I don’t know about how the rest of you find the player community… but it feels non-existent. I pop a question in general chat in the plains… no one answers. I pop a message in westfall chat… no one answers. It feels like I’m playing a single player RPG “online” - much like ESO before I stopped playing that one.
My guild is dead. My server shouldn’t be dead. Just feels dead all around.
Pick an activity? Most chatting, I find, is done through discord these days because it’s just a better platform for communication. From achievements and collection to pvp, dungeons and of course raids.
Realm doesn’t really matter unless you’re mythic raiding.
Yeah, very few people actually speak in the ingame chat, from my experience. Even in Capital Cities.
I’m assuming they are all cordoned off into their own little communities on Discord.
It does make the game seem dead, even if it isn’t.
The community has evolved past in game general chatting.
Even before discord, general chat was just trolling, the latest meme phrase, spamming groups/selling stuff etc.
Most channels are rendered unusable by advertising spam.
Try Moonguard. People still chat there, more on Alliance than Horde.
I’ve said for years that they need a social channel.
Even Classic is not what it once was with the community. Trade chat is super quiet most often and even most dungeons and bgs have very little words spoken. Classic has a better community than retail, but not much of one. Probably because most of the people playing Classic were never there in the first place in the old version.
I’d argue this game is dead for most casuals, especially this expansion.
Only the most diehard folks within their guilds are still trucking as usual.
My friend quit back in Season 1, and he’s the reason I’m here at all. I don’t have much time left, and I don’t see myself renewing.
The population dip is apparent.
There’s just not much reason to play alone.
It’d still be filled with junk because they aren’t moderated like Discords are.
I’m on Shadow Council.
I thought about making my characters on Moon Guard but decided against it for a reason that I cannot remember.
This XP Bonus time might be a good time to do so. hmmm.
Eh. I probably need to just go ahead and find a guild, I’ve been putting it off because I’m very picky about it, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to stick around WoW long-term.
I mean.
Yeah.
Its not designed to play alone. But to cultivate friendships and play with others.
They could actually put in the sort of player moderation that would allow after a certain number of “Wrong channel should be in [x] channel” reports, the post would automatically be moved to the right channel.
Even if they did people would still use a third party platform. 
PvP scene is barely hanging on, and I haven’t played WoW for PvE content since Cataclysm.
I stepped off that treadmill a while ago, but PvP was still worth it to me.
Now, it’s not anymore. Balance issues, and maps just getting stale.
Same thing as doing M+, only we’ve been doing these same battlegrounds for decades.
It was always fun, but there’s only so much fun to be had in a mode that is clearly an afterthought, and gets no balance or new additions for years.
They should just make WoW a PvE only game at this point, and put all the resources into that, PvP is pretty much never gonna recover.
There’s just no one there anymore, all the PvPers quit lol. And thus no one to play with, so I just leave too.
PVP was never a large focus on resources for WoW.
So that seems consistent.
Depends on your server. I get general chat in the new zones. But if you’re in Chromie Time in Westfall, you’re basically playing single player. And it’s also an old zone where no one hangs out.
Modern WoW is a single player online game poorly designed for the solo player, as everything is designed around an end-game loop of 5-player instances, who might run a 20-30 player raid a few hours a week.
It neither feels massive nor does it feel like much of an RPG. Those experiences are still locked back in the classic games.
This is a glorified lobby game with some world stuff to do as a side thought.
Too bad it was really and enjoyable thing for those of us that would come back year after year just to engage with the same battlegrounds.
WoW was the best (Vanilla - Wrath) when they actually focused on the PvP, gave us reputations and world-building along with it, like Wintergrasp and Isle of Conquest.
Those days of investing money more into WoW are gone.
And we’d come back, knowing we didn’t get anything new, but would still play it anyway.
Regardless, WoW grows smaller, and those folks I’d play PvP with are all gone now.
The new Megadungeon doesn’t even look all that interesting unless you like fighting sand ghosts, which further strengthens the idea they’re just skimping out on the game, which makes sense because much less people play it.
I mean, they should have done this from the beginning anyway.
PVP games need to be built and designed solely for PVP in order to be supported well, imo.
If you have a game that is split PVE/PVP then the PVP side will always, always suffer in the long run. Every time.
History bears that out, in the MMO genre.
I really wish more people had supported Planetside 1. It was amazing and there was not a lick of PVE anywhere in it. It was a full loot PVP War Game and it was magnificent.