I’m so grateful to you for putting this all into words in a way that I’m not sure I could. I have a few IRL friends whom I love dearly, and who’d probably be happy to group up with me for stuff I wanna do, but I feel absolutely terrible for taking up their time, when they could use it to improve something they actually care about.
I think the main issue is that I’m Playing The Game Wrong™. They like M+, they like PvP, they wanna raid. I don’t care about any of that at all. So I’m just over here like… “any of you willing to sacrifice time for something you don’t care about?” - and I don’t think they should AND I don’t think I should even ask if it’s something that doesn’t give any extra player power in PvE or PvP.
I can already hear “get better friends” or “join a guild that does what you do” but… I’m in a guild with friends and I want to be able to be there even if we do different stuff. And they’ll absolutely 100% unsub for content droughts, whereas I will always have something to do/see/collect. I’m also on a small server cluster, so there are no guilds who aren’t PvP/raiding/M+ focused.
Moreso, it’s not even about “current content” - Legion was ages ago, for example, and mythic Antorus is still just too annoying to bother with when you’re on your own.