Hello everyone, I came here today to add my voice to the dwindling list of roleplayers in this game, and to spread awareness about the problems we face as we struggle to sustain our dying playstyle. We lack critical tools necessary to make role-playing a comfortable and immersive experience for all parties who choose to do so; but there seems to be some key solutions that could be worked towards, based on features that already exist in the game.
Arguably the largest problem with role-playing in its current state is that the playerbase for role-play has been too thinly diluted with the introduction of the megaservers. While I agree that the megaservers are a boon to players on lower population servers or less active maps in general, the criteria for exactly which megaserver you join is too variable, and no individual criterion seems to be effective enough on its own to guarantee you a match with other players based on similar interests – in this case, role-playing. In fact, none of the officially listed criteria for megaserver placement have anything to do with how you interact with other players, besides your client’s language.
To solve this, perhaps we could work with the megaserver system to better reinforce matching role-players into a more dense population spread: a toggled option, that allows you to select, for example, In Character or Out of Character. When you toggle yourself to In Character, the game could use this as a megaserver matching criterion that overrides all other criteria, so that you are placed into maps comprised mainly of players who are also marked In Character. I realize this would not prevent griefers from entering by simply flagging themselves as In Character – but there’s another solution that could help with that problem.
Griefing against the role-play community has led to a great many players seeking refuge in private role-playing, which has significantly reduced the chances you’ll encounter role-play in open world. “Griefing” used here refers to acting in such a way as to intentionally break the immersion of role-players in a scene; to interrupt the flow of dialogue by spamming chat channels that host role-playing; and to create a distraction so large that other players cannot simply ignore it and move forward.
For example, a common method of griefing is when a player moves their character into an area with clusters of role-players, and proceeds to repeatedly initiate emotes, like /cheer, /cry, or /dance, so that the chat channel is completely filled with their messages and washes out all other player messages. Another method is when a player moves their character directly to a group of role-players and begins dropping excessive amounts of particles and sound effects – like Engineer grenade or bomb skills, or the autoattacks of some of the louder legendary weapons, Quip and The Dreamer. These types of attacks can sometimes last for hours, depending on the dedication of the griefer, and are sometimes initiated by several people at once, increasing the amount of visual and audio noise. There is currently no system in place to protect against these methods of griefing.
This problem’s solution is already automatically controlled by the game client to some extent: Players are able to select the amount of character models that are rendered in their surroundings, as well as how detailed those models are. All player characters outside this range are culled from sight and sound, leaving only a nameplate. Perhaps there could be an option implemented that allows players to manually control which characters their computer chooses to render, so that if an incident does occur in which someone is using particle effects and sounds to intentionally grief someone else, then the victim can protect themselves from it by removing it from their personal view. This option could be tied to the Block function, as well as added functionality that the blocked player’s emotes do not show up in the emote chat channel.
Overall, Guild Wars 2 has gone through improvements on every game mode since its release – except for role-playing. We need some basic tools in order to sustain this playstyle; surely nothing as labor-intensive as a Living Story season, but important functions to better protect ourselves when we role-play in open world, and to be able to reliably find megaservers which contain other role-players.
If you’ve made it this far through my post, I’d like to thank you for taking the time to read it. ArenaNet, if you’re listening, I’d like to say that I appreciate any amount of time you spend considering improvements toward a playstyle favored by a small fraction of the whole population. It’s my personal belief that ArenaNet should step forward with an official stance toward role-playing, and either take steps to protect and encourage it, or denounce it completely. Regardless, role-players have nothing to lose at this point, except the opportunity for growth.
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