I am looking for some people to play with, a social or friendly guild that actually talks and has fun, so many guilds have like 20 people on but no one is doing anything and its completely silent.
horde or alliance doesn’t matter, also looking for someone to level with
This paragraph alone tells me everything I need to know about people who complain about being asked to be a decent person. Please stick to your musty and edgy discord server
I would say this started long before any of this “social contract”/SJW/leftie stuff entered the news.
They added cross-realm, Looking for Dungeon, Looking for Raid, “sharding”, and similar anti-social features around ~Cata and slowly but gradually the “small-town feel” or community aspect of the game disappeared as fewer people talked to each other in-game (as a direct consequence of Blizz game design choices)
As a side-note, white-knights/anti-flyers will claim that flying being added was part of it, but nah, I can clearly remember the community still being super social from TBC into Wrath (both expansions that had flying available from day 1)
Nah flying was the first salvo in the destruction of the community feel in the game. You’re more likely to have an emergent interaction between players who are both grounded. It’s no coincidence.
LFD was the turning point, i think that was added in 3.3, but it was essentially the end of server communities and was a huge spike on toxic player behavior. players dont act nice when they know they will never see someone again.
Interesting that you are making a connection to “real life” here, because a lot of people in the game are like those who live out on farms far from their nearest neighbors. There is no “small town” feel, no neighbors like those cityfolk imagine everybody has. Their lives are centered around their families and their work to survive.
I wouldn’t say flight is entirely blameless – it did cut down on the number of chance encounters by virtue of reducing chances for those to happen (reduced travel time, alt-tab autopilot, etc) – but it was a minor scratch compared to the damage done by phasing and LFD in WotLK and crossrealm/sharding later on.
Another thing that didn’t help was trivialization of leveling content and the addition of heirlooms and boosts. Prior to those leveling was a decent driver of chance encounters but that was eliminated when everything up to current content became total faceroll and entirely soloable.
Yeah, I feel the emptiness as well. Occasionally I’ll see someone shoot a message into general chat for the zone I’m in or there might even be a conversation already going on and I try to add to it when I can because I want those small social interactions too lol