Guild Wars 2

Creating a Greater Roleplaying Enviroment
I’m not sure of everyone else’s experience with Roleplay so far, but my experience with Roleplay in Guild Wars 2 has been OVERWHELMING; I’ve spent over 300 hours of my time online Roleplaying ( my main is only level 30 and I have 250 hours on her so far). Roleplay is such a large part of this game that its largely consuming much of MANY players entire time online.
Whenever I log in, I’m hailed with invitations to come down to Tavern X and Y with all of my character’s friends. I have even started losing sleep over how rich an environment is here. AND I LOVE IT. So how could we take this richness and improve it? I know it does sound difficult but bear with me here when I say this.

Structured Roleplay
sRP, start thinking about it a little, wait where are you going? ITS NOT PVPRP!

I know when you hear this you immediately shift to thinking to Structured PvP, and that’s what I want, but not on the fact its PvP. What I want you to focus on is the fact that its an overarching system with a focus on skill and teamwork that isn’t restricted by Worlds (not in the Lobby but in the servers). Now you’re on the right track.

What I’m proposing is to bring all of us roleplayers together absolutely while making it so we don’t have to fight over the -very- few open spaces in the Mega-Worlds, while improving the features given to us.

The Idea
When you enter the Heart of the Mists, you come into a lobby with; a series of vendors, lockers, the tourney master, and the Grandmaster (the guy who lets you join battles in random arenas).

With Structured RP, I want to replicate this, only with less PvP. With the unlocked cosmetic items and the lockers, we’ll replace with another locker that has every piece of armor in game, with all the stats removed. Cosmetic Armor for everyone, but to add another item on top of this, all of these items are given a new category of armor type that allows everyone to wear anything they like. Dyes however, are still up to you.

We’ll replace the vendors with vendors who sell ‘Deeds’; I’ll cover this later. We’ll remove the Tourney Master and replace the Grandmaster of Battle with the Master of Portals.

The Master of Portals will function like the Grandmaster of Battle, only instead of servers with PvP matches, he’ll have a cornucopia of Roleplaying instances from us to pick from. At first, these instances will only be stock ones, copies of home instances like Dreamer’s Terrace, Salma District, etc. and a few other high traffic areas in game already. They’ll function like the instances we already have, but instead of being there alone, everyone else who joins it will be present (up to a cap to keep the servers from blowing a processor) but later it’ll be filled with player maintained instances.

These instances are purchased via Deeds. These instances can range from anything to a small cottage to a whole forest. They can be dissected from the world or be brand new content. Now, these can be purchased with Gold or Gems, and they’ll be in their own respective vendors.

These instances are controlled by the person who purchased them, and they can be filtered, linked, and managed like a guild. The owner can restrict access based on Race, Class, Gender, and even what you’re wearing (or what you’re not). Of course the appearance catagory isn’t going to be a list of specific armor pieces you have to wear to get in, but more of what slots are filled or not. No Pants? Boot. Pants? Boot. Its up to the owner! The owner can also make their instance completely public and they can police their instance with these filter options and the ability to remove and or black list offenders of the player’s virtual property.

The owner can also make their instances private; to just themselves, or their party, or their guild, or their entire friend’s list.

Owners can also link the instances they own or are apart of through transition points, gates, streets etc. If you wanted you can build your own network of instances into a city.

The Breakdown
I wouldn’t be posting this if I hadn’t done all that I could to show that I’m not being an optimist playing on the good parts of the idea.

Pros

• Creates a great atmosphere for roleplay
• Gives the player the ability to express their own view and creativity
• Brings Roleplayers together and removes the limitations to player creativity and interaction
• Includes a new Gold Drain as well new items to spend Gems on
• Makes for an easier system to join into Roleplay
• Centralizes Roleplay and makes for an easier time to meet, congregate, network and pursue
• Decreases population strains in servers like Piken Square and Tarnished Coast

Cons

• Extensive hardware requirements
• Strain on current hardware
• Removes several players from the Economy almost wholly
• Additional work to include new content in the function
• Could cause TOS issues due to private ownership of in game content
• Increases the ease of trolling or griefing players in public instances
• Could decrease the wont to roleplay by removing the organic and sense of growth within roleplay through gameplay

So, that’s all I have for now, tell me what you think Players!

~Pylia

You essentially want a MUSH arrangement, wherein players have build privileges. I understand the appeal of that.

However, in the context of roleplay, there would be a huge negative to such an arrangement: population dilution.

The problem is, the larger you make your grid (world), the greater the dispersal of your playerbase. If players get too spread out, they won’t be able to find each other anymore and the sense of a living world will be lost. What you’re suggesting would have this effect very quickly. Once implemented, and despite your lobby arrangement, most people would immediately retreat into their own little corners, and the shared space would become a wasteland. The very roleplay you were looking to centralize and make more accessible would become fractured and extremely difficult to become engaged in. I’ve seen this happen several times in text-based virtual environments. So often, in fact, that building small and restricting player building became the conventional wisdom for world design in the MU* community.

