They’ve def gone overboard with the instanced content, and damaging the profession and gathering system as a whole. Not easy or worth the time to make money (via gathering), explore, look for unique BOE’s anymore, Trade or any of that stuff. Everything is instanced content and communication feels very limited even inside those instances; even for crafting.
I think there’s a lot of players that really like that, but it’ll be damning for the developers that work on the world, since it’s mostly just a lobby now…
I would not be surprised one bit to see AI completely take the jobs of world designers and artists in the future, and a smaller team focusing on systems like Delves/raids/m+ as the bread and butter of the game.
I think outside comms like Discord communities have also influenced WOW as a social media too…but that’s just evolution of the internet.
All that being said, remember to communicate with your dungeon teams though!
And yet every expansion, every patch there are these posts about the masses… so who is right? The people who want to be social, or the others who don’t care about others?
Just from my anecdotal experience, those looking for “friends” and “social interaction”, tend to be the folks who have the hardest time actually socializing, they want to have conversations but won’t initialize. There are certainly large guilds and communities which have thriving social environments, however they tend to go sour fast with; politics, drama, and as pointed out, social cliches where folks won’t talk outside of them and turn most away.
It’s a two way street, and both are issues, but both are almost fully under a person’s control.
MMO just means the game runs in a persistent world and the players CAN interact. Doesn’t mean they HAVE to. And RPG has NEVER meant "Requires Playing in Groups ". If you only feel it’s worthwhile when you play with others good for you, but “forced” socialization really isn’t.
Pretty sure you’re actually retarded if you can’t understand the difference that was clearly laid out for you.
I get zero gratification getting a group, I get gratification upon completion. I may get into a group that absolutely horrible, do I feel gratification? No.
But boy, it sure was convenient getting that group.
I sympathize with folks who end up in guilds that go sour but that’s not exactly Blizzard’s problem to solve. For myself, the key has been to find guilds where you have more in common with the people inside than simply “likes playing WoW.” That’s the baseline experience that you can get from literally any guild, so those people need to go deeper - looking for other dimensions of compatibility like being parents, girl gamers, LGBT, political views, maining other games, being local to a specific region for IRL meetups etc., then using tools like a recruitment discord, RaiderIO or even this forum to find a match.
The one thing I would tell people NOT to do is to rely on the in-game tools to find their tribe. They really have not advanced much in 20 years, nor have the folks sending random invites to unguilded characters or yelling in trade chat.
I think vanilla was the only game where I made many friends out in the wild and that was because we were all new and exploring together.
After that I pretty much stuck to my social circles and guild. Guilds were the biggest factor in meeting new people and making friends for me.
And I have real life friends I have met in wow.
I think that’s how most people are. We have our social circles and guilds and those are who we socialize with. Few people are out to make friends wit every single person they meet.
And many tasks in wow need to get done like a weekly checklist and for those who have little time to play they have to decide how much time they have to get those things done vs stop and socialize with randoms
You make valid points, but doesn’t mean the op is wrong.
But even though you points are valid it also doesn’t mean your are right everything you said is all about you or the individual. You might have a kid in the lap, you might be hyper focused, you might have anxiety.
You, you, you……
Your reply though valid only highlights the ops issue. You want the game to be about you and you alone. The op wants the game to be about the community, a group, not all about himself.
The atmosphere blizzard has created has caused this. Beating timers, topping logs, are all things set in place which by defaults removes the time to chat while doing anything meaningful. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
When I complete a key with a group. I always say “thank you for group” followed by “you guys have a nice night.” What’s weird is that I almost always get a whisper if not mutiple saying you as well.
The reason this story is important is because people want to be social, but they don’t know when it’s acceptable
Half a good reply. The normal negative default attitude of players in game speaks to anti social behavior.
While I agree most use discord and that’s why chatting to n a lot of guilds in text form is down but that doesn’t excuse all the smart Alec’s in game constantly and lack of talk in pugs.
Granted if people deserve it because they act up I’m not talking about those instances.
Personally, while trade ad is probably the method with the widest reach, being connected to all cities, so you advertising from SW reaches all the way to Shattrath and even as far as Dornogal… just look at most of the folks in it and tell me anybody sensible would take 95% of folks in it?
In this regard I prefer to find folks in-game or on forums looking for a guild and contacts to discretely offer them a brief interview with myself. sort of a more friendly and less insurance riddled version of: “Yeah I met my future boss by crashing into his car in the parking lot.”
It does actually. Because the OP has unrealistic expectations for an online game in 2025, that everyone should be relying on in-game text chat to make him feel warm and fuzzy.
Back in Classic, rotations were simple enough that you could be in an in-game text chat mid-pull, or quests/traversal were tedious enough that the game doubling as a chat room made sense. That’s not the case anymore, and if Blizzard tried to degrade the game to get back to that point they would completely lose to every other online experience out there that doesn’t do that. The folks who want that Classic style already have Classic. Ruining Retail wouldn’t make everyone who likes it suddenly smile and switch over, they would simply quit.
“Hi” and “thanks for the run” are acceptable in current retail, yes. If that’s all you want, congratulations, you can do that.
