Consider for a moment one of the types of people who plays MMOs.
Let's call him Bob. Bob is a roleplayer. So too is xXxDrthVad3rxXx and LoliLilith.
Part of the endearing sucess of MMOs is of course the ability to lose yourself in your avatar and in your world. Doesn't matter if you're a serious roleplayer who has taken the time to craft a long backstory, mannerisms and personality or a casual guy like me who pulls a concept out of his nethers about two minutes before hitting the newbie zone. What makes the games for us is the people we meet, the experiences we have and share and the world in which we all "lived".
Roleplaying brings that to a new level. You get story writers, artists, those of a musical or machinima bent and so on creating scores of people based off this one shared setting.
You're going to run into LoliLilith probably within five minutes. Reduce that to 40 seconds if you play destruction generally and Dark Elves specifically. After all come on, the base model for an undressed Dark Elf is black, presumably leather, lingerie.
You know that things will go a certain direction sooner or later.
You are garunteed to meet whateverhisfacewas. The guy who thinks pop culture references rendered in leet make him a roleplayer. Or his slightly more eloquent counterpart who is still a rubbish roleplayer and will set your teeth on edge, but at least managed to make a coherent name.
That leaves Bob. Bob is going into a world of warfare. A world where there is always something happening, someone fighting and something worth fighting for. Bob has access to public quests, open groups, scenarios that will pluck him from the world at the press of a button and much more besides. Bob has more warfronts than he can shake his pointy stick/axe/hammer/other at.
So if you come across Bob, say hey. Make him feel welcome. Help him along. Get him the bronze needed to back away from the warfront. Bob is going to the Capital. Bob and all his friends are likely going to end up in the square, possibly recounting battles, perhaps marvelling at a friends statue or otherwise living up the world they're in.
If Bob doesn't get to do that, the extra trappings of a world made alive by its inhabitants will take that much longer to come about. I am not implying that RP servers are going to have two full capital cities of poem slingers and precious little in the way of war. All I am saying is one of the crowning moments of awesome for me in WAR from my sampler was waking up Orrekai and being right smack beside a canon emplacement. It was war all the way to the flight master.
When the game goes live, I want to see people socialising in the cities. I want to see keeps filled with singers and fighters. I want to see a community grow that will bring with it the machinima makers, the artists like http://www.rpvisions.com/ and the story writers that we've seen so far.
It isn't enough to see the game succeed. I want to see it be alive and be loved by those who live there.
The bad are catered for. The horny have options. Lets make sure the good find their place to rest, to play and to be.
That and I just don't want to be tripping over people when I go looking for lairs and other fun bits. Sod off you smelly roleplayers, even if I am usually one of you.
Not just one Overton window
17 hours ago
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2 comments:
Personally, I've seen a few problems in WAR's basic makeup that complicate that. The lack of a sit button, for instance, the lack of usable chairs. Standing is a queue to people, generally that they should be off doing something, while sitting is an opposite queue. Having to stand around while talking can actually be a little uncomfortable, because the visual queues are all emphasizing that you should be moving.
The Inevitable City, from what I saw, also didn't have very many places that might count as public commons. While there were a few "bars"(with auctioneers hmmm...) tucked out of the way, the lack of a true commons can be problematic to large scale social scenes.
Poor city planning is hardly something new to WAR, of course. We'll see how the players overcome it after WAR has been live for a while.
I was rather confused myself at the lack of emotes, later discovering they were not yet in.
Seems though they're being tested on the Elder server and we'll see them in a few days. It will make a huge change to the ability to play in the world if we can, as you say, even just sit.
I still wonder, even with emotes and the few scattered bars, how long until the roleplaying communitys extra bits focuses on WAR.
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