I guess I'm one of those old guard because I was playing MUDs before MMOs as well. Many of the old MMOs had accessable roleplay and even up into some newer games. City of Heroes for instance had an unofficial roleplay server while DDO had two. LotRO was a game that actively discouraged me from roleplaying however. The reason being is accessability.
There is little to no reason for people to congregate with people outside of their narrow level range band in many games. City of Heroes got around this by having public areas for things like costume contests and ways to have characters of vastly different levels actually contribute to the same quest. DDO used to have a much lower level cap so the spread was less, but they also had open roleplay sessions (Thelanis Thursday and Sarlona Sunday) where the roleplay community actively set up an easy in for new people on those days. As the level spread grew, and the person spearheading much of the roleplay organization was hired by Turbine this openly roleplaying in public and inviting strangers in has slowly gone down over the years.
LotRO is an example of what killed roleplaying for me. When LotRO launched there was a rather vocal portion of the playerbase that wanted a server at least flagged with a RP tag to the name even if it wasn't different in any other way. Turbine did not want to do this. The result was a portion of the beta players decided to declare one of the servers an RP server. When the game launched they policed the public channels for what they considered inappropriate use of out of character chatter and reported names they felt were out of character. I had a character named Nymiel that was reported because a few people felt like the correct spelling in Tolkien's world should be Nimiel. I wouldn't see anyone roleplaying in public during that time, but I knew they were out there somewhere roleplaying in secret because they were swamping the customer support with their reports on names and publically condemning people using the public channels.
This is what I see as the principle problem. The roleplayers with some experience are rather secular and not actively looking to expand by bringing in new roleplayers. They have their group of friends and they are comfortable with them. From the outside, we appear to be elitists. Even if somebody has roleplayed in other games in the past they will likely encounter resistance trying to join an existing roleplaying cliche in a game so each little group of roleplayers are an island unto themselves that doesn't interact with the other roleplayers on their server. The exception to this seems to be games that are so small that those islands can't help but bump into each other to form larger masses of roleplayers, or are looking for a way to save their favorite game so actively seek out new people to bring into their little pocket of the game world.
Actions speak louder than words. I think what the column is meant to touch (if it dropped its elitistic attitude): "Why is roleplaying nowadays more action-oriented than text-oriented and why is the diversity among roleplayers so low compared what it used to be?".
A person not talking a single word and soloing every bit of content on his warrior to max level in strife for maximum power, is still very much roleplaying a warrior striving to become as powerful possible in a given world. He is unlikely a real warrior in real life, so he is indeed playing a fictitious role in a role-playing game. He roleplays through his actions rather than his words.
You may find it to be problematic if that is the role and the manner in which the grand majority are roleplaying, I can agree with that. However, you have to admit it is actual roleplaying.
No. That would be meta-gaming.
....
Meta-gaming does not necessarely exclude roleplaying. Isn't a "Warrior trying to become as powerful as possible" a role one plays?
Isn't it a fictitious role? A role can be played through actions, heck the stum movies of the old are a testament to that.
You wanting to be the powerful character isn't very deep in the RP pool. Your character is pretty much the same as you, the person at the keyboard (or controller...).
You aren't a mathmatician when you've just started exploring your math tables. You're taking the first steps.
Everyone should go to whatever level they're comfortable with certainly. The extremes at both ends (the GodModders and the RP Griefers) certainly aren't fun. I know I play in character much of the time, but computer games just aren't that well set up for it. The harder it is to do in game, the fewer people will partake, and the less involved the RP aspects can easily be, imo.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
Heck, I can tell you that from experience. I'm an "old school" Original D&D player (I go back all the way to the "White Box" "Little Brown Books" era). I also play computer/video games like World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2.
I give you this part of my history beacuse I have the answer to your question.
Most of us RPG players are going back to tabletop games. Most video/computer games are very strictured in their play. For instance, I can't play a Tauren Shaman without being part of the Horde. In the Warcrat and World of Warcraft RPG's, I =can= do that. When I play Andarcy, a 70th level WoW Human Hunter, I go thru many, if not all, of the same scenarios that I did while playtesting "Mists of Pandaria" with my (eventually 85th level Alliance) Pandaren Hunter. In most Tabletop RPG's I've seen in almost 40 years of tabletop, I've can't remember running thru the same scenario, module, or adventure twice. Despite running new character classes like Monk and Druid, in WoW the same adventures crop up that I already did with my Hunter.
