The problem with RP servers in WOW is that to non-RPers there is no reason to not roll there.

One suggestion I’ve made is an experience reduction on RP servers. So people will only play on them if they want to RP enough to take a hit to character effectiveness.

I don’t think positive methods to enable RPers to find other RPers is sufficient if loads of people who aren’t able to RP also turn up and spoil it.

Alternatively you can design a game from the ground up to give players niches (eg cop players, robber players) that drive story because of the way they interact.

I was thinking of a /where which would just return a neat table of the 10 most populated areas, with how many players in each. And maybe a separate switch for designated hangouts (eg. /where hangout)

I know in DaoC I had guildies who loved that you could set macros up to effectively implement your own RP filter (so it would translate rofl as *laughs aloud*, for example), so that you could pretend everyone else on the server was roleplaying when actually they were just doing regular player stuff.

I’d rather get away from this notion that RP requires really stilted language and leave it to people’s choice how they talk. It also doesn’t cater for people who want to put on an accent. But as an optional switch I’m neutral to it.

I quite like the idea of being motivated to do things that your character would do, but I don’t know if giving out points is the right way to do it. As soon as you assign points to something, people want to game it. I need to think more about this, it’s actually quite tricky to reward people for roleplaying. The other way is to let other people vote and that’s subject to cliquiness.

For multiple guilds, it wont work. What happens is your player will stay mostly on his social and endgame shell, and not be on the RP one much. The point of an RP one though is to have roleplaying in the guild chat, despite being separated by distance. If you don’t, you shouldn’t have an RP guild at all except for announcements; you might as well just open roleplay in events once a week or so.

The tags idea is pretty good, but you might just want to have a searchable database instead. Have a mini-search engine in game that people register to roleplay on, and link it to the /search command. FFXI had search comments, but no one read them much. But like a /sea Roleplayers lvl1-50 would bring up all roleplaying people levels 1-50 in the world. /sea “E Ronafure” Roleplayers would bring up all RPGers in the area East Ronafure.

Anakh:

Player Housing unfortunately seems to be segregated onto a separate server in most MMOs now-it worked in older games because they didn’t do that, but most now you really can’t wander in an area with signs and pubs-you have to switch to the player area and maybe even need to know who’s “room” to go to.

Lyressa:

It would be a huge undertaking, and then you’d just have people using symbols to break it like any other ch%at f1lter.

The RP points thing-a problem is that it leads to the developers sanctioning styles. If you want to play a paladin that has lost his faith, being forced to donate to a church to get points for whatever reason is majorly OOC. You’d have to really make a whole system of mechanics for that. It would be interesting to see a MMO that rewards based on in-character self-defined actions instead of killing mobs and exp.

My best ever RP experience was in early SWG (though that game was seriously flawed in other respects) and some of the best experiences came when engaging people in town or just outside it that weren’t even RP (it helped that Star Wars is very accessible lore that everyone knows at least a little bit).

But when player-cities with full transportation and admin rights and everything went in the game, much of that was lost. Additionally, since the RP became essentially invitation-only (literally or by guild/city membership), I suspect that in the long run recruitment became more difficult — new players had to lookup _out of game_ where RP might be going on since they no longer had any chance of randomly encountering it.

(I admit, however, being less than sure on these points, SWG having been a problematic MMO in many ways, not just its RP history.)