Supporting an Immersive Roleplaying Enviroment (Summer 2003)

Roleplaying ruleset is not enough.
You need content and features to support and promote roleplaying.

Dark Age of Camelot lacks that, it's a poor roleplaying game. The game revolves around either PvM to increase Character power or PvP battlefields. The concerns of players are no different than competitive strategy and shooting games. Min-maxing everything to the highest competitive level. There's no on-going story, no massive GM events. Nothing players have done have really effected the world or the story. Each faction just take turns controlling keeps in a frontier that have minor effect on the game world while accumulating for Character power. While great features that I believe are important, as a lone feature, you can't give people that and expect them to roleplay.

Good example was Anarchy Online. That game had real atmosphere and was far more immersive. There was fluff to make you believe the world was real. Better NPCs, better sound effects like loud-mics that shout factional propaganda. The game had a real on-going story, shaped in part by players. There were huge GM hosted events, based on the story. Such news was event presented on the official site. Key players(read: gamers) were featured sometimes based on their actions. Actions that were not planned, actions that the gamers themselves chose. Actions that effected the story a little. And actions that effected future GM events. Funcom gave people all that, and people loved it - people roleplayed.

Star Wars Galaxies was also a good roleplaying game. Not because of content and events like Anarchy Online but because of social features. First the skill system filled the world with a variety of characters: Adventures, soldiers, crafters, doctors, entertainers. Then the game provided a dynamic world that people could effect: build guild halls, houses with their own furniture, build farms, run harvesters. Lastly the game supported a high level of social interaction between players. Crafters were reliant on hunters if they chose not to hunt themselves. Hunters were reliant on entertainers and medics to heal them. In turn those support templates were reliant on the financial support of adventurers. By creating a world that people literally lived out fantasy lives in a realistic manner, it immersed players to a higher degree that they could more easily relate to the world and thus roleplay their characters. This fantasy never lasted forever. It became monotonous, social aspects declined as people bot'ed and went afk, gamers become solely intent on grinding out professions to achieve jedi, et cetera. But for atleast a couple months, the worlds of Star Wars Galaxies were well roleplayed thanks to dynamic and social game features.

To finish, this reminds me of a lot of gamestyle discussions.
Can't give PvPers a pointless arena and expect them to love it.
Can't give PvMers a world of mobs and no Character Levels and expect them to grind.
Roleplaying is no different - it needs content too, it needs support.
Such things need to be fully supported by the developers, in order to be fully supported by the community.