I was feeling a little worn out with the staleness of Balmung RP for a while about a year ago, and decided to venture around a few other MMOs and RP communities out there to try and gauge the general quality of public spots that people tend to congregate in. After giving it long enough that I felt that the shock and novelty of these new communities had worn off, I began to realise just how unsuitable this street is for so many types of characters and archetypes that give other RP servers all their flair.
I've come back, renewed and refreshed and ready to go -- And it's all the same. The primary hub just seems to leech excitement out of RP, not add to it, like the others I'd stumbled across in my exploration of other MMOs.
The Pearl Lane (and its cousin, the Gold Court) only exists, as far as I'm aware, because world visit and an influx of new players swarmed over the Quicksands and made anything even tenuously IC difficult beyond the odd bar interaction and /whisper ERP. What we've been pushed out into is a back alley that has little to no real diagetic purpose for being as crowded as it is. A tavern is a natural place for adventurers, scholars, knights and strangers of all stripes to flock together, but the poorest stretch of cobbles in Ul'dah? Not so much!
Not that it's anyone's fault in particular, but it feels like wasted potential. The city has a lot of really interesting aspects to it, all the finance and politicking and magical study that comes with Ul'dahn culture, but you'll be damned if you find all but a tiny, tiny subset of the population treat it as more than window dressing. I saw a lot of folks on Moon Guard pour a lot of love into making Stormwind feel like a living place with roles for characters to fill and create stories within, and a similar (but more limited) engagement in the bigger ESO RP guilds. Where is all that? FCs are off doing private events or loitering around player housing, and plenty of them are just ticking timebombs of IC/OOC drama waiting to go off. You'd imagine they'd be out in public, recruiting new quality members and involving the community in RP, but they don't. You've got to be in the know to get anywhere near these sorts of groups.
Am I just playing the wrong game, just jaded, or is Balmung Ul'dah as unfortunately uninspired as I suspect it might be? Should I look somewhere else for organic, interesting public RP that doesn't involve ERP or weird semi-OOC livechatting? It's been years, and I'm yet to find something as interesting as what these other communities have going for them.