Within recent times I've seen at least two major WoW players come back to the tabletop other than myself.
Therefore I believe that true RPGers are abandoning their video/computer games and going back "home".
First, everybody has their own definition of roleplaying... you have to define the term/choose a definition before any discussion can get too deep into whether or not MMORPGs have lost the RPG by your definition. Going with the usual "I know it when I see it" is just going to lead to people talking past one another, arguing for their own definition without even necessarily realizing that is what they are doing (for example, this thread).
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My own definition of RP is, in summary, "cooperative storytelling". And by that definition, while today's MMO offerings don't exactly lay out the red carpet for the more involved forms of that activity, I would say it certainly is still possible.
The "cooperative" part is the difficult element in an MMO. Getting 10000 people to all agree that the earth orbits the sun is a dicey prospect, let alone having them agree on how things "should" work in a completely imaginary shared virtual environment. However, cooperation can be far more easily achieved amongst smaller, player-formed sub-groups/communities... as such, the very existence of guilds is arguably support for RP.
Storytelling is also a bit more difficult, tho not incredibly so compared to many earlier games. One of the underlying subtexts is that, for the more intricate forms of RP, you need to be able to tell your own story. In the action-packed, combat-centric MMOs of today, that can be difficult if you're not telling the story of a cold-blooded killing machine (but if you are, you're golden...)
-=-
I would argue that the MMO has never been a great platform for RP in the sense that the pen-and-paper RPer typically yearns for. Having been one myself since '77, I know this is true for me, at least.
It is simply too large and open a forum. It would be a minor miracle to get the same sense of immersion (another loaded term, IMO) as you can get with a smaller, human-moderated group of friends/acquaintances sitting around someone's gaming table. However, if you're willing to settle for a muted echo of what that experience can be, with the occasional close approximation at random, I think the MMORPG can still get you there, even today.
I also think the rise in use of Ventrillo/Voicechat. Before this became a standard it was much easier to stay in character. For me at least, RP while using vent with half the people I was doing it with broke immersion and made it much more difficult to keep up that aspect of the game beyond the basic "Hail" crap. Not a big part of what contributed to it, but definitely a part.
I agree with everything you said, but I don't have any hope for even the mighty EQNext. It's the generation problem. This generation never had to use its imagination, so its like asking them to go back to the days before cell phones. Incomprehensible.
"but the lack of support makes it seem like RP is invisible or dead"
Therein is the answer to the question asked in the article's title. The reality is very different, of course. Roleplayers are alive, well, and thriving throughout the entire world of MMORPGs. We have so fully integrated ourselves into our favorite games that we often do seem invisible, but that's one of the great things about roleplaying, and that's just the way many of us like it. It certainly beats logging into your favorite MMORPG and being assaulted with the multitude of childish IPWNURFACE99x characters, at least in my opinion. Despite the fact that a game's mechanics may seem to be non-RP friendly, or even anti-RP, I have no problem finding fellow roleplayers in any of my games, many of whom have been roleplaying since the early 80s, as I have.
I have a few thoughts on this. One is whether or not there were that many role players to begin with. Two is how many actually want to role play in an MMORPG and Third is if they were there, would you really notice them?* It's not like they're up on a stage with advertisements laying around. They would be off in their own area, doing their own thing.
* JimMoreno's post is what triggered this thought. That and I wonder if that's his real name and his real picture.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Bless you for bringing this up. I look forward to your second article on this subject.
There CAN be game mechanics which foster RP, but again the developers don't worry about that. For the past decade, as I have played, I've noticed that almost ALL RP is incumbent on the players to maintain for themselves. RP will never be an in-MMORPG constant, as most RP deals almost exclusively with social aspects of life. If I am not sitting across the tabletop from you, where I know your face, see or at least sense your emotions, and can at least attempt to address you as my character, and vice-versa, then it's not really role-playing. My oldest son, at 16, even knows the difference in this, as he often comes to me and asks when we'll be able to get back into a tabletop group; he plays games like Assassin's Creed, MechWarrior Online, Lord of the Rings Online, Smite, etc., but he comes to me often enough that I feel badly that we don't live in a part of the world where role-playing is more prominent.
