March 15, 2009

Thulf the Quest Giver

Those that follow my adventures from pre-WAR know i have always played MMOs on a roleplay server when i had the chance. I'm not a hardcore roleplayer, but i like the immersion and dislike people standing around in the major city talking about the Superbowl or having names like xXPowerBarbie13Xx. In addition its great that you can run into player driven events any day. With AoC being a PvP centric game we had some issues the political/diplomatic kind on the RP server tho, an attack always became a major affair of state when you just wanted to have some nice PvP. Therefore the decision for WAR to move to a "normal" server.


From the Witching Night event i still had tons of those Leather Mask of the Gobbo items. Since quite a while i had the idea to pose with Thulf as a quest giver in the greenskin newbie area and hand them out.

What better occasion than a lot of Choppas running around there? On Friday early evening i placed myself at the Snouts' Pens in Mount Bloodhorn and posed as a quest giver - asking for grey trash items from the Stunties to bolster the greenskin supplies. One thing i realised: The chat messages have to be quite short, if you add too many item links, those will make the message too long and it won't display. Therefore i had to shorten my message a bit. In addition to some pre-thought of lines for communication i also used the OrcTalk addon for slang flavour...
I know on "normal" servers players often are not that open for roleplay, as they're not used to it or don't have any interest in it. In addition the english servers are cross-cultural and some players don't speak english that well.


I had no expectations for this experiment and was prepared to stand there lonely for a while. I posed as a quest giver for around 40min and had two or three really nice conversations. I only handed out a few masks as many players were just running past, busy with their newbie quests, not reading the chat or not being interested in any interaction. Only one conversation i can describe as roleplay, the rest was people wanting to do the "quest" but needing pointers or high level players on their alts that already had masks themselves, but thought its a cool idea. As it was early evening the area was not bustling with activity the whole time tho. The result was okayish, but not great. I guess I'll try it again once everyone can create a Choppa and see how it goes then.

I can only encourage everyone to add to the server life with player driven events, be it regular 6vs6, player quests or just any other event that is open for others to participate.

8 comments:

Proximo said...

Dude you make me wanna reroll Azgal with your bright ideas and stunts. Wish someone would do something like this on K8P, it's a awesome server RvR wise but very little happens outside of the RvR lakes =\

Anonymous said...

Thats our Thulf alright!

Anonymous said...

Great Idea!

Greetings from germany ;)

Anonymous said...

I love this, so good stuff. You inspire me to play war....

Doogs said...

I wish I would have kept my masks. I had 16 at one point I think. No one bought them on the AH, and they took up too much room, so I trashed em. :( That would have been a great way to give them out.

Jagor said...

Great idea! A Burlok Orc applauds your initiative.

Eelco said...

Great Idea, makes me think of something I could do to give tsomething back to the server.

Anonymous said...

You are crazy, lol!