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[personal profile] cybertrixx
I've been pondering this all day.



Two things have come up on WoW recently (yes, that's right. I finally succombed to xpAIDS) which, I think, highlight a rather interesting quirk of roleplaying games, especially CRPG's. Many people have entirely different play styles and IC/OOC divide - it's one of the game's strengths that it can accomodate this (so long as you're happy to put up with an hour or two of grind here and there in between doing cool stuff) - but what happens when your enjoyment of the 'C' and 'G' parts of 'CRPG' comes into conflict with other people's 'R' and 'P'?

A World of our Own

I applaud Blizzard on their introduction of the 'Recruit-a-friend' feature. It's fantastic marketing. It lets people munch levels like popcorn, powering up with as little grind as possible, encouraging an existing player to bring a new player under their wing with an alt character and take them through the game, showing them all the cool stuff. Aware that existing players will have existing commitments, they even implemented the 'grant a level' feature which allows the new player to go off and do their own thing and then quickly bring their friend up to their level.

It's great. Playing with a friend is great. You can blast through the 'CG' parts of the game while having someone to bounce 'RP' off on the way.

RP is fab, isn't it? It's what makes the game world come to life. Take away RP, and you've got 70 (80 soon) levels of soulless grind ahead of you (interspersed with some fab instanced scripted sequences and cool looking set-pieces.)

So. What's the problem?

If you and your friend are playing through under the assumption that you'll both be doing the same quests together, exploring the same areas and roleplaying your characters while doing so, what happens when this wonderful little bubble of idealistic solitude bursts?

Roleplaying is selfish?

You're playing this roleplaying game on a roleplaying server on the assumption that you're going to roleplay - but I'm sure we're all aware that in many ways, Roleplay is inherently selfish. It doesn't care that you're trying to play with your mates. In order to play our characters, we have to (to a greater or lesser extent) forget that we're playing a game, and forget that the other people we're playing with are also playing a game. And this means that in a cooperative game like WoW, you're potentially forcing other people sit around and wait while you go off on your own to do your thing.

In LRP, we regularly run into the problem where it makes perfect sense to kill someone else IC - and you have to balance that against the fact that you're potentially ruining someone else's game. It's generally assumed that by playing, you're opening yourself up to the possiblity of getting PK'd. There's always the chance that your character might die and you won't be able to play with your mates anymore. We're prepared for it. Do we have to be similarly prepared when RP'ing in WoW?

Should we set immersion aside for the sake of others? "Don't split the goddamn party" is generally regarded as a rule to live by in tabletop. MMO's run themselves, so you can quite happily get round the most obvious limitations here - but does it take something away from the game if you roleplay with *everyone* as opposed to *your group*, meaning that you can never reliably plan anything big that isn't spur-of-the-moment?

I spent two hours the other day roleplaying with another character who turned up and started talking to me. Completely unscripted, completely IC, wonderful emergent RP. During these two hours, my recruit-a-friend buddy ended up hanging around kicking his heels and occasionally going off to kill boars. That's pretty damned lame.

Is it appropriate to effectively tell people 'sorry, I don't want to roleplay with you right now, please go away'? Does that mercilessly slaughter any hint of immersion, if everyone in the game is wandering around in their own little toggleable bubble of solitude?

When I was starting out in WoW, I used to wonder why so many people would refuse to stop and roleplay with me. Everyone always seemed so busy - always having to be somewhere or even just ignoring me entirely. I think I know why, now. Everyone's already got their own little circle of friends, their own little guild, their own little raiding team. If you step outside it, you're letting your friends down. In a team-based game where everyone has a job to do and you can't access vast areas of content without the rest of your group, it's no wonder that it can seem like nobody is roleplaying. They are - just not with you.

Next is something that randomly happened last night and which totally unneccessarily annoyed me - through absolutely no fault of the player in question. Allow me to give some background:

There's a part of the game which slowly builds up a quest chain into a climactic encounter with a certain NPC faction, with all sorts of fun scripted scenes along the way. At some point, there is a 'big reveal' when the player is supposed to finally realise what's actually going on.

As my recruit-a-friend and I were building up to do this quest, totally innocently, a fellow player who had already been through the instance in question wandered past and while RP'ing let slip a spoiler that ruins this moment of revelation, thus depriving my recruit-a-friend who had never done that quest/instance before of being able to discover it for himself.

Obviously, there was no malicious intent here. If you've completed a quest before, it barely comes to mind that other people might not have done. And if you're roleplaying your character, it seems perfectly natural to mention things that have happened to them.

Yet by doing so, we can spoil the fun for others. Tough one.

About a year ago while in one of Hellgate's auto-join general chat channels, someone let slip a colossal spoiler which ruins an awesome part of the game plot. It really, really pissed me off. I religiously avoid the 'general chat' channel in every MMO I play nowadays - but how can you filter this kind of thing out of other player's in-character speech when they're perfectly innocently roleplaying with you?

Are spoilers inappropriate even while IC? Should we have to watch what we say while in public chat to avoid inadvertantly ruining the story for other people? I'd *like* to say no. In an ideal world, we wouldn't have to worry. But I, personally, think the answer should be 'yes'. We're all playing the same game - we're just playing through it at different times.

Date: 2008-10-22 02:37 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] draconas-rage.livejournal.com
So thats why we haven't been seeing you online so much...

While no spoilers would be good, given that warcrack is at least 4 years old, I think that it is unfortunately inevitable that people will discuss the various quests that they have done.

Date: 2008-10-23 07:05 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] favouredenemy.livejournal.com
In WoW, there are two types of roleplay - that of a 'roleplay event', and roleplay whilst adventuring.

