The wheels of the RPC were in motion as early as June of 2009, when FFXIV was first announced. FFXI's RP community had always been scattered across the many servers and extremely tiny as a result. Those of us on Sylph server that were still RPing there lost enthusiasm with FFXI as a whole once XIV was announced and determined that we didn't want the new game's RP community to be as divided this time around as it was in Vana'diel.
I created a temporary forum to start gathering RPers up that were bound for Hydaelyn, but it wasn't easy at first. Remember that in 2009, RP coalitions weren't exactly commonplace yet. I think the only other major ones at the time were EQ2 and Aion (I may be mistaken though...I know Aion in particular had a huge influence on us though). I approached the myriad of different RP groups across the FFXI servers to invite them and make the pitch for a united front. Many were skeptical at first, but eventually threw in their hats.
We bolstered our numbers over the months prior to going public. We wanted the forum to look alive before even announcing our existence in order to gain even more traction and make our pitch that much more powerful. We officially announced ourselves to the world on February 15, 2010 and gradually began to grow even more. Big premier sites at the time such as Zam, Eorzeapedia, and Core all put us on their front pages for maximum visibility. We continued to expand the site through multiple facelifts (anyone remember the book theme?), heated politics (RPC charter), and tons of preliminary character planning and discussions. When the release date for the game was finally announced, our numbers exploded even more since we had already taken the number one spot on search engines.
It's had a lot of bumps along the road since then, but hasn't slowed down at all. While the bad 1.0 launch drove a ton of RPers away, those of us who remained for the transition to 2.0 managed to somehow keep things from collapsing through an amazing tight community where everyone knew each other. The big ARR launch came with a new RPC facelift again (the one currently in use and about to go away with the even newer upcoming facelift), which drove traffic up yet again exponentially.
We did at one point "compete" with one or two other attempted separate RP coalitions for the game, but neither really lasted longer than a few months since this one was the first and most established. Nowadays, RP coalitions for MMOs are everywhere and it totally depends on who puts it out there first usually.
I created a temporary forum to start gathering RPers up that were bound for Hydaelyn, but it wasn't easy at first. Remember that in 2009, RP coalitions weren't exactly commonplace yet. I think the only other major ones at the time were EQ2 and Aion (I may be mistaken though...I know Aion in particular had a huge influence on us though). I approached the myriad of different RP groups across the FFXI servers to invite them and make the pitch for a united front. Many were skeptical at first, but eventually threw in their hats.
We bolstered our numbers over the months prior to going public. We wanted the forum to look alive before even announcing our existence in order to gain even more traction and make our pitch that much more powerful. We officially announced ourselves to the world on February 15, 2010 and gradually began to grow even more. Big premier sites at the time such as Zam, Eorzeapedia, and Core all put us on their front pages for maximum visibility. We continued to expand the site through multiple facelifts (anyone remember the book theme?), heated politics (RPC charter), and tons of preliminary character planning and discussions. When the release date for the game was finally announced, our numbers exploded even more since we had already taken the number one spot on search engines.
It's had a lot of bumps along the road since then, but hasn't slowed down at all. While the bad 1.0 launch drove a ton of RPers away, those of us who remained for the transition to 2.0 managed to somehow keep things from collapsing through an amazing tight community where everyone knew each other. The big ARR launch came with a new RPC facelift again (the one currently in use and about to go away with the even newer upcoming facelift), which drove traffic up yet again exponentially.
We did at one point "compete" with one or two other attempted separate RP coalitions for the game, but neither really lasted longer than a few months since this one was the first and most established. Nowadays, RP coalitions for MMOs are everywhere and it totally depends on who puts it out there first usually.
