I'm walking around in Hydlaa, and I see very little, if any, roleplayers. I stand in front of Harnquist's shop, and there's no one but people running around with swords drawn. I walk in the tavern, it's full of godmodders, fenkis with plate armor and swords drawn, and people pretending to roleplay thinking that anything said with /me counts for roleplay (example: /me thinks xx is a noob).
Just yesterday, me and a few friends were in Gugrontid hosting an event dealing with lowering platinum prices. We found that all of the miners were OOC after trying to communicate with them, and they refused to buy the platinum in Main chat, always bringing it to OOC /tells and simply refusing to roleplay. Also, a few people decided it would be funny to lure 4-5 ulbernauts to a stall we'd set up to sell food and drinks to the hard-working miners, and nearly got us killed. Then we were told by a GM to treat that as an IC event, even though the people who did it were OOC, and we were right next to the main part of Gugrontid where guards should have (if the mechanics worked) protected us.
I ask, where are all the roleplayers? So far I'm beginning to see that the majority of the community is immature, against roleplaying, or godmod with no regard for settings or limitations on their character. What happened to the unique attribute of this game where it encourages roleplay? That's the entire reason I started playing, but now it seems like it's about to become like the general MMO - a grindfest. I notice that there are about 8 people logged onto the forums, compared to 86 guests. These names I see logged in, are generally the people I see that roleplay, while these 86 guests, the majority, I assume are grinders that don't interact with the community at all. Then there are people who don't even know about the forums, so probably also don't know that this is a roleplaying game, and the only reason they may have possibly come to the forums is to figure out how to get out of the tutorial so they can start grinding.
Now I'm not saying I have a problem with grinding, as there are many exceptions where there are amazing roleplayers with equally amazing stats/skills, but just look around ingame. In the tavern just earlier today, there were random people with grinded out stats/skills, weapons drawn, and plate armor, acting very immaturely like they came straight from Runescape. If this is what the game's being reduced to, there isn't any point in having settings. As long as the game mechanics are all finished, that's all they care about, and that's all they'll play for. It'll be a waste of time if the community's roleplayers don't nearly equal the number of the community's non-roleplayers, since they'll rarely, if ever, use what's written in settings.
