This week, we want your opinion on what roleplaying elements would you highlight throughout the gameplay experience as a developer?

I think the most important thing to encourage role play in a game is not to force roleplay aspects things on players through gameplay elements, or to be extremely careful which gameplay elements are intended to foster roleplay to begin with to make sure it's not stifling it.

Leave things to the player's imagination. The Playerbase is far larger and more diverse than any developer team and will invariably come up with better ideas over time because of this.

For me rokeplay elements apart from good storyline and quests is a complete waste of time and money. People were more themn happy with doing their rolepkay around the statue in millenium city.

Mission editors and custom missions....actually I think I remember posting something on this in the old forums: More solutions in missions beyond simply blastin the way through everyone.

Super strength character? Give me a locked door I can rip open instead of fighting a mini-boss for a key. Character some kind of robotics user? Let me hack it's panel and trick it open(and be clever to). Let me try sneaking past guys and taking a pacifist approach once in a while using my powers to open alternative paths through once in a while know? Or even have like a skill/power around exploiting alternate means of opening doors.

As for roleplaying itself? Yeah, more places to meet, supergroup bases(not puny hideouts like champions online) I think would be very important, and they have to be customizable to. I think base building being more usable would also help things, so players wouldn't have to jury rig exploits to make the most of a base.

Being able to make our own missions and even add non-combative solutions would I think be very useful for roleplaying later

For me, role-playing is about choices. That could be complex like dialog choices that affect the game later on or simple choices like what kind of armor do you wear. Choices are what really brings the immersion in games. I would try to give the players as much choice as possible and make sure that the game world encourages experimentation. The game world should also respond accordingly to the choices. A super villain should inspire fear in normal people when they walk by. On the other hand, a valiant, charismatic hero should start to gather a crowd wanting selfies if they stay in one place too long.

pretty much what frosty said word for word. id also like multi path missions and multi path alignment where your choices effect the outcome of mission and also your alignment in and a CoH style NPC interaction system would be my core request. aside from that my secondary would be decent power proliferation and path options to ensure diversity, cant RP without diversity, more diversity = more RP options

Options, lots of options. Sometime I log into an selfcalled mmoRPG an I think the dev mix up *emote* = all about roleplaying so they can sit on their hands in that regard. Its not. Its a filler. Its what I do not need an MMORPG or even PC game for.

Hypothetical situation: 4 characters have a little hangout to a mixture of getting to know each other better, don't wanna combat something right now and just chill and talk shit about maybe yesterdays raid in character style.

Now you can have meet the 4 chars meet up somewhere near the town square for the lack of any other useful space and *emote stuff like sitting somewhere* which is probably even totally ok for some. But in the end: I play a PC game to see stuff.

We already have guild & private housing confirmed. That is good, because the private hangout moves from some random public spot to a private one. I saw a good deal of furniture in the screenshots of the private appartment.

Please lets make them usable; click on the couch and the char gets a small dialogue box to either sit or lay down on it.

Let ppl buy a stereo set for their homes that actually works and can play some songs. Have a store in the city that sells cds which gets automatically fed into that hifi set at home (and in the car if thats a thing). There are probably enough good license free options that could be included into the game. So now that hangout don't have *inserts Mozart cd and starts playing it* but the actual action of doing so and even a topic to talk about in the hangout "What? You don't have XYZ? I got if for 10 bucks at Wavebox near Chinatown".

When ppl click a stove the animation of starting to cook something could start.

Click the phone? See the char pick it up, pressing some numbers (and have optionally pop up the friend list where you can quickly right click /tell something to someone as a gag [just to be sure, a phone should not be required for opening the friend list; nor should any RPG element be required for basic MMO functions]). The possibilities are endless.

Sure, this is all fancy fluff. But beside that all the animations you do for that will most likely use for NPCs too (i.e. cooks at a restaurant) so its not that its wasted work should only a small percentage of players actually use it.

If you manage to have a big amount of players have fun play sessions in your game without even engaging in anything combat related you have mastered the RPG part

A game that's conductive to RP has:

1) Accessibility of that server the community designates as "the RP server" (unlike FF XIV, which makes it harder to actually play where you want than a U.S woman trying to get an abortion in the Bible Belt).
2) ALL of the game world's lore available in the game's site so we can make informed concepts for characters that will fit in the world. (like Anarchy Online and CoX did)
3) Specialized socializing hubs (like CoX' Pocket D).
4) EXPEDIENT GM REQUESTS that makes swift work of harassers. (unlike Cryptic, who de-facto deputized troll guilds for years).
5) Animations that look alive and stylish (unlike SWTOR where people stand like mannequins or CO where even sitting down looks plain unnatural).
6) Sufficient emotes, and a list that's constantly growing.
7) CoX-degree character customization (like CO, alas, this was about the only thing CO did right).

That's what I can think off the top of my head.

Thanks for consulting us.

I'm not much of a roleplayer, but I think realism is important, by which I mainly mean things should behave the way they'd be expected to behave. That's how I interpret a lot of what Anothername mentioned.

I also think functional player-created content is a must-have, as in the RP possibilities are considerably limited otherwise. Rich player profiles and highly customizable toons, of course. Robust chat/social controls are obviously important.

But I'd probably echo what ZeeHero said early on: Don't integrate it so much into the gameplay as to be disruptive beyond, you know, basic lore and environment/atmosphere.

[edit]
Rereading the initial prompt, "What RP elements would you highlight," one thing that CoX did a decent job of was incorporating my character history into the NPC dialogue. So, if part of the fantasy is that I'm establishing an identity as a superhero, I think it helps when NPCs acknowledge my exploits or whatever. In terms of the general gameplay experience, I think that would be a good thing: Some sort of longitudinal recognition of my character's development. But I have no idea how you'd do that the way I'm picturing it in my head--like, in an end-game setting, after doing something crazy difficult, if an NPC advisor said something like, "Man, remember that time when you were just starting out and you totally bailed it doing [whatever]?"

Anyway.
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I think another thing I didn't touch on, on RP servers, more than just one popular place to hang out for RPers. I think this is especially important both when a community is large or small. Right now for example, there is only one popular place in Champions online and it has a bad reputation in it's own way of to many who think for example only magic is successful as a character. Or Pocket D having lots of vampire wannabe's and catgirls ect. Course Pocket D was more diverse to back then compared to today(there only seems to be a few players left I actually enjoy roleplaying with simply due to the lack of diversity, not to mention some who try to dictate how others rp).

But I think also the game environment has to encourage being reasonable in RPing characters to. And not in a "Everyone can use the same solution" so much as everyone approaches things with different solutions in mind. That is something I've noticed to be sorely lacking in rp in both CO and Paragon chat: everyone just goes "attack attack attack" in an rp event. I'm among the only people who'd like to use buffs. It annoys me more for example in paragon chat, that when people do dice rolls for example, they severely nerf the buffs to uselessness. So it's all strategyless attacking, more attacking, even more attacking. Or God forbid, holy trinity boredom.

Because Paragon chat isn't CoH, and I feel some players who rp left never played real support for instance. It also feels though again, every solution being combat limits roleplayer creativity in plots where a non-combat solution is key.