headlessorpheus Wrote:As someone who hasn't had much experience with FFXI, why exactly are the RP communities there dwindling? Also, do you think the dwindling state of RP in FFXI will be brought over to FFXIV come launchtime? I plan on trying to convert as many of my roleplaying friends from LOTRO, AION, and AoC to FFXIV come release . . . from what I've read so far of the game's lore and so forth, there is a whole lot of potential! Hopefully they game will have as much support as LOTRO has given to its community instead of say, what WAR gave to its loyalists.
Well, part of it is that FFXI's player population has been going down in general, and with less players overall that would bring down the RP population. I think the groups that are still up and going are plenty determined and may still continue to RP past FFXIV's release date (my group will be one of them), its just there are less people doing it. It doesn't help that a lot of the 'hardcore FFXI players' tend to view RPers negatively and cast them in a bad light, often making fun of them. Which makes people feel self-conscious about doing it, which makes them speak up less, and as a recruiter for a RP shell like myself, makes those people a lot harder to find.
Also, what defines an active and 'dwindling' RP community is really to each their own. There certainly don't seem to be any RP Linkshells around on FFXI where you can just hop in and take place in some random RPing whenever you want these days. And it is my impression that even when there were more RPers on the servers, that was still hard to achieve. Biggest problem with FFXI was that the game was kinda unfriendly to RPers... it is a hard game to advance in, and it is hard to constantly RP and get anywhere in the game. For the most part you ultimately sorta end up having to settle for a middle ground between going through a lot of the game's BS and RPing. But there are still people who make it work. My group continues to grow today actually.
As for if this will carry over into FFXIV, I don't know. That's certainly what this group is trying to prevent, and provide a more unified place for RPers to go. A lot of it will have to do with how good the lore of this game will be, how hard it is to advance and do things, and also how other players will react to RPers. It's hard to say at this point but I'm hopeful. At the very least, RPers will have a good place to go to when they want to find out what the RP scene is like on XIV.
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