Warcraft Roleplaying Guide: Friends, Guilds, and Community Introduction.

Friends are a really awesome thing to have. Having a great group of friends can help to make any activity or hobby better since it's not really fun to do things by yourself.

Sure, something can be said about being alone, and in solitude every once in a while, but when you're involved in an activity that involves multiple people, a good core group that you can interact with and engage in can make a hobby so much more impactful in your life, and make it something worthwhile.

What's even better than having a group of friends you can talk to and interact with is having a community of like-minded people who are all into the same hobby as you are who are also looking for more friends to engage with.

And honestly, that's all Roleplay is at the end of the day when you get down to it: People who want friends that they can develop and be creative with and who enjoy collaboratively developing stories with one another.

When you Roleplay on World of Warcraft, you'll often hear people talk about "The Roleplay Community" like it's some monolithic organization that you have to get accredited to even join. This all-encompassing fear of "The Community" can seem a little daunting, and even intimidating when you first join because it seems like everyone knows one another along with having histories both good and bad that can date back several years.

This might even make it seem impossible to get involved with. There are so many people to see and interact with, so many guilds that come and go, and so many events and storylines that you can hop into that it's paralyzing to even make that first choice What if one option locks you out of a dozen others, and what if you make friends with one group, but find that you don't mesh well with them at all?

Well, that’s what this section is here to help you with; to organize your social groups and show you how you can remain in communication with people from more than just a handful of people you'll see daily. Of course, there's nothing WRONG with keeping a small circle of friends. In fact, a lot of people prefer smaller crowds to manage because it makes it easier to feel engaged when your clique is intimate.

Though more often than not, people like to venture out of their comfort zones and see what else is out there: For those that want to do that, this section of the Roleplay Guide will be perfect for.

Now, I'll be going over three major subsections of Community Connecting because each of them functions differently from one another. While overall they're all similar in that they help you achieve your goal of staying connected, they're not all made to function in the same way.

In fact, during each I'll be going over their pros and cons, so you're aware of what they're good for, and why you should use as many of the available options that you have. Don't worry, juggling them all together isn’t hard; in fact, a lot of them are integrated with each other.

Let me break it down so you’ll know what to expect:

Part 1: Friends List and Guilds – This usually serves as the start of everyone’s Roleplay adventure because it’s the most likely way you’ll connect with other people. Everyone knows how to friend another person on their friends' list and everyone knows how to join a guild and might even be looking for one.

Part 2: Battle Tagging, and In-Game Organizations – This is the next step after the basic in-game ways to stay connected. What I’ll be going over in this section is what Battle Tagging is, and breaking down In-Game Organizations between the Blizzard App communities (Which are highly underutilized) and In-Game Organizations organized by the players.

Part 3: Third-Party Communication and Social Media – This section is where I’ll be detailing how you can stay connected with friends, guilds, and organizations through the use of Discord and Social Media (Such as Twitter, or Tumblr). All of which is found outside of the game.

With that said I’m going to go ahead and go over the first aspect that I feel I should discuss before we get too far into the various ways you can stay connected with friends and other Roleplayers.

The Community

So what do I mean when I say “Community” exactly? For a lot of people, what defines “The Community” of World of Warcraft Roleplay is your server and the people who you see constantly. To them, the community is the people who log on every day, walk around the various Roleplay hubs, get together and organize events and storylines, or even familiar guilds that have been around awhile who partake in server events.

In general, to a lot of Players, “Community” is just that; everyone as part of the same hobby that spends any amount of time getting to know one another. At its core, the community on World of Warcraft is just a collection of interconnected groups of friends who all connect over the same thing. It’s no different than any other hobby, such as Card Gaming, Dungeons and Dragons groups, Warhammer 40k tabletop gaming, or even things outside of game hobbyists entirely.

Of course, that’s still looking at it from one small part of the whole. A lot of people don’t even really think about “The Community” outside of their server. A lot of players think Moon Guard and Wyrmrest Accord are separate from one another and entirely different communities (Which at some level is different, but similar), and don’t even take into consideration how much Roleplay happens outside of the game such as Discord, Twitter, Tumblr, or even private servers such as RP-H.

So the community itself is far larger than a lot of people realize, and it’s easy to get lost starting out. To give you an idea of just how large the World of Warcraft Roleplaying community IS, I can give you an anecdote from my own perspective:

When I first started Roleplaying on Moon Guard back in Mists of Pandaria (MoP) I was completely overwhelmed with the sheer amount of people that were there to the point it was dizzying. I got involved in some guilds, some inter-guild organizations, made some friends and focused on my slice of the Roleplay world.

Quickly, I kept seeing the same faces and names pop up and I started to think that MAYBE World of Warcraft Roleplay wasn’t as large as I thought it would be. After all, last time before that, I roleplayed on a small Ultima Online server that saw maybe ~40 people on average log in and do things together.

Then after a while, I simply broke out of my comfort zone and started to go back out and meet with other people who weren’t a part of the circle that I normally ran with. To my astonishment, I kept finding people I had never met before who played. People who ran the gamut from weekenders taking a break from Raiding, PvPers hanging out in taverns before their arena matches, people who hop between servers, people who only ever hang out in Orgrimmar/Stormwind, people who weren’t aware of organizations that tended to get a lot of attention, new players, old players set in their ways and everything in between.

Honestly, I could walk around the major RP hubs now and run into someone who has been on Moon Guard for years who I never roleplayed, or interacted with before.

And that’s JUST on Moon Guard alone. I’ve logged onto Wyrmrest Accord and met an entirely new community of people who I never met and never heard of. I’ve met Roleplayers on Twitter who do it exclusively through Twitter DM’s or Discord; people on discord who haven’t had game time – or don’t like the game right now but love the community – who Roleplay openly or in whispers. Tumblr accounts where people write out short stories about their characters.

It’s just mind-boggling how large the community truly is.

So what does this mean for beginners exactly?

Nothing really; I just wanted to showcase that joining in can be one heck of an adventure because you never know who you’ll meet and get to know. Even when you add friends to your friends' list, join a guild, join a community, and log onto discord or Twitter there will always be another group of people you can potentially get to know and Roleplay with. If playing with one person or group doesn’t work out, there are about a dozen other people or guilds that will.

Conclusion

Not much can truly be said here at the end other than sit back and relax a little bit. Hopefully, by now you’ve at least dipped your toes into the scene and saw what it’s like for yourself. Hopefully, you’ve even made some friends in the process! If so, then the following sections of the guide that I’ll be going over next can help you not only maintain a connection with those friends but even get involved with them – and others – in interesting, fun ways!

And if not, well. Think of this as a primer on HOW to get friends then.

As always, I’ll see you next time!