Could this be changed? Sure. Biometrics, but further than that. If you're playing an MMORPG, and you have a web cam, part of the game, while creating your first character for it, could run you through a series of emotions, each captured by the web cam, measured and made into template images for various emotions. Each template would have a percentage of leeway because you won't make the exactly measured expression a second time, ever. While in-game, your character's face is superimposed over your own, but your head movements and expressions would replace current animations. That might help.
This is just one suggestion, but I have papers due for college, and this is finals week, so I'm not thinking of much, right now.
I used to roleplay back in my pen and paper days. However, I find roleplaying in MMORPG's to be ackward and forced. Maybe its the medium, the lack of face-to-face contact, or my own inability to adjust.
My characters have good backgounds that I make up for them, and that does affect how I play them. However, I don't actually "roleplay", that is act like the character, in MMORPGs.
i gave up on roleplaying fiew year ago sadly......i knew RPlaying was dead when some guy i ran into on a roleplaying server and i asked him if he could be so kind to show the the nearest town.
Instead of answering something like "you may find a small town to the east of here" he sayd the following "WTF?, you high man.....use your f*cking map nOOb".......and yes this was on a RP-server so yeah.....roleplaying died i guess.
wondering what people like that are doing on RP servers.....must be me i guess.
According to people on this site, RPG is character progression and not actually playing the role of a character in a virtual world. Character progression can be definied as a reward for successfully conforming with the rampant behavioral conditioning that substitutes for fun gameplay in the modern MMORPG. Role players are gone because MMORPGs just kind of suck at the moment.
Are you a Pavlovian Fish Biscuit Addict? Get Help Now! I will play no more MMORPGs until somethign good comes out!
Not sure what's happend, but i still have the mindset that i should RP in MMO's so i do it without thinking in one way or another. Sometimes its casual with friends, and sometimes its more hardcore among other RPers. Still the days of Roleplaying in Ultima Online, are long gone and i'll probably see anything like it again.
An answer to your query is that roleplayers have no place in modern MMOs. They aren't designed for roleplaying. These new games are treadmills, designed to herd the playerbase through a tunnel and keep them so occupied with mind numbing tasks that they barely have time to stop and talk to anyone. This is also another reason why you will most likely never see another MMO that caters to roleplayers. The new MMO players is one that is impatient and lacks creativity. They are so use to having content force fed down their throats they they have absolutely no desire to step outside of system and mix things up a little bit.
I've played World of Warcraft for many years, even on roleplaying servers you barely see any RPing; well, minus Moon Guard; but, those people there confused RPing with cyber eroticism. I can't say it's all their fault though; as I said, new MMOs aren't sandboxes, in no way shape or form. And anyone who has played a sandbox MMO before, knows that they require a very active community to make anything interesting happen or else the game becomes extremely stagnat. For this reason, sandbox MMOs have been branded as a boring design for a game by those who lack the time, patience or initiative to make the game fun and interesting.
I've seen in the past that other countries have started developing their own sandbox games and they do really well over there; but, Americans don't seem to know what to do with them anymore. I was watching a video of some players trying out on of those sandboxes, it was hysterical to watch because they didn't know what the hell they were suppose to do, they were expecting some sort of a linear pathway to follow or some kind of objective, there was non. So you watch them wander around aimlessly for about an hour, getting into all sorts of trouble, the whole time they kept complaining about how lost and confused they were. It was amusing; but, it made me a bit sad at the same time. I realize that is why RP is dead; because, everyone is so use to having their hand held in MMOs. No room for creativity in a world that drags you from point to point in an endless race to a finish line, that's always just out of reach.
Part of the issue that I see here is there's three major types of role-playing:
Executing a specific job in a group (healer/tank/DPS/CC if the game has a dedicated CC type) (this is what it seems that MMORPGs - as an extension of PC and console RPGs - seem to focus on)
Making targetting, ability, appearance, and/or dialog options based on what the "character would do" but don't interact with others in-character (called "playing in character" by many)
Interacting with others in-character (what most self-identified roleplayers seem to consider as "roleplaying"). This almost but not always includes type 2 behaviors.
The problems come in when you get people who purely play as different types in the same group. The type 1s find the type 2 behaviors to be "playing wrong" and (in my experience) seem baffled at people interacting in character, so type 3 behaviors are also considered wrong. Type 3s tend to get insular mostly when the type 1s tell them to "learn2play" or to STFU; on City of Heroes' unofficial RP server only the 1-iest of type 1s gave the type 3s direct grief about RPing in the any-level areas (indirect grief like the "Pocket D is nothing but catgirls" meme was rife, if very inaccurate - I think I saw one catgirl in Pocket D in 4 years and a fair bit of lurking about in it).
