Taear@Venekor wrote:And what would you define as roleplay? UO had a really strong community of Drow roleplayers. They roleplayed every single part of the drow in D&D to the last detail. But to me that isn't really Roleplay, because drow don't exist in UO. They're just the same as someone being their real life self in the game.Would this form of roleplay be allowed? Would you enforce EQ2 only style stuff? What about people who say thee and thou and things as a character other than a froglok, since no other race does that.I used to roleplay quite avidly back in the days of UO, but people just aren't interested in playing characters that fit into the setting of the game, they want to be Gandalf or Rand Al Thor and no matter what you do you won't ever stop that.
Taear nails it exactly.
WHO gets to decide what valid role-playing is? Is it Shakespearan speech? What about "meta-gaming"? If I inspect someone and see they're a shadowknight, do I get to treat them as such because they look like one? To many role-players, the answers to those questions seem almost self-evident. However, they'd find themselves on opposite sides of the same arguements because simply put, role-play means different things to different people.
Further, the only way I can see a RP server really really working would be to "nerf" the server so much that only role-players would want to play there. Cut exp gain by 75%. Keep Legendary and Fabled items unique. Only ONE Raincaller, for example, could exist and if that gets deleted, it's gone forever. Eliminate cross-team groups and guilds. Drastically change the whole betrayal system. By that, I mean make betraying so tear-spawningly painful that actually accomplishing it is virtually a legendary feat. Dramatically "nerf" the production of Mastercrafted gear (think 1 piece per RL week at best, Mastercraft takes time...).
Basically make it so abjectly painful to play only RPers would even consider going there.