Gonna have to disagree with the number Torscee pu tup for men and women playing different server types,

Sure it looks reliable, but seriously any satistic saying women play more than men on PvE server (the most populated servers in the game.) seems to be a bit on the false side. This could be just from a statisic value in which they take a small sampling of players and try to use those numbers to show the rest of the server population, but MMOs work against statistics since the only real numbers come from those that stick with the game rather than pick it up play for a week and then drop it.

Hey Hey

What a great article, and i have to agree with you the best game to RP in is EVE .  However the responce have been very interesting and sometimes funny to read.   Every one takes all the shit to seriously.

Welcome Home

Rev

Originally posted by shava

I inserted a poll on my previous post on this topic, asking how many folks would pay 2x as much for a game and 3x the monthly subscription fee for a game that entailed better story (and presumably with better story, better RP potential).

So far nearly 90% answered unqualified yes (over half), or that it would depend on the game/developer.

Personally, I would be ecstatic to be able to pay a higher monthly fee for a more immersive environment in gaming, more GMs, better attention to story, and so on.

I think LOTRO and Eve are probably the closest to this on the market now, and sw:tor upcoming.  LOTRO did it on the basis of the license for the root IP of all RPG games, and Eve did it because...well, because they're from Iceland and could think small and intelligent at the same time, I suspect! :)

C'mon guys -- people are paying over $100 for a DVD set of one season of a TV show. The market for a $120 game with a $30-50 sub fee is out there. You won't get most teenagers, slackabouts, and people downside of the digital divide (the last of which I actually am sorry for) -- but you would be recognizing the maturity of the gaming market as an adult passtime pursued by people who don't live in their mom's basements, tyvm.

But will future companies consider creating financially-gated communities for advanced, mature, RPing gamers, where each sub counts as *greater than* three current subs?

I say *more* than three because people involved in community and RP tend to ride out a game longer than do people who are shooting for level cap, then jump.

I can't wait until this market matures, so we get past the movie-like "big studio" stage and indie games have a better economic chance.  Until then, there's little hope for anyone who isn't just trying to out-bliz Blizzard's WOW, trying to make the money-pitch for development, and that's sad for all of us, even the non-RPers.

Shava

 

Go make it and ill sign up.

1. roleplay strictly enforced by gm team aided by filters.

2. adult content in context of gameplay, make the ratings mark require 18+ only

3. no 'global' chat channels, only local.  in game voice chat only broadcasts to your vicinity

4. no damage info or parsing

5. loaded with emotes, housing, crafting, player cities, vehicles with travel times, marriage/soul bonding benefits, animal as pets player races and death penalties that mean something(???!@!!!?)

some benefits to the company:

1. lower playerbase with much higher revenue per player

2. loyal playerbase with generally mature attitudes toward issue resolution

3. lower server/hardware requirements for hosting.

4. less demand for constant class balancing and rebalancing and rebalancing

5. more focus on sandbox and utility allows the company to be more innovative and explore the limits of mmorpg possibilities.

Two Comments:

1. This article alone has completely changed my perception of what a mmorpg is in general. Instead of seperating the play styles and social interactions i would get out of my fps,action,sports video games, i should expect more of the same mmorpg and not a different social experience i would get from a Rpg/table top game.

2. The great thing about free speech is you can say how much something sucks without backing it up.

Wow, I am shocked at the author for such an ignorant and uninformed article.  It seems to be created from nothing more than personal opinion.

To be frank I choose RP servers to avoid pricks and people like this author who think they know what something is all about.  It has little to do with the actual Role Playing, but the maturity level of most players.  Many individuals when they see the options of servers will avoid the RP servers because they think it is retarded, there are restrictions (even if they aren't all enforced) and the player base won't be L33T.

I mean to me if the "Role Play" is nothing more than playing the role of a decent character in the game who isn't an ass and can stay on topic, that is more than enough for me.

Wow, talk about off base Dana. RP servers are very typically the most populated servers in the games I've played. Do any of them go all out in forcing RP? No. But that's not what an RP server is.

An RP server is a place where you are specifically allowed to RP if you wish, and NOBODY CAN GIVE YOU CRAP FOR IT lol. Unlike so many other servers, where even being polite can get you laughed at for how stoopid n'week u r. So RP guilds go there, and RP people go there, and people who want to see what RP is go there, and people who want to annoy RPrs go there and get KICKED OUT for acting against the rules of the RP server. Reported, warned, banned on strike 2.