Through the larger community, you can advertise roleplay events - the LFRP channel, general chat to invite nearby people, posting a warning on the forum. People who want to roleplay will come, just for the roleplay itself. You won't advance skills, you won't be racing to finish a quest, everyone is there for the event, and no one is missing out on anything.

Roleplaying whilst adventuring means you get to play the game as well. A lot of people will pretty much rely on their mates for this part, because it is so much harder to find someone of the same level, doing the same quests as you, who is also happy to hamstring their progress by stopping and chatting IC.

Tom seems determined to stubbornly not enjoy WoW, and that's something that he'll either get over, or he'll leave saying it wasn't for him. He complains about the grind, when all he does is go out and grind. I'm not sure why he kills random passing things when they're unrelated to any quests, and then complains about it. He also doesn't seem to be being proactive about the game, but rather rides on your coattails a bit - he doesn't play unless he's with his recruit-a-friend.

I enjoy WoW most when I'm gaming and roleplaying at the same time. I enjoy just gaming, and I enjoy just roleplaying as well. I concede that I can't always do both, and that to get to doing both, I must do some of the gaming on my own - or just gaming in a group sans roleplay - until the both can happen. I think that's what most roleplayers on WoW have accepted.

Date: 2008-10-23 02:36 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] illithidbix.livejournal.com
Not actually accurate Paul. Certainly I was mostly doing so in Westfall, although this in part seems to be due to me and Theresa seemed to stop having so much intra-party roleplay.

I have had alot of fun for the first few days playing; for example when I genned Varas the Paladin with you, T' and Gemma. We where playing the game at a relaxed pace, lots of fun roleplaying even during quests.

The main reason I finally subsume to joining WoW entirely because it seemed everyone in my social group was doing so, and hence when doing stuff it seemed to be almost the only topic of conversation for hours on end. I also *do* enjoy roleplaying with my friends. Doing so through the medium of a computer game is obviously inferior to LARP or tabletop, but is also alot more convenient.

If I'm riding on Theresa's coattails then that's down to:
1)We're playing through the game together, if I run off and do aload of quests, then I'll progress ahead of her and have to redo parts of the game as she catches up. Also, she happens to actually know where to do quests.
2)We get a lot more XP if we hand in quests together (so avoid grinding),
3)I know Theresa will roleplay through the game.

Since most of my friends are (understandably) playing their high level characters most of the time. To get a chance to roleplay with them, I need to reach that level
To solo I lose the massive Recruit a friend bonus, and whilst there is still the potential for random and fun roleplaying with someone who isn't your real-life friend, it's rather rare and the norm on even a RP server is for someone to race past (normally far higher level than you) presumably to get to the place where to do the next quest (as Theresa describes above)

I have played the game a few times by myself, randomly logged into the Blue Recluse inn when the megapatch had downloaded to respend talent points and ended up spending 2 hrs or so Roleplaying with a random Paladin (who it appeared later logged inn to do exactly that). This incidentally technically provided potential spoilers for a later part of the game, however it was presented in an interesting way without spoiling plot, actually I'm not sure if it's even in the later game.
Most of the best experiences from WoW appears to be in the Blue Recluse inn.
Last night I also made a solo trip to Stormwind, to find a group of PC's where attempting to lock it down due to a zombie plague infestation (which I think is caused by one of the Halloween quests)

However, that seems entirely player driven and rather sporadic and as you point out, a distraction to playing the game. Since you unfortunately don't get XP for roleplaying. .
At the moment the game itself mostly involves talking to random NPC's who tell you to either Kill X number of y monsters, or to obtain K ingredients who have a chance of being randomly dropped by J monster. Of course this is a relatively standard formula for CRPGs and it might be just a feature of levels 1-20 (which I've done).

In that sense the game itself without the roleplaying hasn't grabbed me too much, the combat system (unsurprisingly) feels a bit to diabloesc and not very immersive (if potentially very tactical) and if I wanted to play a CRPG by myself, I'd go and play Oblivion, which I consider a far better game. Oblivion however is single player so I can't roleplay with my mates whilst playing it.

Date: 2008-10-23 09:28 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] casparrrrgh.livejournal.com
I seem to have completely underestimated the RP aspect of WOW, and can now add it to the growing list of reasons why I should never play the game for fear of losing all contact with real life!

With regard to the spoilers I feel the root of the problem is not in the players, as you righty say it's perfectly natural and indeed necessary to good RP that characters should talk about their exploits and past glories etc. The problem as I see it is that these quest chains aren't unique to every player who comes along to work through them. There may be a multitude of individual plot-development linears out there, but with such a large player-base it's only a matter of time before you run into someone who has been through one that you're working through currently. You can't really blame Blizzard either as re-writing the plot of these chains to keep them fresh for every player group that came through would be impossible.

I think it just serves to point out that providing plot and NPC's for a player base as big as WOW's is very difficult to pull of without making it entirely PvP.

Date: 2008-11-26 11:12 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] pangolin-jones.livejournal.com
Wrath of the Lich King is probably going to be the *last* WoW add on. Thats why they're dealing with the uber plot. Because of this - they went all out on preparing you for lots of rp/related quests and scenarios/cutscenes.

Rp in Wow has recently gotten a *lot* better for me on my server. I dont know whether its all the complete gimps soloquesting their way to 80 and therefore just not talking in trade. Or all the idiots playing gnome deathknights... (yes. Gnome DeathKnights, you too could be killed by Squibby McRotsAlot)

But Its a linear form of rp with relation to random groups and quests - You do each instance over and over sometimes. This means you cant take the cutscequences as being the Only time they run. You kinda have to have a barrier on it.

But yes - Wow rp is a complicated beast.

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