It had long-term consequences.
Why bother making friends when you can press a button and get put in with randoms, essentially getting you the same results?
I did lol, made many friends in PuG raids outside of guild runs back in Wrath, because I’d get benched or something, giving me free time to go run with a PuG.
Even starting in Karazhan in TBC, some of those friendships lasted, and that was PuG’d a lot for me.
And often times they’d friend me so we could go again next week after reset, if the run went well. Didn’t always happen, successful groups, but when they were, people noticed.
Especially on my tank, people always wanted a good tank.
A lot of gamers are also introverts by heart. Social interaction takes energy for those people.
They may just be more likely to auto-queue instead of reaching out and talking to folks.
It’s the path of least resistance.
Before, you had to talk to players, or that content just wasn’t getting done, period.
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So you have 85 players in your community discord. Are they not enough for you? Are you the Borg and feel you have to assimilate everyone?
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I kinda wish WoW made you opt into content because of this.
It should make you opt into M+ and then when you do that it locks you out of raiding and PVP on that character. It’s basically what they dreamed up for Covenants, but it has nothing to do with direct player power or anything like that.
If you lock people into M+, now they can’t even think about raid trinkets or raid lockouts, they have to actually make a conscious decision to branch out and play with other people.
You can normalize the rewards back how they used to be doing this also, since RWF raiders will opt into the raid and be locked out of M+. There is no reason to gate gear anymore with the opt in method.
Delvers and high key pushers don’t interact with the community anyway, they’re two sides of the same Asocial coin.
not really.
Classic spoke/speaks in code.
LF1M dps druid. ms>os, x,y,x hr’d…
translation, unless a druid they don’t want you. they are probably stacking. or need something druid can do for a reason.
If working offspec, you will be not be getting gear if someone needs MS.
and if what you needed is HR’d…you don’t need to speak to them either. HR is locked, debate is not an option.
Also /4 is for ads only.
you can only post, 80 bm 241. all people need to know. they do not care if you are great person. they care if you have the gear to run the content, and if stacking classes…you are a class that won’t be “stealing” their items.
Trust me…the /4 police can be brutal. even slow as hell and some make it fun conversations since game wide, they will write up tickets if fun is detected there.
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Lol most of the talking I see is not in those global channels, but rather in /say or /yell.
And you’re talking endgame, which isn’t what Classic is about to most playing it, it’s the leveling.
There’s a lot of chill casuals like myself that aren’t playing it in sweat-mode. Been there, done that the first time around.
Anniversary has seen HR in leveling dungeons. it gotten cut throat lol.
for some of us this is like the 3rd time at least doing this. the milk of human kindness…sold fresh out with some really lol.
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I think that’s kinda why I’m doing a self-found run, I just wanna play WoW without the hassle of other players, and raid loot drama I’ve seen several times before lol.
Exactly this. It wasn’t just the design or the small servers that made people socialize - it was the lack of alternatives. If I was given the choice between sitting in a text chatroom doing nothing and sitting in a text chatroom where I could also grind weapon skill or farm Thorium or work on my attunements, you’d better believe I’d be doing the latter instead. But “sit in a text chatroom” is no longer what most people go online to do.
I can see that. Non sf can be the same.
I wanted to group up for some of the crap quests like kill X of worgen type. then kill Y worgen type.
Mage farmers…don’t group up. I was jsut lucky they didn’t skin. Quest run times sucked, but I pulled in crap tons of worgen skins.
So I got something out of it. closed out lw that uses medium, I can AH the rest now.
this doesn’t make any sense though as you already acknowledged the below quote
and sitting spamming trade/general LFG 1/5 DM for twenty minutes isnt exactly the peak of socialization people keep on acting like it is. lol
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It’s two things-
-Social media didn’t exist back then, WoW was the social media.
-Ease of access, stuff like LFG tools giving us less of a reason to be social. It’s just not required to play anymore.
And of course, time. It’s just not 2004 anymore. Things have indeed changed and people don’t even use text chat for the most part- Discord exists and most games have voice chat as a feature.
imo the reason why ppl become less social in the game:
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ppl gets older, they need to worry about their rl issues, not only social, but also their job, their family.
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it’s not about ppl forgetting WoW is a MMO, it’s about ppl seeing MMO more clearly
2.1 MMO’s merely a game, when your house is on fire, an empty “pray for xxx” from your guildies or community members would help nothing.
2.2 there’re always moralless douchebags would claim that bcs it’s a MMO, so they can grief and harass other players as they wish in the game
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Increasing “persona non grata” in the game: Russian boosters, Chinese gold farmers or simply a toxic foreign guy who can only repeat f word again and again. Trying to “social” with those things are waste of time.
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2005: For the alliance/horde, for the Azeroth!
2025: For the loot and gold!
If people genuinely consider spamming trade or general chat with LFG 1/5 to be the “socialization” we desperately need back, that’s one of the most absurd and childish things I’ve heard in a while.
Let’s not pretend it wasn’t inconvenient—because it absolutely was.
It’s like asking people to abandon email, phones, texts, or any form of instant communication and go back to writing letters by hand. Good luck with that, I guess.
And no, it was never required to play wow.
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Hey, think whatever you want about it.
Fact of the matter is we had no such auto-queue for anything.
Had to speak up if you wanted that group quest or dungeon done.
Now, you can do anything and everything without so much as a word being exchanged.
There is literally no content you can’t do if you don’t talk.
I’d really like to see how someone got to 60 without doing any group quests or dungeons in Vanilla lol.
Especially without talking.
Must’ve been like nobody doing that.
It might be outdated by today’s standards, but I’d take people talking rather than total silence.
The social elements aren’t ever coming back into the game, because they’ve all been done outside of it for years now. It’s Discord or nothing.
wow is a toxic trash pit these days only the most sociopathic thrive here
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All these talks about social media, Discord etc aren’t the main reason why this has changed. Fundamentally the game has change and the social aspect has been reduced, that’s why that sense of social that you fondly remember (I do as well) isn’t there anymore.
- With dungeon finder now, it’s all automatic, you get placed in a group, you do the run and you’re done. Compared to back in the days where people will come to IF bridge for inspect, spamming groups for invites etc, all that is now transparent in the background.
- Back in the day, having a good reputation helped you getting into groups. That point is now moot due to the changes mentioned above, again so it feels less social.
- Content nowadays - It’s easy too easy, or too hard for most people. There’s no middle ground - With everything before M+ too easy people just breeze thru it with randos you’ll never see again, to M+ that requires people to be 100% focused and pull after pull so there’s no time to socialize.
- If there is no sense of a community, there won’t be any socializing. With so much content now as well, you can play the entire game without speaking to another player at all. You can choose not to do any instance, and just quest and farm mounts for example. This isn’t the case 20 years ago, where everything was focused at group based content once you hit 60.
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Many of us haven’t forgotten it’s an MMO. I think it’s Blizz who forgot that lol
Well… most of the time I’m one of those people who doesn’t say anything until someone talks to me first. The most I say when I join a group is hi.
You have to tell Blizzard that .The only reason you would want to group up now , is Mythic raiding , RGBS or high end M + everything else is a one off deal or it is just not worth it and I believe that also will be eroded sooner or later .
It getting worse and worse every expansion and players are just making excuses for Blizzard. An infection always starts insignificant but if you leave it like that it can turn deadly.
Nobody cares!!! and if you care you are not addicted enough to talk about it at which point you end up making excuses for Blizzard 
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It isnt.
It is a failed esport lobbygame