Now I'm not an RPer, but I did check out a couple of RP servers in CoH and other games just to see what it would be like to play in that environment. My god, was it ever NICE. You could just go play without having any of the usual issues like having to /ignore jerks spamming cusswords and flaming and having to report characters with highly offensive names before your kids wandered up and saw them.

And every group you joined was serious about playing - lots of pros and the other people were at least trying to do well. All in all, my experience on RP servers was the best game time I've had.

Originally posted by Stradden

Originally posted by DarkRexx

This isn't an article, it's a thinly veiled verbal assault against a certian playstyle. Articles are not supposed to take sides or state the writer's opinions as if they were truth. I mean seriously Dana, you don't even TRY to disguise it as an article, the freakin' NAME is 'The Myth of Role-Playing Servers'. The title of the rant is basically trying to quote itself for truth. Even when you admit that there may be an exception to the rule, you immediatley discredit yourself afterwards on purpose in order to try to prove your point on several occasions.

Exaggerated Example: "I realise that there may be decent rp'ers out there but they are so few and far-between that they're hardly worth mentioning."

That kind of writing is bullshit. It doesn't matter if the article is The Myth of Role-Playing Servers or the The Joy of Role-Playing servers if all you do is ramble on about your personal opinion and use writing trick to sound subjective and informed when you're really not. I'm sure if the article was "Are Role-Playing Servers a Myth?" and allowed both sides of the issue equal time and consideration, and maybe if you did a little bit of research into the subject instead of relying on your own speculation it would have been much better. 

In short, MMORPG.com should not be treated like a refrigerator door for the journalists to stick any half-assed thought on for all the world to see. This kind of journalism reflects badly on you, and in turn the website your writing represents.

I'm not speaking about the content of the article on way or another, but I WOULD like to point out that this was an OPINION piece. Disagree with the opinion, sure, but you're dressing it down because it IS an opinion.... which is the point of each of the five featured columns every week.

No offense intended but if I had written an opinion peice like this in the forums I'd of been warned or most likely issued a ban for several days.  His tone is overly vicious which is cause of the problem more than anything.   Article writers when writing Opinion Pieces should be held to the same rules that any of the rest of us are.   Using tones that will obviously incite anger from a particular group is pretty much flame baiting by your own rules.   

There's a thin line between editorial opinions and flaming in the name of "I'm an article writer i can do what i want and call it an editorial" this is obviously an example of the latter.

Regardless if a person is well known, a regular joe, an article writer, or an employee of the website none should be above the 'law' here.  This isn't some small time lil blog website.

If I'm going to get banned for supposed 'flaming' when I'm not flaming then why should his article be allowed to be passed when he's obviously and ignorately flaming a group of people.  Sure I respect his general opinion that RP servers serve no real purpose (despite the fact I think oppositely ) but I don't respect a person who openly generalizes and flames as a whole.

Wow, this site has such terrible articles. From the typical fantasizing/advertisement for F2P games to pure conjecture, "uhh i have to write something this week" piles of BS..I would hate to see what you people would do with political pieces.

You do realize that in a proper opinion piece, you don't just throw in random arbitrary claims, like "only a guild's worth of people actually RP," right? There's no real points in this. It's just sort of rambling. Do you get paid?

 I once knew a guy from work who spent at least a half an hour talking to me about how badass his Orc Hunter was and how his guild was the best on his server and blah blah blah, etc. Then I mentioned when I used to play WoW I played on an RP server to which he responded "those people are dorks". 

Needless to say, this confirmed what I already knew: he was an absolute moron. 

People that spend all their time playing MMOs, then have the audacity too look down on roleplayers as freaks/weirdos are further out of touch with reality than any roleplayer. We're all spending our time in some form of alternative reality, but at least the roleplayers have the courage and imagination to run with it without worrying about what others think of them. 

Personally, one of the biggest things I look for in an MMO is immersion, so I'll take a server full of people with a dramatic flare over one full of people named UberPwner and UrMom any day. While I myself can't stand the elitist jerks that refuse to talk to you if you don't use (()) to display you are talking out of character and so on, I see nothing wrong with trying to fully get into a game and character and come up with your own stories, and enjoy doing it myself from time to time. 

