The RPC is shutting down.

[Maril]

Hello Everyone.
 

We are sad to announce that the time as come to let ffxiv-roleplayers.com out to pasture.

We do not have the funds for the server costs and we feel that it is time, as the site has become mostly an archive of a time that once was.

Please take steps to save any media, posts, stories & other things from the site that you may wish to save.

This includes the wikipedia.

 

Date of closure:

1st of September 2022

After this it will no longer be possible to access the site or its contents.

 

So long and thanks for all the fish!

Nero, Unnamed Mercenary, Maril, Teadrinker, Rinikett, Sorcini, Alothia & GhostlyMaiden.

 

[Aya]

I am so sad and sorry to hear this. I understand why, but that doesn't make it any easier. The RPC has been such a part of my online RP journey, and remains an important archive and depository for me I do not even know quite what I will do now.

Thank you everyone who has helped with this site over the years, from the bottom of my heart. I knew someday it would come to and end but it doesn't make it any easier.

[Kylin]

Ah, the end of an era. I suspected it was only a matter of time. The RP community in XIV has changed over the years. Whether for better or worse depends entirely on who you ask. But one thing is for certain regardless of subjective opinions: The community is far more dispersed than it once was, and the RPC just doesn't serve the purpose it was designed for any longer. So the decision is a perfectly understandable one.

 

The project began at the end of 2009 when knowledge of FFXIV first arrived. RPers from FFXI's Vana'diel were all too familiar with being broken apart across worlds and having tiny communities. We sought to change that by bringing as many RPers together in this new world to create a better and more thriving experience for all. In those days, such a coalition was laughable and it was no easy feat to persuade everyone to give it a shot.

 

FFXI RPers started slowly gathering on our first (free) forum (https://ffxivrp.forumotion.net/login). We held discussions about what we would be and how to proceed with our unveiling to the greater communities. A 'charter' was crafted and voted on by the members (approved unanimously at this juncture might I add) and when the time was right, on February 15th, 2010, the RPC announced itself to the world to mega sites at the time such as Zam, Eorzeapedia, FFXIV Core, and several other gaming media sites.

 

Our numbers rose. A podcast was even formed: https://archive.org/details/RpcvEp.1 . An "RPC Council" was formed of the various prospective Linkshell leaders and a teaser site of the first 10 RP groups of Hydaelyn was released to the public. On game release day, population exploded to unforeseen proportions. There were so many posts in a single day, keeping up was next to impossible even for the most active forum goers.

 

We had our server vote, with the usual drama (though tame compared to other games). Besaid won the day and the migration began. Over time, it evolved into Balmung. Then branched out to Mateus. Now, RPers can be found in small clusters in even more servers beyond those.

 

The RPC had its ups and downs, dramatic moments for the ages. Too many to list and tons of old posts I'm likely to slosh through just for old time's sake now. This group set a foundation for a community to build itself in a way few MMOs can replicate.

 

I appreciate those who continued to hold the banner high and maintain a source of invaluable resources, advice, safety, and companionship for the thousands of RPers who passed these halls. To all the staff and the members, new and old, thanks for the memories. It was a fantastic run worthy of stories for years to come. So many plans that came to fruition, so many that fell through the cracks. But through it all, memories and friendships were forged from the foundation built and sustained here. Thanks for the commitment.

Edited August 2, 2022 by Kylin

[Brynhilde]

I'd say that all good things come to an end, but it's not really an end, is it? The RPC has played such in integral and indispensable role in the creation and life of FFXIV's RP community that, in a way, it will always be a part of whatever our community goes on to do and become.

Although I haven't been active here in a long time, the RPC has been a huge part of my journey in FFXIV and I will always think fondly of it. I have warm memories of those first days of planning and organising back before the launch of 1.0. Being a roleplayer back in FFXI was often a lonely experience, so the idea that we could gather together and build a community right from the launch of FFXIV was so exciting. In the years that followed, the RPC would grow into something remarkable that helped to keep the heart of RP in FFXIV beating.

