Wow stopped being an MMORPG over a decade ago. Its a theme park RPG.
Any sense of it being an MMORPG died when they removed the concept of realm community with the introduction of cross realm…well…everything.
Before you used to be a fish in a small pound, now you are a very small fish in a very big ocean.
Not everyone plays wow to make friends.
It’s ok if people don’t want to socialise in WoW.
Based on many of the responses to your post, I would argue my reasoning is easy to see. Players tend to be vicious and completely combative. Rather than seeing this and being like “hey, this isn’t what I believe” and moving on, they literally twist what you say and make it all about some weird conflict that doesn’t exist.
I’ve been playing some cataclysm lately, and the server I jumped into, the LFG chat is all about racism, sexism, promoting sex trafficking, promoting pedophilia. I think I’ve made 30-40+ reports in the last 5 days because of it. It’s utterly gross. I haven’t seen one person disappear for it yet.
Thus, I don’t want to play with these folks. I hate doing random dungeons because I ran into a stretch of dungeons where I was getting vote kicked because as the tank I didn’t want to pull half the dungeon at once when the healer was doing a horrid job (wanted to dps instead of heal, etc.). That pushed me away from random dungeons. I’m the kind of person that if I touch a dumpster and get burned, I don’t try to touch that dumpster fire again. So I haven’t done random dungeons in years at this point.
When I saw delves, my first thought was “didn’t the solo content fail in warlords?” But the more I thought about it, I realized I could play mini dungeons again without having to deal with the worst part of this game: the players.
In the last 20 years, there’s been this evolution of toxicity, which has redoubled since a certain toxic king has claimed his throne. I wanted to think people were mistaken, but the more I think about it, people are toxic af these days. Worse-so on the internet (just see replies to this to prove my point).
Of course, I’m not speaking for everyone. If I run with my friends, I have a blast. That’s how it works in any game. But spending 15 minutes reading any of the global chat channels tells you everything you need to know why people don’t want to reach out to ask about help. The response is almost always (note the caveat there) toxic backlash that results in further toxicity followed by a parade of racist/homophobic/nightmarish garbage.
If the devs actually care about making this game more social, they need to do more than put out a fancy “agree to this” list that nobody reads or follows. They need actual moderators that ban folks without having to report them first. But that costs money and time and people that Microsoft won’t invest in it. They wanted the game company, not the employees (hence, layoffs). They don’t care about toxicity, so the toxic levels will continue to grow.
Personally, I’m ready to quit MMO type games, because people are trash. And they’ll attack you regardless of what you say, just to prove it to you. The popular shift right now is to bash the weak or disabled or non-normal. Hell, I literally just read a post where someone was asking about accommodations because they are disabled, and the first responses were basically “go play something else.” There were some helpful comments later, but when you have to sift through poison to get to the potion, there’s a bit of a nasty aftertaste.