Then you have the effect on general gameplay to consider, as such a feature would take one more segment of the population out of it. PvP and WvW already do this, and it wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, but the design of GW2, with dynamic events and exploration being a huge chunk of the content, makes it one.

We’re barely a month in, and I’m already seeing events fail in starter zones, because there aren’t any players around to take them on. So I think this is already an issue ANet’s going to have to tackle, and a system like the one you’ve proposed would just complicate the matter.

We already have a big (possibly too big) shared world in which to play, representing a wide variety of different locations. We also have home instances, guild halls are no doubt on the immediate horizon, and I hear some form of personal housing is actually in the works. All of that’s probably going to be more than enough.

What I’d rather see are QoL adjustments and additions that would have particular benefit to roleplayers, but would be helpful/fun for most everyone…

- Player-made chat channels.
- Significantly reduced range for local chat.
- Additional safe spaces across the grid (like the treehouse in Shaemoor or many of the spots reachable by jump puzzles)
- Events and features in hub locations that roleplayers can consolidate around.
- Additional emotes, particularly idle stances and emotes that are environment interactive.
- Recognition that chat actually qualifies as activity.
- Lots more town clothing and wardrobes (in home instance?) for the storage of that clothing.

Hydrophidian there are no enough +1 for you, couldnt explain it any better, im speechless.

Hydrophidian’s awesome list there pretty much hits on everything I’d like to see for better RP in GW2. All I’d add to it would be visible roleplay status flags that you can switch on when you’re up for RP. Even on an unofficial RP server, half the problem is knowing whether or not the players around you are interested in RP.

The issue with your reply is that its arguing that Roleplayers don’t already do this by nature. You can see it in SWTOR,WOW LOTRO and AOC, roleplayers spread out over time, finding their own little holes to dig into until they fade away.

So, if that’s typical behavior in just about every MMO on market, you may as well serve it and give them it. But, the best way to think of these instances are as player housing and guildhalls, because these are already wrapped up in what I propsed.

Hydrophidian really hit the nail on the head in this one. As much as I love stuff like the Home District, it effectively means I can’t interact with anyone in it. What you’re talking about would basically be making Home Districts for everyone, so there would be no random RP interactions, there would be no random non-RPers coming by and getting sucked in. It would make the community completely insular. And an insular community is a dead community. I think personal and guild housing will be enough (maybe even too much).

There is a reason why MMO’s with “official” RP communities have terrible communities, and one’s with “unofficial” RP communities thrive.

Myxam.2790:

The issue with your reply is that its arguing that Roleplayers don’t already do this by nature.

Not at all. What I’m saying is that the system you’ve proposed would accelerate and exacerbate this dynamic of the medium by putting an unbalanced focus on it. I think this would end up being a detriment to the larger community.

For the very reason you’ve stated, it’s important to establish entry points for roleplay. These in-world, in-character locations allow new people (and new characters) to introduce themselves and get involved. They also enable already established folks to connect with new blood in order to expand and shake up their own scene. Without such anchors, the community dilutes and disperses.

I’ve always referred to these places as lobbies. Typically, at least one lobby location will evolve organically. Roleplayers will come to favor a particular open, social spot (usually something like a tavern) to the point where new folks looking to roleplay start getting directed to it. Once that happens, you’ve got yourself a roleplay lobby. Hooray!

But the important thing here is that the lobby is IC. Your proposal supplants the IC lobby with an OOC one. I’m pretty confident in saying that such a change would stifle roleplay, because I’ve seen it tried before and I witnessed the result; the OOC lobby was just something people passed thru and the IC lobbies became player-controlled locations.

There are several reasons why we don’t want that to happen, and I’m gonna assume a lot of ’em are obvious. In short, the lobby should be open to all, all the time.

Your proposal also, again, encourages everyone to take their roleplay off the grid. While, as you say, some of this is going to occur naturally, your system would make it the default, and the shared world experience would suffer. As roleplayers are just immersionists on overdrive, this would be a significant loss for RPers. I love seeing roleplay occur dynamically around me, even if I’m not directly involved.

Managing an environment for a roleplay community effectively means trying to balance the constant tug-of-war between the desire to gather and the desire to break away. Equilibrium can be established, but whenever I’ve seen that happen, IC lobby locations were absolutely essential to the dynamic.

My current impression is that the GW2 community is having a hard time establishing such lobby locations. I attribute this to the sheer size of the world, the existence of multiple hub locations, and a strong baked-in lean towards human characters (a GW1 legacy).

The developers can help with this by promoting specific locales with events and activities. They could also add services, such as clothiers, into the IC world that inherently encourage gatherings and interaction.

Yah, it’s natural for roleplayers to break off into smaller, closed scenes. But it’s also natural for them to gather for larger, open scenes. They just gotta know where to go.

Just came by to say that I’ve never been a roleplayer and had no idea this was even a thing in GW2. However, the things Hydrophidian suggested are very reasonable and you guys seem fun to have around, so +1.

I support this! I have over 350 hours of RP on my main and I support all RP ideas.

Brought to you by the Give The Role Players What They Want Foundation