So I'd like to give a big thank you to everyone who played a part in it and made it the special place that it was - it was an incredible project and a much-needed tool, and certainly something to be proud of.

See you in Hydaelyn!

Brynhilde Wulf (Balmung), Jakih Ishtari (Besaid - 1.0), Solemn Dawn (Omega)

[Faye]

Really sad to hear this, but I totally get that it's time. The RPC has always been a great asset for making friends, finding RP connections, tossing around ideas, and exploring lore. I've definitely made a lot of great connections here and have so many fun memories thanks to this place. Thank you to everyone who has kept the RPC running for these many long years. I'll miss this place, but I'll be seeing you all in Hydaelyn and beyond! Thank you all for everything!

[Parth Makeo]

I know i've not used the site for years but wanting t o share my happiness with the site that got me to enjoy ff14 RP. since then my character has gone through a lot of change good and bad. Married, adopted a kid and more. It is because of everyone i've encountered even from here that the journey was met with plenty of events. Stories were told. Friends died, enemies fell and peace is once again.

It sucks we can't keep the wiki up as an archive to not add more things but i'm going through and copying everything i can down to images to preserve what they looked like for my Drive.

Thanks to everyone and i hope you all are out on some discords i can check up randomly :3
I'll always be on Balmung to the bitter end and RPing as that Record Keeper helping everyone with her multi-colored family. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.

P.S: I WAS A SAGE BEFORE IT WAS SAGE WITH THE FLOATING WEAPON DEVICE! NEVER FORGET!!! :3

- The Quintessence Family.

you can follow me on twitter if you wish @ParthMakeo

[Mikielle Bellange]

Hello, my name is Mikielle Bellange and I run a magazine of louche sophistication called /dote.

 

Unfortunately, I just discovered the RPC about an hour ago and the first post I see is that it will be shutting down shortly.

I'm not 100% sure on the policy of advertising here is, and honestly, with this thing shutting down, I figured "why not shoot my shot anyways?"

While my magazine is technically an NSFW publication, featuring tasteful nudes of our cover girl (known as our "darling"), the focus since its inception has always been to take a very heavy RP slant and produce high quality journalism. The vast majority of the work is SFW and features articles about venues, interviews with prominent people, original short stories and more. Everything is written IC and some of our contributors are real life journalists of considerable talent.

 

But that was never where I wanted to stop. I wanted the magazine to be so much more than "just another club review," and I wanted to dive much deeper into the RP world. Sadly, it seems that I've stumbled upon this repository a bit too late.

 

I want to extend a warm welcome to anyone who wishes to find a home when RPC is sadly "let out to pasture," as it was put. I don't write this with hopes to bring in new paying customers, but rather to beg for your guidance. My goal has always been to serve the community and if anyone cares to reach out to me on ways that I might improve my publication, I will gladly hear it. I want my home to be your home too. I want my magazine to serve a deeper RP community than simply more "/beesknees to a Twitch DJ" (not that there's anything wrong with that).

 

To anyone wishing to contact me, our page is here: https://dotemag.carrd.co Although the website is nothing more than a portal to our Discord and Twitter.

To reach out to me directly, please contact me via Discord: Mikielle Bellange#5340

 

And finally, to the RPC: I am so very sorry that I discovered you so late. Things have been so chaotic since I've left Ishgard and even more chaotic since the calamity. I know all too well that goodbyes can be difficult and that new beginnings can be intimidating. To all the staff and your vast well of dedicated members, I wish you all continued success in your future endeavors. I wish you all equanimity, comfort and satisfaction here at journey's end.

 

Mikielle Bellange

editor-in-chief

/dote magazine

[Sescheraun]

Can we move this to a discord channel or something?

 

 

Or better yet, is this account transferable and how much would be needed to keep it up?

Edited August 6, 2022 by Sescheraun

[plumwine]

i'm sad to hear this! i had joined recently hoping to meet some more RPers, but i can see that it isn't what it was before--not anyone's fault, just times changing. thank you kylin for sharing the story; i wish i had gotten here sooner.

a re-gathering of active users on discord or twitter might be nice. i would still like to see some of the venues here someday if i can.

