I agree... I hope you don't misunderstand me as whining here. I'm not saying that RP is dead -- far from it! I'm just saying that there's a gap between what Blizzard is wanting to give roleplayers in the future and what roleplayers are asking for.

This may be because roleplayers haven't articulated their desires in ways that Blizzard understands. Sometimes you kind of have to be a roleplayer in order to get what roleplayers are talking about, so one of the things I tried to do in this article was write about it in such a way that a non-roleplaying developer could look at it and say "oh, I get it, let me think about that," and maybe make some improvements. Likely roleplayers will look at those improvements and say, "no, that's not quite what we had in mind either," but it'll be a step in the right direction.

On the other hand, maybe the devs are completely aware of what we want and just haven't figured out how they can give it to us yet, or they've decided they don't want to because of other reasons we don't understand. Either way, RP remains alive and well in the here and now, and we roleplayers still love it a lot! In fact, it's because we love it so much that we are trying to find ways to improve it.