Thoughts about a box in the options which you can tick for the megaserver to do its best to put you in the same phase as fellow Roleplayers?


Background & Details
Hello to you and thanks for stopping by this post!
I've been a Roleplayer since 2010 and through a wide range of multiplayer games it's always been the RP that's been my key motivation. Now I realize that this game is not like any other so please do excuse comparisons I make and know that they're made strictly concerning the game's friendliness to Roleplay. The ES games have always been terrific roleplaying games and frankly even Morrowind Oblivion and Skyrim had distinct roleplayers. People who enjoyed the gameplay and the questlines for their stories but more than so also made a conscious effort to immerse themselves within the games for that extra enjoyment. By the time ESO was released you can imagine that myself and others were incredibly excited! It's a fantastic world, exciting lore, a brand new game and for someone like myself it was best of all: A Game which franchise already had an established single player roleplaying community. That was wonderfully promising for the MMO RP Community that had yet to be established.

Now, the megaserver has a whole lot of benefits. I'm definitely not trying to bash on it through and through. Yet with that RP-Focused perspective in mind I'm sure you can imagine my bitter dissapointment when it was announced. Still, I was far too excited about the game to let it discourage me, at least not at first. I bought the game very close to release. I made myself an Imperial Sorc and I thoroughly enjoyed the questing experience but eventually I came to notice the inevitable...

Walking through Wayrest, a flourishing well populated city, some days it had a lot of roleplayers and was lively as can be. However, other days it was absolutely vacant and deserted as far as RP is concerned. Now if this was because there was no RP available then it would've been a different story but alas, that's not the case. The phasing! The very, very frustrating phasing meant that if I were to walk into the Cloudy Dregs in and see either very few or just no roleplayers at all I had to drop all immersion, quit what I'm doing and ask myself and then friends and guildies: "Hold on, am I in the right phase?" now already, that's a problem that just...Doesn't exist in games with one or multiple dedicated RP servers.

ESO is not WoW, but bare with me: Walking through a populated RP Hub in WoW at a dedicated Roleplay server you can immerse yourself, find strangers who are in-character and have fun. And if, per chance, the hub is empty then you can safely summarize that hey, I guess it's a slow day. At no point do you have to ask around and rely on guilds, Out-of-character chats and travel systems to make sure that the game mechanics won't PREVENT you from seeing strangers who share such a distinct similar interest.

This unimmersive experience made me quit the game before long and I didn't think twice about it for literally almost four years time. Now I returned a bit back because, and it should come as no surprise that I am incredibly fond of the game in general. Especially for an MMO I consider the gameplay to be fantastic. Upon my return I've found there to be a Roleplaying community that's thankfully still alive. The problem is the same that it's always been, people are just more...Used to it.

I'm in a large Out-of-character Guild that has simply collected a lot of players who happen to RP and due to it people can easily ask "Hey am I in the right phase if not who can I teleport to" etc. So people are getting around it when they try to roleplay at established RP Hubs, including but not limited to the Cloudy Dregs inn in wayrest or some people's open player homes. My point here is that while RP is still happening, the Problem is still very, very much there and I'll tell you why:

Not only is the necessity to go through these steps incredibly tedious, unimmersive and quite frankly...Rare. To my knowledge this is the only MMO when people actually need to do this due to the lack of dedicated RP realms. But secondly, this renders a wide range of roleplaying opportunities completely impossible. Consider this: If you know the Dregs to be an RP hub then you know to ask people whether or not you're in the same phase. But what about all other RP? You cannot ask whether or not you're in the same phase as RP you don't know is even happening. There's never going to be a succesful "Glenumbra Lion Guard Guild" because so many Roleplayers in the world are never going to even see them simply because they don't know they're supposed to ask because they're in the right phase.

In a big amazing world roleplayers are literally invisible to each other unless they KNOW to ask about it and that is just such a tiresome unneessary waste. I admit, for the past four years I've really been hoping to hear from my friends that hey, they've finally made a dedicated RP server!...Now realizing that likely won't ever happen, I'm still hoping some kind of solution will be implemented. Including but not limited to the one at the top of this post.

Imagine a box in the options you can tick that says "Roleplayer". And if you have it ticked, the game will try really hard to put you in the same phase as fellow roleplayers when you're in cities and in the world. And yet this means that even this part of the player-base won't have to be removed or separated from the entirety of players in terms of the battleground or dungeon queue so as far as I can see there aren't really any negatives.

One really shouldn't ever have to stop and ask oneself: "Hey, do I have fellow Roleplayers around me who I can't see because of a darn megaserver?"

I have no idea how closely the devs pay attention to the forums but I really hope this gets noticed.




Edited with more details on 5/31/2018