[Parth Makeo]

To organize a Discord would be immensely helpful but unlike a forum, Discord is like one big chatroom with various channels and things scroll by. Pinning stuff like submitted FCs and the like might be a bit much especially since forums have easy to search conditions for what you want exactly and the replying of things.
Users also make their own threads to start discussions that isn't overlapping another topic on forums.

However the era of Forums seem to be a dying breed because of the social media boom. Discord has advantages but it won't be the same environment or feel as this website designed for gathering of people and searching for stuff that you can come back to after a day for replies. Discord is fast scrolling and most people don't bother scrolling up for anything if they have not peeked in a while thus rendering them to being 'inactive'.

Still I would be up for a discord to gather who remains here since it is cheaper to maintain. Hell I'd be on board to act more like an admin role.

[Unnamed Mercenary]

On 8/5/2022 at 11:58 PM, Sescheraun said:

Can we move this to a discord channel or something?

 

 

Or better yet, is this account transferable and how much would be needed to keep it up?

 

For the most part, there are many Discord servers that exist already that have largely superseded users' wants for a forum. It's one of the many factors that has led to RPC's decline in traffic/users/content from roughly 2016-ish and forwards. And this isn't a bad thing! At that point in time, a lot of people wanted more real-time chat and less slow posting on forums. 

 

----

31 minutes ago, Parth Makeo said:

To organize a Discord would be immensely helpful but unlike a forum, Discord is like one big chatroom with various channels and things scroll by. Pinning stuff like submitted FCs and the like might be a bit much especially since forums have easy to search conditions for what you want exactly and the replying of things.
Users also make their own threads to start discussions that isn't overlapping another topic on forums.

However the era of Forums seem to be a dying breed because of the social media boom. Discord has advantages but it won't be the same environment or feel as this website designed for gathering of people and searching for stuff that you can come back to after a day for replies. Discord is fast scrolling and most people don't bother scrolling up for anything if they have not peeked in a while thus rendering them to being 'inactive'.

Still I would be up for a discord to gather who remains here since it is cheaper to maintain. Hell I'd be on board to act more like an admin role.

 

One of the main decisions RPC staff made at the time was that is was not scalable for us to try to moderate a still-pretty-active-then forum and wiki while also trying to to moderate a Discord server, which would be infinitely more active and at all hours of the day and night, so that was largely left to the existing big RP-centric Discords to do, and they did! 

----

23 hours ago, plumwine said:

i'm sad to hear this! i had joined recently hoping to meet some more RPers, but i can see that it isn't what it was before--not anyone's fault, just times changing. thank you kylin for sharing the story; i wish i had gotten here sooner.

a re-gathering of active users on discord or twitter might be nice. i would still like to see some of the venues here someday if i can.

 

Many of the venues here have switched over to posted on the RP Calendar managed by Erah'sae, https://ffxiv-rp.org/ . (We actually pull these in on the front page, and used to directly import them before there were too many entries for the forum's calendar importer to handle.) That sort of content isn't going anywhere. The RPC just won't be one of the more front-facing sites to find it from a google search.

 

----
From an administrative sense, it's a very tricky thing to pass off ownership of the site domain and potentially its content. That's a lot of user data, some of which is very much private. Personally, I'm not comfortable passing it over to just anyone, especially people I don't already know well and trust. And if we had to put up donation banners on the front of the site to beg people to donate on a monthly basis, I feel like that would be worse than closing the site, as the idea of always hanging on the edge is kinda terrifying, and if we had a month where donations couldn't handle the bills, that comes directly out of my finances. I'm cool with paying off our bill from July's usage, and for whatever usage costs we'll have from August, but an extra consistently $100+ USD a month that can scale much higher isn't really something I can financially accommodate based on the traffic we currently have, and given the past history of the RPC Patreon, I don't think we'd have a consistent user base who could cover those costs. (Because we already didn't). 