You obviously haven't played on Moonguard in WoW. They actually RP there. Some decent ones, too!  For RP, though, I prefer the games like Neverwinter Nights where you can build your own servers and RP with folks there. Less asshats.

Artikel is a bit weak.

Plus saying people who anoy the rpers on their servers are more intellectual is... BS.

RP-servers are there to have the rpers find each other on THAT server.

If the Autor thinks hes right that  all RPers whine about  1337 kids behaving like AssO that was a wrong guess,

theres a ignorebutton.

I played enough mmorpgs to know there are fine RP guilds which have fun rping actually.

You are taking it to serious.

What a waste of time to read that biased text -.-

Some of the most creative, unique, and inspired people i've ever met used to be RP friends in PnP like Shadowrun and D&D.  Many of them now work in the games industry at places like Turbine, Microsoft, Ubisoft, and they are some of the most interesting people i've ever met.  People that look down on RP'ers in games can't even dream of the type of entertainment real RP can provide. 

I feel exactly the opposite as Dana, and that game devs should start to go even further out of their way to cater to these crowds instead of stop supporting them.  If anyone ever played in some of the persistant worlds in Neverwinter Nights with some good DM's then you know the potential this genre could have if there was more of an RP focus. 

That article was an amusing read. It was a total rant of course but a good and justified one as its completely spot on. I havent read any of the responses in this thread but I'm sure many of them are from so-called hardened roleplayers displaying their outrage at having their serious hobby accurately described.......in short living up to the drama queens that Dana referred to them as.

There are never any particular rules on these so-called RP servers that make them any different to the other servers other than naming conventions......but then how could there be when these mmos arent even designed for proper roleplaying anyway?

I used to play lots of real pencil & paper roleplaying games when I was younger. It was fun meeting up with my friends and acting out the parts of our characters. We could properly roleplay because we were free to make decisions as we played that fit in with what our characters were supposed to be like......and those characters were detailed with their own history and backgrounds that actually meant something in the game world. The GM could react to our decisions by causing the gameworlds denizens to react accordingly. If you were a rich noble then the peasants in the nearby village would react to you accordingly. If you were a treacherous wizard then those same peasants might loath or fear you. Acting in character was required because the entire game relied on the efforts and imagination of the players and the GM. Anything was possible.

None of this is possible in an mmo.......at least not in any of the current ones anyway. Its like having thousands of individuals reading an online fighting fantasy book......and a badly designed one at that. You can come up with any fancy background that you like and pretend to be some kind of hero (or not) but the game just doesnt care because the story is already written and it doesnt involve anything the so-called roleplayer has invented. There is no GM to rule over your world. Its just an automated weak impression of a world that has been frozen in time. Holy paladim who has lost his father to marauding orcs, timid halfling who has fled from his village seeking adventure, reeking dirty troll who is on the hunt to reclaim a lost totem for his chieftain........its all irrelevant because they will all end up having to do the same "please kill 10 badgers so I can knit a scarf" quests. In fact games like EQ2 are hilarious with this as the game doesnt even have any structure in place to cater towards racial likes or dislikes. It just ignores it and lets everyone team up regardless of race or anything else. These games are all about ploughing through the content and reading stories. They arent places designed to cater to any stories you might be able to conceive. Sorry but this is the devs world not yours.

But of course players are totally welcome to "pretend" that the game is more than it actually is. Afterall they're not doing any harm. Its not really roleplaying though is it. The same level of roleplaying could be achieved by getting a bunch of players to log into Counterstrike and all pretend to be wizards on a quest for the orb of power. In fact I suspect that a large number of mmo players who say "Oh we're roleplayers" have probably never even played an actual real roleplaying game. I think many of them cant really tell the difference between "roleplaying" and "pretending to roleplay". Try and explain it to most of them and they react as though you just told them the world is flat.

