The Rise and Fall of the Potterworld Towns Roleplay
Feature
Written by ChaileyChi
Edited by MamaDuckie
Welcome back to the Daily Diviner! My name is Chailey and this week I will be recounting the life of an unofficial, player based roleplay organization! Roleplay is a fun way for players to interact and add something to do on the server. Many players will create organizations that focus on a form of roleplay. The organization I will touch on today is ‘Potterworld Towns’.Feature
Written by ChaileyChi
Edited by MamaDuckie
Most players are very familiar with the words, “Revelius Maintenance”. Most people shudder at the mere thought of it, however, our community stayed strong together. Many players found entertainment in #random on Discord. It began with families trying to claim towns as their property and ended in a 200+ Discord server run by Llama. This was the Potterworld Towns server, which many of you will be familiar with.
To get a better grasp of how the roleplay came to life, we spoke with iSpitLikeALlama ‘Llama’ to get a better idea of how the roleplay started. When asked what his thoughts were as he began to organize the conversations from the Discord, he seemed very shocked by how quickly everything came together. He was amazed at how such one small comment could spark something that could bring such a large portion of the Potterworld community together.
Llama told us that, ‘Essentially, we were all waiting for the Revelius update to come out, just sitting around because we didn’t know exactly when it would be out. In another Discord, I made a joke of land claiming being a thing, just to pass time. I then pasted a list of people who had “claimed” towns in the new update in the Potterworld Discord, jokingly saying something like “anyone else want to claim a town?” It just spiraled out from there, and it felt necessary to make a discord to organize it. It all happened within the span of about six hours, it was crazy.’
The hope of this project was to give players two things. Firstly, something to do throughout the maintenance. After the first day or so, everyone was getting bored with playing minigames and was looking for something else to do. However, this also was for players to have something roleplay based to do once the update came out. It encouraged exploration among the towns as well as an opportunity to compete in “wars”. This was an alternative as the official roleplay was on pause.
The first project was organizing everyone’s suggestions in the Potterworld Discord. Llama and a few others created a document with all of the rules of the roleplay and a spreadsheet with all of the land claims. This was a cohesive list of the families and groups that claimed a specific town. Once this was done, the Discord was founded on June 9th. The server gained over two hundred members in the first 48 hours, surprising Llama and the moderators.
Throughout the time it existed, players loved the energy and the roleplay bickering over all of the towns. Many people climbed on board quickly and as a way to create rules and guidelines, each town was allowed to have two representatives that voted on important topics, which surfaced at meetings. There were three major meetings in the life span of the server. Each meeting really helped shape the organization and helped it flourish and reach all of its goals.
During the 1st meeting, many things were discussed and over 50 people were in a voice call. Some of the major topics that were covered were a 2-week grace period after the update was released and a 1-week grace period after a war ended. Mainly, there were a lot of arguments of what land was claimable and who could claim land. Places like wizarding residences, Hogsworth, Hogsend, London, and allegiance base locations were neutral. Water was not claimable and you had to have a group of more than two in order to claim a town. That group or family then “owned” the town and mob locations around it.
During the 2nd meeting, the concept of war was discussed. It was decided that if you declared war on a town, they couldn’t refuse the declaration. However, the side that the war was declared upon, chose the war activities which were to consist of minigames. Both sides had to come to an agreement on the terms of the war. Towns could lose mob locations, but not the town itself. In the 3rd and final meeting, the idea of war between families and towns wasn’t working. The only war declared was between Rushstone and Antrum which ended up falling through. It was a group decision to replace the wars with bi-monthly town Olympics.
This project was a wonderful demonstration of the Potterworld community, however, the roleplay recently ended. On August 18th, Llama announced the end of the Potterworld Towns roleplay. When asked what made him come to the decision to end the roleplay, he responded, “Since the Revelius update came out, the roleplay seemed to be slowly losing player activity and interest. The roleplay was also very constrained by Potterworld, as you could only duel in certain regions, and playing minigames privately is impossible. That made it very hard to have wars, which was one of the main parts of the roleplay. Meetings would still be held every few weeks to discuss these problems, but slowly, fewer and fewer people showed up, and the Discord was getting an average of five messages a day in public chats. Despite our best efforts to keep the roleplay going, including the Town Olympics, the roleplay felt like it had to come to an end. It was a super enjoyable thing to do in maintenance while waiting for the update, but it just wasn’t going to work out while the actual Revelius update was out.”
Though the roleplay ended, many players still wanted to continue with the Olympics concept. The Town Olympics was supposed to be a compilation of various events such as swimming, archery, a triathlon, and others that the towns participated in. Since the roleplay ended before the first Olympics were held, the plans and preparations are now being shifted into the Potterworld Olympics. Llama is stepping back from this project, leaving Leyak, Maddie, and Spaghelle to continue it.
Llama’s final words on this roleplay is a touching way to remember Potterworld Towns. “For the first week and a half of the roleplay, when we were all still waiting for the update to come out, so many people were talking about the roleplay. What they were claiming, what their land had that other places didn’t. It was one big community. I can’t speak for others, but this roleplay was one of the most fun things I have ever taken part in on Potterworld. Thank you to everyone who helped lead this roleplay, as well as everyone who took part in the roleplay. This roleplay was amazing, but unfortunately, everything must come to an end.”
Overall the town roleplay was a great way to pass time during the maintenance and ended up being a fun interaction between many players and staff. It was something many players will treasure for a long time and a roleplay that will not be forgotten easily. Thank you all for joining me in this tribute to the Potterworld Towns Roleplay. We hope that those of you who participated had fun, and those who didn’t were able to enjoy hearing about it. I hope you all have a great day and tune into the rest of the issue!