Just my experience. In vanilla to wrath (maybe the start of cata) there were a large number of players who logged in to get drunk, have fun with friends and get some loot.
Game mechanics have become increasingly complex. Compare any raid boss from wrath to those of the current expansion and you can quickly see why a drunk guy trying to tank a boss is going to find remembering 10 min worth of explanations on mechanics per boss difficult to remember. Or any mechanic that requires group coordination and quick reactions, yet something else drunk people are not exactly know for.
Not to mention that loot drops are not nearly what they once were. There is very little incentive to do the easiest difficulties if WQ gear is better.
Then with timers in dungeons it prevents people from communicating with anything but voice. Every second spent typing is a second wasted on the timer. Gone are the days of trash talking people or teaching others mechanics (again unless they join discord something many people hate to do.) Furthermore it means that you have to be available for the entirety of the dungeon. If your kid is sick well you better take the night off, on call and may possibly have to leave? There is no way the group can just come back in a couple of hours and finish up. Want to switch characters for a specific boss? Not anymore.
A lot of people are also turned off by the number of difficulties. At one point everyone was funneled into easy or hard difficulties. Now we have 4 raid difficulties, 20+ dungeon difficulties and tons of pvp styles.
This splits the player base into so many tribes that it becomes difficult to find a group that plays the same faction, same time, same realm, same types of content, same difficulty of content. And what happens when you become better and want to increase the challenge and others don’t?
I’ve run several large guilds and find that players fall into one of the following categories.
- New players who have no idea how to play and have fun doing just about anything.
- Players how have played for years but are there for the social aspects of the game and are not very good. This can be because of a bad computer, not wanting to read or watch guides or just being able to understand their spec or the mechanics of a dungeon or boss. More than 2 or possibly 3 in a raid is going to make things challenging to impossible (depending on the boss mechanics.)
- Players who are moderately new but are quick to grasp the fundamentals and push themselves.
- People looking for a challenge and get tiered of carrying people so they leave for a mythic raiding guild.
Player type 4 generally become a clique and talk about their frustrations about type 2 players. Over time they either become passive aggressive and drive them out or they quit and join a guild that sell carries instead of doing it for free. All the while new players wonder just what the hell happened and if they should stick around and the players who are ok and looking to get better find themselves having to decide if they follow the good players or stick around for what they know will be an increasing amount of wipes without the good players there to carry people.
This whole cycle happens any where from a few weeks to a couple of months and just needs one player to be the catalyst to start drama about frustration everyone has felt for years. I’ve seen extremely stable guilds that worked together for years fall apart and people quit the game permanently over.
I’ve had a ton of friends quit over these issues and many more who never really start because its over whelming. I think a co-worker said it best when I was watching a Queen Azshara guide. What the hell is going on? followed by: Why the expletive would you ever play that?
Edit: Ok my wife just informed me that you were probably being sarcastic. My mistake.