Its hardly surprising though that people are so tempted to try and deliberately spoil the "fun" of these roleplayers. Afterall the roleplayers are the ones who arent actually playing the game properly. The "pretend game" that they are all acting out (which is more like a theatrical show) doesnt really have anything to do with the game itself. Ironicly the roleplayers are the anomoly in a massively multiplayer roleplaying game. They are the bunch of oddballs that decide to set up camp in the middle of a supermarket while everyone else is doing their shopping.......and then wonder why those busy shoppers have bad manners and keep running through the middle of their camp. Meanwhile everyone else gets on with playing the game the way it was designed......and if NoobKilla and FartyHead happen to pass a group of roleplayers standing around desperately typing out imaginary scenarios to each other in an attempt to compensate for the mmos lack of ability to provide them with the entertainment they crave, then its hardly surprising that those players might stop for a while to jump around in the middle of them all to get a rise......or pull some monsters into their vicinity to watch the reaction.

Ah well maybe someone one day will actually make an mmo which caters to proper roleplaying. I'm sure its possible. It just requires more complex systems than what the limited attempts have had so far. I certainly hope so as I would rather like to play a real massively multiplayer roleplaying game. For now though I have learned to just play the games the way they were designed, occasionally typing a bit of text in character banter for the silliness factor but otherwise just playing the game that I paid money for. If I want to roleplay I will just play a roleplaying game.

Originally posted by neonwire

That article was an amusing read. It was a total rant of course but a good and justified one as its completely spot on. I havent read any of the responses in this thread but I'm sure many of them are from so-called hardened roleplayers displaying their outrage at having their serious hobby accurately described.......in short living up to the drama queens that Dana referred to them as.

There are never any particular rules on these so-called RP servers that make them any different to the other servers other than naming conventions......but then how could there be when these mmos arent even designed for proper roleplaying anyway?

I used to play lots of real pencil & paper roleplaying games when I was younger. It was fun meeting up with my friends and acting out the parts of our characters. We could properly roleplay because we were free to make decisions as we played that fit in with what our characters were supposed to be like......and those characters were detailed with their own history and backgrounds that actually meant something in the game world. The GM could react to our decisions by causing the gameworlds denizens to react accordingly. If you were a rich noble then the peasants in the nearby village would react to you accordingly. If you were a treacherous wizard then those same peasants might loath or fear you. Acting in character was required because the entire game relied on the efforts and imagination of the players and the GM. Anything was possible.

None of this is possible in an mmo.......at least not in any of the current ones anyway. Its like having thousands of individuals reading an online fighting fantasy book......and a badly designed one at that. You can come up with any fancy background that you like and pretend to be some kind of hero (or not) but the game just doesnt care because the story is already written and it doesnt involve anything the so-called roleplayer has invented. There is no GM to rule over your world. Its just an automated weak impression of a world that has been frozen in time. Holy paladim who has lost his father to marauding orcs, timid halfling who has fled from his village seeking adventure, reeking dirty troll who is on the hunt to reclaim a lost totem for his chieftain........its all irrelevant because they will all end up having to do the same "please kill 10 badgers so I can knit a scarf" quests. In fact games like EQ2 are hilarious with this as the game doesnt even have any structure in place to cater towards racial likes or dislikes. It just ignores it and lets everyone team up regardless of race or anything else. These games are all about ploughing through the content and reading stories. They arent places designed to cater to any stories you might be able to conceive. Sorry but this is the devs world not yours.

But of course players are totally welcome to "pretend" that the game is more than it actually is. Afterall they're not doing any harm. Its not really roleplaying though is it. The same level of roleplaying could be achieved by getting a bunch of players to log into Counterstrike and all pretend to be wizards on a quest for the orb of power. In fact I suspect that a large number of mmo players who say "Oh we're roleplayers" have probably never even played an actual real roleplaying game. I think many of them cant really tell the difference between "roleplaying" and "pretending to roleplay". Try and explain it to most of them and they react as though you just told them the world is flat.

Its hardly surprising though that people are so tempted to try and deliberately spoil the "fun" of these roleplayers. Afterall the roleplayers are the ones who arent actually playing the game properly. The "pretend game" that they are all acting out (which is more like a theatrical show) doesnt really have anything to do with the game itself. Ironicly the roleplayers are the anomoly in a massively multiplayer roleplaying game. They are the bunch of oddballs that decide to set up camp in the middle of a supermarket while everyone else is doing their shopping.......and then wonder why those busy shoppers have bad manners and keep running through the middle of their camp. Meanwhile everyone else gets on with playing the game the way it was designed......and if NoobKilla and FartyHead happen to pass a group of roleplayers standing around desperately typing out imaginary scenarios to each other in an attempt to compensate for the mmos lack of ability to provide them with the entertainment they crave, then its hardly surprising that those players might stop for a while to jump around in the middle of them all to get a rise......or pull some monsters into their vicinity to watch the reaction.

