In my experience, the most often-purported reason why Roleplayers are viewed unfavorably in other people's eyes hasn't been something that was touched upon yet, so I just thought I'd state it briefly for the sake of additional understanding.
In addition to some of the other things that people have said (we're "weird," some do embarrassing public things, etc.), some people see Roleplayers as simply "dead weight" in a server. We and our friends and groups take up large portions of the (limited) space for characters on servers, we populate cities en-masse and make things chug for some people on lower-end computers, and all for what, standing around and talking?
To a lot of people, that isn't really playing the game. We're just there to talk at each other, and take up precious gamespace in an annoying manner like the silver chunks from Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine. I've seen "oh man, these annoying Roleplayers are standing around next to this hardface event and aren't even helping a single bit" in games more times than I can count.
So even if the other reasons might seem a bit confusing or otherwise inadequate, this one might help to shed a bit of light on the attitudes that some people may have. The less of us there are around, the more people there are who will actually want to "play" the game.
In addition to some of the other things that people have said (we're "weird," some do embarrassing public things, etc.), some people see Roleplayers as simply "dead weight" in a server. We and our friends and groups take up large portions of the (limited) space for characters on servers, we populate cities en-masse and make things chug for some people on lower-end computers, and all for what, standing around and talking?
To a lot of people, that isn't really playing the game. We're just there to talk at each other, and take up precious gamespace in an annoying manner like the silver chunks from Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine. I've seen "oh man, these annoying Roleplayers are standing around next to this hardface event and aren't even helping a single bit" in games more times than I can count.
So even if the other reasons might seem a bit confusing or otherwise inadequate, this one might help to shed a bit of light on the attitudes that some people may have. The less of us there are around, the more people there are who will actually want to "play" the game.