In my experience, type 2s only run into issues with the other types if they take a "gimped" power set (then it's back to "learn2play" from type1s - even if the person's taking a mathematically inferior ability for some other benefit, like a chance for CC or making the game more difficult for themselves on purpose) or find the type 3s are stopping any group play to soliloquize without making sure that the type 2 players are okay with that up-front.
Playing in games like NWN 1&2 where fans can literally creat worlds (Persistent Worlds) and are empowered with DM events that any serious RPer will spend time in rather than any MMO where RPers are faced with nothing but restrictions?
you want to know where all the RPs have gone, they hide. people love to F&%$ with RPers and as such most no longer openly RP normaly RP is done via bsae's, or instanced missions tht large groups can form in and join.
i ahve seen more and more of this of late and i dont blame them, my group dose the same form time to time and every now and then i manage to find a group and join with them.
and beside that most game do not make it easy to RP anymore in fact more and more MMO make it hard to RP, especilly when the chat box is not as easly used due to the more action based UI setupos.
F2P may be the way of the future, but ya know they dont make them like they used to Proper Grammer & spelling are extra, corrections will be LOL at.
Originally posted by furbans Playing in games like NWN 1&2 where fans can literally creat worlds (Persistent Worlds) and are empowered with DM events that any serious RPer will spend time in rather than any MMO where RPers are faced with nothing but restrictions?
i have a NWN 2 server i still play on.
F2P may be the way of the future, but ya know they dont make them like they used to Proper Grammer & spelling are extra, corrections will be LOL at.
I know alot of them actually had to go out and get jobs and/or they got themselves married and had a family. But can't forgot about the other people who got tired of doing the same old crap on the MMO's they played and got tired of waiting for the devs to actually add new content to the games so they quit playing games altogether..
The roleplayers are either playing old games or are gone.
This couldn't be further from the truth. They are difficult to find sometimes, but in Neverwinter, I just met up with a huge group of RPers, and was amazed at how good they were, and how excited I was to see so many gathered together.
As a former MUD player (Gemstone III) who has played many of the past major MMORPGS I have two thoughts about the current state of things:
* more recent MMORPGS do not provide tools and mechanics to encourage RP. For example, games that don't allow you to interact with much of the surrounding game world, e.g. sit in a nearby chair, often mean that to RP you might as well be back in a text-based MUD. You can look at original UO or SWG and see that, over time, players have less and less ability to interact with the world while the games get prettier and prettier graphically
* generations have changed. The younger players towards whom most games are now designed as an audience generally have not played old Pen and Paper or MUD games. And to compound things modern MMORPGS make everyone expend more effort to RP given game mechanics (see above)
So its really two things. Virtual worlds have virtually disappeared and even the supposed sand boxes are full of mechanics that are not RP-friendly. And the younger players have different expectations.
This MAY change if a game like EQ Next turns out to fulfill its claims. It will take the proven success of a major MMORPG reclaiming the "RPG" part of the title to shake the game companies out of their risk averse slide into pushing out one theme park after another.
As a former GS3 player myself, I agree with this statement as well. It's difficult to RP in an entirely static environment where the characters actions have little to no effect on the game world itself and are limited in the ways that they can interact with thier environment. Honestly you are better off with a simple text based chat client then most MMO's for RPing.
I don't play MMO's much these days, but I do try to RP in them when playing. Mostly I do RPing through Virtual TableTop gaming sessions...that seems to be a much better medium for it then the typical MMO.
In MUDs (like GS3) you would have real GM's who ran real story arcs, large and small. The characters could interact with those story arcs and effect thier outcome and make lasting and persistant changes in the game world. You also had a significant number of players with both a familiarity and interest in RPing. It was part of the expected culture of the game.
So much of the gaming community and gaming systems in general are for the progression based gamestyle it seems. I remember in SWG folks just hanging out in the cantinas. Heck, in early vanilla WOW these was some good RP on some of the servers. As long as games and gaming communities are focused on gear and character progression as the main purpose of playing rather than just enjoying being in a fantasy/sci fi world for a little escape after hard day at work, then the trend will continue.