Ah well maybe someone one day will actually make an mmo which caters to proper roleplaying. I'm sure its possible. It just requires more complex systems than what the limited attempts have had so far. I certainly hope so as I would rather like to play a real massively multiplayer roleplaying game. For now though I have learned to just play the games the way they were designed, occasionally typing a bit of text in character banter for the silliness factor but otherwise just playing the game that I paid money for. If I want to roleplay I will just play a roleplaying game.

Hi!

red the darn responses or at least some of them before posting a wall of text

now mandatory go back to WoW you WoWtard

or are you the OP`s alt?

Abyway , RP`ing and playing the game with it`s game mechanics arent mutualy exclusive. Even if only  "tonight we face the wrath of Graashashs , assemble the troups!" instead "We Raid in Kpf at Tdg tg u all T7 pink armor" It`s all about immersion and....gasp...having fun

But you know what? I have 5 years of MMO experience (young i know) and I learned that in 90% of the cases talking to arogant people such as yourself or the op is useless...

That`s why i only play free PvP / death penalty games...at least there I dont have to rely 100% on GM`s to do the job and I can at least work myself to weed out trash (aka grief out if you will) from the game :) Well even 1 WoWtard leaving is a step in the right direction

see what i did here?

i ve not actually played on a roll playing server before . in warcraft i ended up in pvp simily because some friends had told me about it and i ended up on the same server as theme . i did however like the idea of them and a naming policy appeals to me . i mean how many people in wow who play a death knight include death in the there name . i guess if your 12 years old something like pwnyou or critfire would appeal to you . so maybe the roll playing servers are the unofficial adult servers . when i play aion i might give one a try and see what its like

Originally posted by Charity

Wow.  I am officially never reading another article by you again.  You've done a great job, not only of generalizing, but of doing it in a massively negative manner.  This does, as a previous poster said, come off as a rant.  Also, just because you've apparently rarely seen the brighter side of a role-playing community doesn't mean it doesn't exist.  How sad.

I totally agree with this statement. It should have been more objective and possibly tweaked the name of the article a bit. Dana obviously doesn't or has never been around good rpers.                                        ~OZ

Originally posted by neonwire

That article was an amusing read. It was a total rant of course but a good and justified one as its completely spot on. I havent read any of the responses in this thread but I'm sure many of them are from so-called hardened roleplayers displaying their outrage at having their serious hobby accurately described.......in short living up to the drama queens that Dana referred to them as.

Congratulations on coming across as a complete asswipe! You only needed to read a handful of responses to realize that your entire post was off-target garbage - that you didn't even bother to take a couple seconds to do this is typical of the "me me me" mentality pervasive in MMOs. Ironically it is this type of player which is the most detrimental to game communities, as opposed to the niche and definitely smaller group of so-called "hardcore RPers".

Wow, this brought out the idiots and trolls, didn't it? Including the original blogger/poster.

All right, so the OP strikes me as the type who loves to roll on RP servers JUST to try to get a rise out of those "nerdy RP kids".

I never understood the hate. Listen, if people want to RP and make up stories with their characters because it helps them enjoy the game more, who the hell are you to say it's stupid and they're not "true leet RPers OMG!".  Definitions vary. If you don't like RP, just don't do it... just like PVP. Who rolls on a PVP server and then gripes about the PVPers there? It's just flat out idiotic.

Secondly, I find that anyone who uses blanket statements and generalizations such as the old "Thou shalt RPeth with me or a GM shalt be summoned upon thee in a wrath that will make thy eyes bleed!"  ye olde English RP cliche' (I honestly have never seen any RPer do this, they adapt to whatever the cultural standard for their chosen character race is in terms of lingo and dialogue, 9 times out of 10)  is probably one of those idiots who doesn't realize that all those stories in the game? Probably created by the RP nerd devs in charge of storyline... and there you are playing it and getting all excited about it. And yet you never once realize that the second you log into an online, pretend digital world, you are RPing to some degree. You are running around as a little orc or elf shooting other little orcs and elves in some pretend battle for pretend legendary items.

