“Choose Your Ruleset in World of Warcraft: Forever”
“Players will be able to select from several rulesets that reflect familiar ways to play World of Warcraft:
Normal: The baseline World of Warcraft experience, where players can focus on exploration, questing, cooperation, and player-versus-player combat when they choose to engage in it.
PvP: For players who want every trip into contested territory to carry more danger, excitement, and open-world conflict.
Roleplaying: For players who want to lean more deeply into the fantasy of Azeroth and seek out like-minded adventurers.
Hardcore: For players seeking the ultimate challenge, where every decision matters and death carries lasting consequences,” via the World of Warcraft website.
Roleplaying in World of Warcraft’s actually got me into writing in the first place – you can read more about that in our MMO column, Terminally Online.
Alright, here’s the problem—I’m not sure this really works for its intended purpose.
Extra Context: IC/OOC
- When you’re out of character (OOC), you’re playing the game normally. If you need to say something OOC while you’re roleplaying, you might use brackets, ((like this)) [or this].
- When you’re in character (IC), you’re roleplaying, describing what your character does, and generally trying to write.
World of Warcraft has traditionally had roleplay servers, yes, and those servers do traditionally have people acting out their gameplay in-character: But there’s a perception, which is being applied here by Blizzard, that this is their—our—main deal.
In my experience, most RP communities do have players who are still interested in… well, playing the game. Very few people log on exclusively for the purpose of writing with each other. They’ll also do dungeons, raids, and so on—with a clear split between their in-character actions and game time. Basically, nobody’s RP-walking in a dungeon on Argent Dawn EU. We’re doing the damn dungeon.
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I won’t gripe about the “strict naming conventions and behaviour rules” because there’s every chance they’re reasonable, although the word “strict” does give me cause for alarm. Roleplay servers tend to work on informal manners without one real “one size fits all” model of in-character/out of character conduct.
What gives me actual pause are these clarifications by Blizzard:
- “Cross-ruleset grouping is not supported, so characters in different spaces will not be able to group together for those activities.”
- “Players cannot freely hop between rulesets; to play under a different one, they’ll need to create a new character in that ruleset.”
This seems like an overkill requirement for roleplayers—who, again, very rarely act in-character while they’re doing dungeon runs and raids. While I can see separating “normal” ruleset players and roleplayer ruleset players out in the open world, where RP is likely to take place, there’s no real reason to split them off from the rest of the community outside of that.
Roleplay servers in the retail game are where we congregate, sure—but they’re actually populated by a lot of folks who don’t roleplay, or just like to watch people RP. And I see no reason why, in Forever, we should be siloing off those groups from each other in all content.
A clear split between the other rulesets makes sense, but to a roleplay ruleset, I think a semi-permeable membrane would make sense. That way, I can still play with my non-RPer mates—something I do all the time in other MMOs of choice without having to make a separate character.
Read the full article here