Case in point, I bought the neverwinter guardian pack. When I logged in to play there was already someone in chat LFG lvl 60 endgame PVP and RAIDS... I was a bit stunned. lol
Comments
I guess I'm one of those old guard because I was playing MUDs before MMOs as well. Many of the old MMOs had accessable roleplay and even up into some newer games. City of Heroes for instance had an unofficial roleplay server while DDO had two. LotRO was a game that actively discouraged me from roleplaying however. The reason being is accessability.
There is little to no reason for people to congregate with people outside of their narrow level range band in many games. City of Heroes got around this by having public areas for things like costume contests and ways to have characters of vastly different levels actually contribute to the same quest. DDO used to have a much lower level cap so the spread was less, but they also had open roleplay sessions (Thelanis Thursday and Sarlona Sunday) where the roleplay community actively set up an easy in for new people on those days. As the level spread grew, and the person spearheading much of the roleplay organization was hired by Turbine this openly roleplaying in public and inviting strangers in has slowly gone down over the years.
LotRO is an example of what killed roleplaying for me. When LotRO launched there was a rather vocal portion of the playerbase that wanted a server at least flagged with a RP tag to the name even if it wasn't different in any other way. Turbine did not want to do this. The result was a portion of the beta players decided to declare one of the servers an RP server. When the game launched they policed the public channels for what they considered inappropriate use of out of character chatter and reported names they felt were out of character. I had a character named Nymiel that was reported because a few people felt like the correct spelling in Tolkien's world should be Nimiel. I wouldn't see anyone roleplaying in public during that time, but I knew they were out there somewhere roleplaying in secret because they were swamping the customer support with their reports on names and publically condemning people using the public channels.
This is what I see as the principle problem. The roleplayers with some experience are rather secular and not actively looking to expand by bringing in new roleplayers. They have their group of friends and they are comfortable with them. From the outside, we appear to be elitists. Even if somebody has roleplayed in other games in the past they will likely encounter resistance trying to join an existing roleplaying cliche in a game so each little group of roleplayers are an island unto themselves that doesn't interact with the other roleplayers on their server. The exception to this seems to be games that are so small that those islands can't help but bump into each other to form larger masses of roleplayers, or are looking for a way to save their favorite game so actively seek out new people to bring into their little pocket of the game world.
I blog sometimes. http://kibitzknook.blogspot.com/
You wanting to be the powerful character isn't very deep in the RP pool. Your character is pretty much the same as you, the person at the keyboard (or controller...).
You aren't a mathmatician when you've just started exploring your math tables. You're taking the first steps.
Everyone should go to whatever level they're comfortable with certainly. The extremes at both ends (the GodModders and the RP Griefers) certainly aren't fun. I know I play in character much of the time, but computer games just aren't that well set up for it. The harder it is to do in game, the fewer people will partake, and the less involved the RP aspects can easily be, imo.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
"Where Have All the Roleplayers Gone?"
Heck, I can tell you that from experience. I'm an "old school" Original D&D player (I go back all the way to the "White Box" "Little Brown Books" era). I also play computer/video games like World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2.
I give you this part of my history beacuse I have the answer to your question.
Most of us RPG players are going back to tabletop games. Most video/computer games are very strictured in their play. For instance, I can't play a Tauren Shaman without being part of the Horde. In the Warcrat and World of Warcraft RPG's, I =can= do that. When I play Andarcy, a 70th level WoW Human Hunter, I go thru many, if not all, of the same scenarios that I did while playtesting "Mists of Pandaria" with my (eventually 85th level Alliance) Pandaren Hunter. In most Tabletop RPG's I've seen in almost 40 years of tabletop, I've can't remember running thru the same scenario, module, or adventure twice. Despite running new character classes like Monk and Druid, in WoW the same adventures crop up that I already did with my Hunter.
Within recent times I've seen at least two major WoW players come back to the tabletop other than myself.
Therefore I believe that true RPGers are abandoning their video/computer games and going back "home".
Does that help?
Bruce "GURPSGM" Gray
First, everybody has their own definition of roleplaying... you have to define the term/choose a definition before any discussion can get too deep into whether or not MMORPGs have lost the RPG by your definition. Going with the usual "I know it when I see it" is just going to lead to people talking past one another, arguing for their own definition without even necessarily realizing that is what they are doing (for example, this thread).
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My own definition of RP is, in summary, "cooperative storytelling". And by that definition, while today's MMO offerings don't exactly lay out the red carpet for the more involved forms of that activity, I would say it certainly is still possible.
