Roleplay go splat
I played on Thorium Brotherhood – a roleplaying server - when I first came to World of Warcraft. I'd enjoyed playing on roleplaying servers in the past in other games and thought I'd continue in that tradition.
What I quickly discovered on Thorium Brotherhood was that roleplaying there was barely clinging to life. The chat channels were filled with questions like "What is roleplaying?" and "What is different on this server?" I could never deduce whether they were sincere questions or whether they were simply meant to antagonize the roleplayers.
I ran a "light RP" guild for several months before throwing in the towel out of frustration with guild members who wouldn't roleplay. Then I did a one-eighty towards the other extreme and joined a "heavy RP" guild and just about lost my mind. I love roleplayers to death, and to an extent I consider myself to be one, but some of the folks in that guild frightened me. We'd spend more time sitting around a fire telling stories to each other than we'd spend playing the game and if anybody got up out-of-turn during story time to kill a flagged player who passed by, there was a severe tongue-lashing in store. It felt like kindergarten all over again. All I wanted was a "happy medium" but I never found it, so I emptied my bank, vendored everything, and presented a large handful of gold to my best friend on the server and left the realm.
Nova Barlow over at Escapist Magazine writes about how World of Warcraft killed her inner actor. Nova speaks fondly of roleplaying characters she has played in the past, but concludes that the place to find roleplaying these days is not in any online game including World of Warcraft. Do you agree?
