An honest conversation about mods and the 14 roleplay community
Hello everyone, so I know this article has probably been making the rounds, and before I go into my point, I want to clarify that no this post won't be focusing on the plugin and whether or not that allows for stalking behavior, that is just an idea for another time.
What I want to focus on is the authors note of the rp community. They mention something along the lines of "if we removed mods, it would be devestating to the rp community." I want everyone's opinion on this question: would a lack of visual mods truly ruin the rp community? Final fantasy 14 had a wonderful roleplay community and that was long before mods made their way onto the scene. Another example I have, as much as everyone will hate hearing it, is World of Warcraft. There are a ton of people roleplaying there without any need for visual enhancers whatsoever. I get it, different communities, different perspectives, also plenty of uncontrolled variables that I'm not discussing such as addons vs plugins etc.. The point of this post is to start a conversation on all of it.
My honest opinion? In all of my biases, and all of my incorrectness.. I do not believe visual mods have been healthy for the roleplay community. This is just causation and correlation, but I've personally felt that the roleplay community has been on a downhill trajectory for a while now, since some time in endwalker. Maybe I am alone in this, but that really was the final straw that pushed me to drop sub for this game, is that I have felt that between houses making all these roleplays more privatized and mods creating their own little exclusive niches, visual mods long term have been more detrimental. A lot of the mods have made it feel rather exclusive rather than inclusive and has divided the rp community between second life modders who like rp as a side and people who genuinely like to write and couldn't care less.