot spots. Even in the most diehard MMO communities, people aren't talking in ye olde English while pushing Vancleef's face in.
There are some people who are always in-character, sure, but that portion of the playerbase is incredibly rare. We're talking a sliver of an already-small population of a videogame, here.
(Image credit: Blizzard)
As for the strict rules on naming conventions—yeah, I'm seeing a lot more lore-accurate names, but I'm also seeing plenty of joke ones. And if I'm being perfectly honest, these gag names really haven't ever bothered me; people being disruptive or annoying when I'm roleplaying are a massive pain, but if Tsundere Cowbell the paladin wants to watch me write, my immersion isn't shattered.
Overall, I think keeping us on our own server architecture for the most part is the smarter plan, especially given layering would dilute roleplayers so much that RP would be hard to find. However, I don't think there's any real reason to disallow us from jumping to the Normal ruleset servers when we group up with someone from there—or giving us an option to travel between them of our own accord.
Just as we tend to swap between in-character for roleplay and out-of-character for, y'know, playing the videogame—I think most of us would be happy to have the choice as to whether we want to futz about on the roleplay layer or go hang out with our non-theatre kid friends on the PvE ruleset.
Especially given, as time goes on, population might become an issue. Believe it or not, roleplayers still do like to raid and gear up, and if they should be able to migrate on characters they've invested literal dozens of hours into, rather than having to start all over again.
Best MMOs: Most massive
Best strategy games: Number crunching
Best open world games: Unlimited exploration
Best survival games: Live craft love
Best horror games: Fight or flight
Continue reading...