For the wiki, there are options to try migrating that to community instances that are free. (I'm kinda considering Miraheze, but given the large size of our wiki, that may not be something they can process, and there's also the matter of user content being a bit more tricky, like if someone wants to remove a page after such a migration, content that might be NSFW or against their policies, etc).

 

I am in talks with some community members I can trust to discuss possibly moving the RPC over to an archive-only format so we can keep historical data accessible, but that will still depend on the costs of hosting that data. (For a general estimate, one would need about 15GB of storage just for the databases, and about 150GB of storage for content images like the forum gallery/attachments and wiki, which adds up quickly on cloud hosting. The site's a bit too large for something I could passively host out of my living room, given ISPs are pretty adverse to that sorta bandwidth).

[inkycompass]

I'm sorry to see this news, though it's a very reasonable decision. I dropped off this summer due to new job and moving things but I was hoping to come back and start connecting with people this fall. However, I'm glad I saw the announcement before the closing; I hadn't realized how long the history of this place was! Thank you very much for running it for all this time. Even if I joined at the tail end of its life, I've found it a useful place to start as a brand-new RPer.

[Mermaid]

This is very sad to see but I had a feeling it was coming eventually. The traffic has slowed significantly since I joined in 2016 or 2017. I really used to enjoy seeing discussions happen here and Discord not only doesn't let you easily see a long conversation amongst multiple people it doesn't really let it continue for several days with new people coming in as they can. It's also honestly abysmal for search, archival, and trying to get your post (be it an RP profile or FC advert) seen. I guess that's just me being a salty old person though.

 

I made a couple good friends here even though I never managed to find even one consistent RP partner through this site. I was just about to finally free up some time and wanted to come poke at it again for a new character. I suppose I'll have to finally try searching for those Discords I hard avoided for years.

 

But since I keep rambling about Discord I suppose I'll comment on the topic of making one. There's no way it replaces the functionality of this site and, from what I've heard, several already exist for general community RP purposes. One also couldn't well replace the functionality of this site. If it's purpose was more or less to keep the small remaining community here in touch I suppose I could see the merit in that. I might even be down to dump some screenshots or memes or something if my social anxiety allows it.

 

So long RPC. You will be missed.

[ShoggMommy]

Unfortunately, this is just how the way technology is moving. I noticed this for other unrelated hobbies as well; moved almost all over to discord or guilded. 
I still remember joining here, playing C'Sien Zoth, attending Kylin and the others' Guild Hall meeting and being so excited about a new game. 
Used the RPC for years, still even come here now and then for lore searching, so I'd hope that maybe there can be a sort of archive made, but I understand if it's not possible. There are still very viable things here. In any case thank you to the community, mods and owners for all the years.

[Zephyr Soul]

Like everyone else, I completely understand why the forums need to come to a close, but it's still sad to know it's happening. I understand there are plenty of Discord servers, and other ways to find RP in game. And I understand the traffic on the forums is a fraction of what it used to be. At the same time, I can't help but worry a bit about newcomer RPers. The ones who have no connections, no idea which Discords to join, and no RPC forum to find when they Google "Where can I find RP on FF14?"

 

Maybe they'll get by, and maybe I'm not considering that there are still easy ways to get into the RP community. Regardless, this was the first place I was directed to when I wanted to start RPing in game, and I'm sad I won't be able to do the same for future gen RPers

[Maril]

On 8/21/2022 at 6:41 AM, Zephyr Soul said:

Like everyone else, I completely understand why the forums need to come to a close, but it's still sad to know it's happening. I understand there are plenty of Discord servers, and other ways to find RP in game. And I understand the traffic on the forums is a fraction of what it used to be. At the same time, I can't help but worry a bit about newcomer RPers. The ones who have no connections, no idea which Discords to join, and no RPC forum to find when they Google "Where can I find RP on FF14?"