The "cooperative" part is the difficult element in an MMO. Getting 10000 people to all agree that the earth orbits the sun is a dicey prospect, let alone having them agree on how things "should" work in a completely imaginary shared virtual environment. However, cooperation can be far more easily achieved amongst smaller, player-formed sub-groups/communities... as such, the very existence of guilds is arguably support for RP.
Storytelling is also a bit more difficult, tho not incredibly so compared to many earlier games. One of the underlying subtexts is that, for the more intricate forms of RP, you need to be able to tell your own story. In the action-packed, combat-centric MMOs of today, that can be difficult if you're not telling the story of a cold-blooded killing machine (but if you are, you're golden...)
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I would argue that the MMO has never been a great platform for RP in the sense that the pen-and-paper RPer typically yearns for. Having been one myself since '77, I know this is true for me, at least.
It is simply too large and open a forum. It would be a minor miracle to get the same sense of immersion (another loaded term, IMO) as you can get with a smaller, human-moderated group of friends/acquaintances sitting around someone's gaming table. However, if you're willing to settle for a muted echo of what that experience can be, with the occasional close approximation at random, I think the MMORPG can still get you there, even today.
My two cents...
Blogging semi-regularly at http://damianov.wordpress.com
This right here, is the fact.
Jim H. Moreno
I have a few thoughts on this. One is whether or not there were that many role players to begin with. Two is how many actually want to role play in an MMORPG and Third is if they were there, would you really notice them?* It's not like they're up on a stage with advertisements laying around. They would be off in their own area, doing their own thing.
* JimMoreno's post is what triggered this thought. That and I wonder if that's his real name and his real picture.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Ms. Gonzalez,
Bless you for bringing this up. I look forward to your second article on this subject.
There CAN be game mechanics which foster RP, but again the developers don't worry about that. For the past decade, as I have played, I've noticed that almost ALL RP is incumbent on the players to maintain for themselves. RP will never be an in-MMORPG constant, as most RP deals almost exclusively with social aspects of life. If I am not sitting across the tabletop from you, where I know your face, see or at least sense your emotions, and can at least attempt to address you as my character, and vice-versa, then it's not really role-playing. My oldest son, at 16, even knows the difference in this, as he often comes to me and asks when we'll be able to get back into a tabletop group; he plays games like Assassin's Creed, MechWarrior Online, Lord of the Rings Online, Smite, etc., but he comes to me often enough that I feel badly that we don't live in a part of the world where role-playing is more prominent.
Could this be changed? Sure. Biometrics, but further than that. If you're playing an MMORPG, and you have a web cam, part of the game, while creating your first character for it, could run you through a series of emotions, each captured by the web cam, measured and made into template images for various emotions. Each template would have a percentage of leeway because you won't make the exactly measured expression a second time, ever. While in-game, your character's face is superimposed over your own, but your head movements and expressions would replace current animations. That might help.
This is just one suggestion, but I have papers due for college, and this is finals week, so I'm not thinking of much, right now.
I used to roleplay back in my pen and paper days. However, I find roleplaying in MMORPG's to be ackward and forced. Maybe its the medium, the lack of face-to-face contact, or my own inability to adjust.
My characters have good backgounds that I make up for them, and that does affect how I play them. However, I don't actually "roleplay", that is act like the character, in MMORPGs.
Cunfushus says "Only through wasting time do we realize that time should not be wasted."
i gave up on roleplaying fiew year ago sadly......i knew RPlaying was dead when some guy i ran into on a roleplaying server and i asked him if he could be so kind to show the the nearest town.
Instead of answering something like "you may find a small town to the east of here" he sayd the following "WTF?, you high man.....use your f*cking map nOOb".......and yes this was on a RP-server so yeah.....roleplaying died i guess.
wondering what people like that are doing on RP servers.....must be me i guess.
Are you a Pavlovian Fish Biscuit Addict? Get Help Now!
I will play no more MMORPGs until somethign good comes out!
An answer to your query is that roleplayers have no place in modern MMOs. They aren't designed for roleplaying. These new games are treadmills, designed to herd the playerbase through a tunnel and keep them so occupied with mind numbing tasks that they barely have time to stop and talk to anyone. This is also another reason why you will most likely never see another MMO that caters to roleplayers. The new MMO players is one that is impatient and lacks creativity. They are so use to having content force fed down their throats they they have absolutely no desire to step outside of system and mix things up a little bit.
