Hi everyone,
If you don't know anything about someone you often open dialog just to find out more about them. That's what I believe needs to be in place on a roleplaying server. There should be no identifable commands to identify a player other than if a player is online. If you don't know what class or level they are you are forced to interact with them and ask them. If they lie about their level, it starts to show in their weak ability and it's something to roleplay and discuss about.
Best regards,
LordJJ
As a long-term roleplayer I can't say I'm enthusiastic about this approach.
Even on a RP server most time is spent doing the same crafting and adventuring as on other servers and this may just make forming groups more difficult. I don't see this as really encouraging roleplaying either, though you may have a better handle on that than I do.
In EQ we had /role and /anon to handle various combinations of hiding guild tags and level/class information. It was up to the individual player to set how much information they wanted to share about themselves with the general server population. If you went overboard on keeping your character information private, you had a much harder time finding groups. Many people went /anon to hide from groups who were looking for party members.
It would be crippling overall to not be able to do things like
/who all 50 60 shaman
I don't see any advantage to blocking this ability across the server and as Dorotea has pointed out, it would make it horrible to replace group members. Are we supposed to run to town, inspect people and chat them up in RP sessions in the tavern if our cleric needs to log for the night?
If I can get a list of online players of a certain class and level range, I can send them tells and chat with them to see if they'd like to join in on our adventures.
Since we don't know what the group finder tools are going to be like, it's pure speculation on my part, but I believe we're going to need solid tools for seeing who's online and appropriate for the various roles we may want to fill in our groups, whether those groups are on RP servers or otherwise.
I wonder if this could be a good fit for Happytrees suggested