Thirdly - most RPers just want non-RPers to be respectful and let them do their thing. The only time the whining against non-RPers starts is when the trolls come out to bait them and harass them and grief them.  Sure, there's drama within a game's RP community...just like there's drama within a game's raiding community or PVP community. That's human nature, so you can't really single out the RPers in that respect because you might as well...as a very good lyricist put it once in a song... point that feckin' finger up your feckin' ass.

In short: Blogger, if you're not creative enough to understand the desire to RP, that's fine. Some of us aren't competitive enough to want to roll PVP servers or join big raiding guilds. But you do your thing, let the RPers do theirs, and stop being a whiney little turd because some RPer probably gave you an intellectual burn you couldn't quite grasp.

Read the article, must say, author has no clue.

I always pick a RP server on every MMORPG I play. I have no expectation of RPing or ruining someone elses. As others have stated, I go there for the increased "chance" at a mature community in the server population and for the naming policy. The players on these servers seem to be a bit older and at times, actually better players.

I do not actively seek RP situations in game, but if someone approaches me in that manner, I respond in kind specifically not to ruin their immersion. Its not like its hard.

The author's article is correct in that they are essentially a myth. But they are mistaken in almost every reason as to why. Had the author simply written a one line hypothesis they would be correct. But the resulting article is a sad and pathetic attempt at trying to back up their statements after obviously doing little to no research on the actual topic.

I only read the 1st page of comments after the OP. So, if someone else said this stuff, and I am sure they did, good job. And, I am sorry for the repetition.

Nothing but a rant post by Dana.  The only difference is that it has more exposure than the other daily rants here.

So this is what MMORPG has been reduced too.

My immediate response is simply "You're an idiot" to the author. Then I thought about it. An editor gave this the nod. This is simply MMORPG drumming up controversy to get hits to sell advertising. Hey MMORPG I got a review I want to sell...I mean write, yeah I work for the gaming company but hey does that really matter.

Real poor guys, real fkn poor.

Removes MMORPG from bookmark.

This is exactly why I prefer RP servers. I don't rp much, hell I solo most of the time, but on an RP server I am less likely to run into moronic douche bags. When I want PvP I play L4D or Huxley (when the beta is up). PvP in most MMO's is a joke anyway, and it attracts crowds of mindless epeen waving yahoos who do nothing but talk trash and spout obscenities and racial slurs.

Seriously, parents need to start using key loggers so that can see just what it is their little manic is saying and doing while they're alone.

Is this a true article? Its very offensive! MMORPG.COM has to be very desperate to hire this type of "staff member"! Very weak material Dana! This type of things is for Trolls!

Sorry Dana, but it seems you really didn't do very well in this article. It happens, especially when there's so much to talk about (always the need to talk about something different) we're bound to eventually find something we do not really dominate enough to write about, or even though you dominate, that knowledge is above the average person. In both cases it doesn't really matter, the drama generated will be the same.

Still, I may be wrong on saying you are wrong, because my knowledge of RP servers are an absolute zero. Never tried one, although many that showed their opinions on RP servers seem to show that I really should give a shot at RP servers. Not really because of the RP, but because of this atmosphere containing a higher level of maturity you may not find in the normal servers with those "I PWN U NOOB" and "OwnsYou" names and grammar, immersion assassinations.

I guess I'd really find a home into RP servers if people are more worried about playing and trying to live the game than finding people with perfectly calculated builds that are in the FOTM requirement on the regular servers.

Originally posted by Dana
I definitely got a reaction out of you all. Mind you while I obviously am not a fan of rp servers I may have been a bit over the top. The goal of this is to incite debate not riots. :)

By you coming on now and responding with that you "may have been a bit over the top" means you do not stand behind the very words you wrote and merely wrote them to get a rise out of people.  

You know I was going to respond half positively to what you had written because in a sense you are correct to some degree.   I too, believe that some games are more conducive to actual roleplay compared to others, however, with your own admission that you may have gone a bit to far - you blew it.  

You've lost all credibility.  Should have stuck to what you wrote...because now how are we to believe anything you write and whether what you are writing is true to how you really feel.