I've played World of Warcraft for many years, even on roleplaying servers you barely see any RPing; well, minus Moon Guard; but, those people there confused RPing with cyber eroticism. I can't say it's all their fault though; as I said, new MMOs aren't sandboxes, in no way shape or form. And anyone who has played a sandbox MMO before, knows that they require a very active community to make anything interesting happen or else the game becomes extremely stagnat. For this reason, sandbox MMOs have been branded as a boring design for a game by those who lack the time, patience or initiative to make the game fun and interesting.
I've seen in the past that other countries have started developing their own sandbox games and they do really well over there; but, Americans don't seem to know what to do with them anymore. I was watching a video of some players trying out on of those sandboxes, it was hysterical to watch because they didn't know what the hell they were suppose to do, they were expecting some sort of a linear pathway to follow or some kind of objective, there was non. So you watch them wander around aimlessly for about an hour, getting into all sorts of trouble, the whole time they kept complaining about how lost and confused they were. It was amusing; but, it made me a bit sad at the same time. I realize that is why RP is dead; because, everyone is so use to having their hand held in MMOs. No room for creativity in a world that drags you from point to point in an endless race to a finish line, that's always just out of reach.
Part of the issue that I see here is there's three major types of role-playing:
The problems come in when you get people who purely play as different types in the same group. The type 1s find the type 2 behaviors to be "playing wrong" and (in my experience) seem baffled at people interacting in character, so type 3 behaviors are also considered wrong. Type 3s tend to get insular mostly when the type 1s tell them to "learn2play" or to STFU; on City of Heroes' unofficial RP server only the 1-iest of type 1s gave the type 3s direct grief about RPing in the any-level areas (indirect grief like the "Pocket D is nothing but catgirls" meme was rife, if very inaccurate - I think I saw one catgirl in Pocket D in 4 years and a fair bit of lurking about in it).
In my experience, type 2s only run into issues with the other types if they take a "gimped" power set (then it's back to "learn2play" from type1s - even if the person's taking a mathematically inferior ability for some other benefit, like a chance for CC or making the game more difficult for themselves on purpose) or find the type 3s are stopping any group play to soliloquize without making sure that the type 2 players are okay with that up-front.
you want to know where all the RPs have gone, they hide. people love to F&%$ with RPers and as such most no longer openly RP normaly RP is done via bsae's, or instanced missions tht large groups can form in and join.
i ahve seen more and more of this of late and i dont blame them, my group dose the same form time to time and every now and then i manage to find a group and join with them.
and beside that most game do not make it easy to RP anymore in fact more and more MMO make it hard to RP, especilly when the chat box is not as easly used due to the more action based UI setupos.
F2P may be the way of the future, but ya know they dont make them like they used to
Proper Grammer & spelling are extra, corrections will be LOL at.
i have a NWN 2 server i still play on.
F2P may be the way of the future, but ya know they dont make them like they used to
Proper Grammer & spelling are extra, corrections will be LOL at.
This couldn't be further from the truth. They are difficult to find sometimes, but in Neverwinter, I just met up with a huge group of RPers, and was amazed at how good they were, and how excited I was to see so many gathered together.
As a former GS3 player myself, I agree with this statement as well. It's difficult to RP in an entirely static environment where the characters actions have little to no effect on the game world itself and are limited in the ways that they can interact with thier environment. Honestly you are better off with a simple text based chat client then most MMO's for RPing.
I don't play MMO's much these days, but I do try to RP in them when playing. Mostly I do RPing through Virtual TableTop gaming sessions...that seems to be a much better medium for it then the typical MMO.
In MUDs (like GS3) you would have real GM's who ran real story arcs, large and small. The characters could interact with those story arcs and effect thier outcome and make lasting and persistant changes in the game world. You also had a significant number of players with both a familiarity and interest in RPing. It was part of the expected culture of the game.
So much of the gaming community and gaming systems in general are for the progression based gamestyle it seems. I remember in SWG folks just hanging out in the cantinas. Heck, in early vanilla WOW these was some good RP on some of the servers. As long as games and gaming communities are focused on gear and character progression as the main purpose of playing rather than just enjoying being in a fantasy/sci fi world for a little escape after hard day at work, then the trend will continue.
Case in point, I bought the neverwinter guardian pack. When I logged in to play there was already someone in chat LFG lvl 60 endgame PVP and RAIDS... I was a bit stunned. lol