Everytime I played WoW I couldn't stop thinking how to improve the game rp-wise.
This is a great server, but I'd like to share with you my thoughts on what would be the realm of my dreams.
Maybe you'll like some of it to add into this realm, or maybe in the future a side-realm to test how it goes.
Basically, the server would start with just a portion of the world.
Like.. just for example, making WarCraft I so we have Elwynn forest.. and 2-3 more regions.
The thing is, these very few regions will have more RP-Stuff in them, like custom npcs and buildings, houses for players, places that we can do stuff Alliance vs Horde or some other factions, you name it.
As time progresses, and each region reached its potential, we all can start working on a new region.
Making WarCraft I was the first thing I imagined.. Humans dwarves and elves with their bases to the north and Orcs with a base in blackrock or near the dark portal. Maybe WarCraft II would be more interesting, even the actual wow but just a zone of it.. or whatever other era, real or not according to the lore, the point is just starting with 1 region per faction and 1 or 2 shared where conflicts would emerge.
What's the point in all of these ideas?
Making each region way more rich, one by one. I love most of the places in wow, but all we are going to find is mobs and empty buildings. Sure, everything changes when we RP in them, but if we enhance the places, wouldn't the rp be enhanced too?
And because, the WoW engine is designed to the actual WoW game, with thousands of people playing in the same realm. We are not lots of thousands, and we certainly don't do all the stuff we do in Retail, here we some more, and some less, and some in a different way, why don't design the game to the way we play it then?
In other words, RP is what i love of the game, but it is not designed to truly rp in it, at least not in it's full potential, so if i could make a rp server, i would make one where it was designed to do all the RPing stuff we'd like to and make the game look alive, not with empty spaces and nonsense mobs walking around.
I don't get it. What I got from the post is that you want CotH to put a new zone where there's a few "RP things" with alliance vs. horde? You didn't really elaborate enough for me to understand.
If I could change something...the cities definantly need to be bigger.
I'd stop wasting my obviously good server computer, and turn it into my gaming rig so I could play APB, as well as other games that will hopefully hold my attention till I end up skulking back to CoTH.
i would delete theramore and rebuild it like the Theramore in WC3 <3
Not that i can make a Rp server, or do anything in it. I'm a muppet.
All hail CotH!
Actually it's quite interesting when I think of it, I was talking with my boyfriend about the other MMOs I played. One was that some of the basic ones like Ragnarok Online and even Maple Story had some form of marriage while he said that WoW only has an item for a wedding band. He pretty much told me that Blizzard was doing more to cater to PVP on retail than RP, so we see less social things like marriage added into the game.
But I am talking more from the perspective of the game itself and not an RP server. A lot of things RP wise definitely has to be done from our imaginations, doesn't it? (:
Think what the OP was trying to say is that since there are so few players in comparison to retail (which this world was built for), we should limit players on where they can go. Give them a few zones with a lot of interactive and more realistic features as to keep people from being so scattered.
Now for my two coppers:
-Flying allowed everywhere.
-Player housing since its so much more viable on this low population server, would have to have restrictions such as character activity ( a certain amount of hours that characters has actually been in game) and an application.
-I'd like all combat equipment to have a base stat set that is modified noticeably, but not drastically, by the material it's made from (to make pvp doable with the wide level range of equipment people use for rp purposes) with level/race/faction/Rep requirements removed.
-An interactive environment example: ooc teleporter at the base of the tree that lets you 'climb' the tree to get up on a branch.
At 4am this is all I can think of, so far.
This would take a lot of time from the GMs, who are already over booked.
And also, it would increase the power of the players, which mostly proves out to be a bad idea.
What would increase the power of the players?
From the perspective of someone still playing the retail game somewhat consistently since early stages of the beta, I'd like to see changes made to how Blizzard treats their roleplaying servers. For one, I'd like to them take a more active stance in enforcing their own rules on roleplaying servers. Specifically, checking names throughout the day -- while tedious -- is something that can be somewhat easily done. And, frankly, it shows roleplayers that the staff are interested in following their own damned rules. I'd also like to see more active enforcement of roleplaying server rules concerning IC and OOC.
Blizzard's stance has long been that roleplay servers establish the standard by which rules are applied. However, there are two problems with this. As rules as not consistently applied, the ratio of roleplayers to non-roleplayers shifts, often drastically in the case of long-established servers. Secondly, due to how Blizzard currently rotates staff members through multiple servers, this renders the rules and their application inconsistent. To fix this, I'd recommend (and have done so in the past) assigning a handful of Game Masters to police specific servers. As such, there should always be at least one staff member who has been enmeshed himself into the culture of a server and thus would be able to ensure that verdicts regarding rulebreaking (and whether one has occurred) can be the same from one decision to the next.
It's very frustrating to be a roleplayer and make a ticket about griefing when one staff member is willing to help you and the next asks if this is really a valid complaint.
I'd also love to see more interaction between the playerbase and staff on individual servers. I've seen on other games how the staff interacts with their players; Blizzard maintains a rather aloof stance. When I was a staff member for a popular, private Ultima Online server, I enjoyed talking with our players, interacting with them on the forums, and being a visible presence in-game. They knew that not only was I a staff member, but that I was also a player on their server. It allowed us to build a rapport that I feel is lacking with Blizzard representatives.
This came into further play when the staff would organize events for the community. We'd have directed events on a regular basis, including contests, stories, plots, and the like. However, we weren't the sole guiding force on the server; we would listen to the feedback given to us by the playerbase and then implement things based on that.
Furthermore, I'd like to see that players have more impact on the world. With dedicated staff members who have fingers on the pulse of a server, we could see greater deviation in the stories on each server. While I'm not saying that huge sweeping changes should occur (especially ones that would significantly mutate lore), it would be nice to see that our characters' actions have impact on the world. Perhaps NPCs would rumormonger about events that have occurred or statues be erected (and then torn down) as characters grow in infamy. I know Origin played a similar role on their Ultima Online shards, which is really awesome.
As Wuvvums noted, many other MMORPGs have had staff members assume active roles in their games and servers. I remember reading for some time the blog of a(n) (in)famous Final Fantasy XI GM who used to chronicle the things that he did on his server (I loved in particular reading about name enforcement; woe to he who named his character any variation of Sephiroth or Cloud!). As I recall, he would frequently appear in-game to perform wedding ceremonies for players. I never played the game myself, but friends have told me that their actions within the game did influence the world, sometimes through the efforts of their staff.
My friend and I discussed this a few times in the past. If I could, I would convert the world to look and feel more like it did during the Troll Wars, or after it, or possibly even before it. Now due to limited ammount of actual lore for this time period we'd have to fill in a lot of our own fluff, or we could just go with an alternate history. Of course this would limit the races sadly, and a lot of the cultures would not have been advanced by Thrall and other major progressors of culture, but that would all be in the fun on it. There was plenty going on in world to keep interest. Though, to keep things accurate I would have to destroy travel between the continents, and do a lot of reworking on the cities, land, etc...
Which could lead to my other idea of setting Azeroth on an alternate history (future?) 300 years or so from the start of gameplay. With technology more advanced along the path WoW has already taken and what is wide-spread. Creating the world would be much easier as I'd just need to expand the cities some, the towns as well, and maybe create a few new villages here and there. It would probably be more Victorian or Steampunkish in a lot of aspects, but in many others you would still find the traditional qualities of WoW (such as most races of Kalimdor).
Think it would be awesome to rp in a recreated Draenor, before the burning crusade came, having Draenor as the only open zone to players where they would have to play as orcs or draenei (maybe some of the other races present in outlands?).