 

Maybe they'll get by, and maybe I'm not considering that there are still easy ways to get into the RP community. Regardless, this was the first place I was directed to when I wanted to start RPing in game, and I'm sad I won't be able to do the same for future gen RPers

 

Some servers can be found through Discords discover-servers type feature, but it does still lay behind the whole, you'd have to know to go and look there type of deal. It certainly wont be the same as googling "FFXIV Roleplaying" and getting to this site. It might come more naturally to look there for the younger generations. I hope that as a community we can find ways to help people who are new to the hobby despite missing this site as an anchor point. 

[Aya]

I love this little Chocobo head in my tab bar. I will miss it so much.

The closer we approach to the end of this site, the harder it is to imagine.

Thank you again to everyone whose hard work, resources, and usage of this site made it  such an incredibly place to role play, find role play, and generally have fun. Thank you so much.

[Erah'sae]

It's with a heavy heart that I posted the calendar change log and event list here for probably the last time.

 

This place has been a fixture for me, since I started playing in this game.  A cornerstone of the reason why I've spent the last near decade supporting our wonderful community it it's attempt to tell stories together. 

 

Thank you to the RPC and it's staff for being there with us, especially Franz for all the weird last night "Hey, I noticed this is broken" or "What do you mean the calendar broke IPS" conversations, and Maril for doing, well, damned near everything.

For all the rest of you, may the trails be soft, and the stories boisterous.

I'll see you all about Eorzea.

erroch / Erah'sae Zhwan.

erroch#5348

[Moon Type]

Unfortunate but understandable. I'm grateful that I came across this website and I appreciate the work that went into it. The community here was always welcoming, respectful and helpful. I hope the friendships formed here continue and that the spirit of this community lives on through other platforms as well as FFXIV itself. 

 

Take care everyone, my thanks and best wishes to you all. 
 

[Knight Kat]

My first, dedicated effort to become a Roleplayer started here. And it happened. It's been 8 years.

FFXIV may be the game, but the RP community, that has always been why I play it. And in the RP community, I have made friendships which will last a lifetime.

And my entry to the RP community was HERE.

 

I feel old now, seeing this go. I never really thought the HRPC would go.

 

But here it is, the last day or two?

Best wishes to everyone.

With love, Knight Kat

[Maril]

I have updated https://ffxiv-roleplayers.carrd.co/# and added some of the comments posted here to a goodbye-quotes page. I hope that's alright with you all, if it isn't then let me know. 

The RPC has meant more to me than I can even properly grasp. I will always look back to this chapter with fond, nostalgic eyes ♥ Be well, everyone. 

[Moon Type]

37 minutes ago, Maril said:

I have updated https://ffxiv-roleplayers.carrd.co/# and added some of the comments posted here to a goodbye-quotes page. I hope that's alright with you all, if it isn't then let me know. 

The RPC has meant more to me than I can even properly grasp. I will always look back to this chapter with fond, nostalgic eyes ♥ Be well, everyone. 

 

Thank you for doing that, it's a wonderful idea! 

[Zephyr Soul]

I guess this is it then. In a few more hours, the doors will be closed... I'm getting sentimental as I watch the countdown timer on the Carrd, so I'll just post one more time.

 

As a WoW refugee looking for a new place to call home in 2019, I met my first handful of friends in XIV by connecting with them here . Ever since then, these forums have been the first place I think of whenever someone wants to get into the RP scene. And then, when I decided to start a new character--just to see if I could make new RP friends and see if starting over was possible--this was the first place I came to.

 

So thank you, RPC team and all you members, for being an anchor to XIV's RP community for the past decade. Perhaps we'll cross paths in game some day. Until then, cheers to all your continued adventures!

 

Edited September 1, 2022 by Zephyr Soul

[RiniKett]

I'll miss you all! If anyone comes looking for me you can find me on discord. Rinikett#9104.

 

Thank you all for the memories.

[Aya]

Aya # 3 6 8 2

Farewell RPC. I let thee go with a tear, and a lasting fondness.

Edited September 1, 2022 by Aya