It’s the players and it’s always going to be the players, it’s always going to be the path of least resistance to get things done as fast as possible, whether that means boosting or min maxing your group for the fastest clears
Having RDF in the game or not literally has no impact on the social aspect of the game but nobody wants to blame themselves - If we don’t get RDF i’ll fly to the dungeon that took ages to organise and not talk instead of be teleported and not talk?
Tbh if somebody makes conversation in either i’ll join in.
I think internet culture has just changed a ton since early to mid 2000’s. People used to be mindblown by playing with people in different states, countries, etc. Socializing was way more common and encouraged on the internet as a whole.
I agree, I don’t think RDF killed socializing in WoW. The players themselves did.
I have played on the classic servers and aside from some small talk about which role someone is going to be it’s pretty rare I see a lot of socializing. The most socializing I see in WoW is in the trade/global chats, PVP, and when forming for raids or any higher-end content.
edit: oh, and in guilds. That’s probably #1. All of the long-term friendships I have made are from guilds. Never groups lol
ofc people changed, new generation are never like the old generation, in the past you could find people helping you for hours for no reason and without waiting for anything in return, Nowadays people will say "why should i help you? “why should i do anything for free?” but i don’t blame them, they was born in he era of smartphones!
i also would like to say that what people call “Anti-social features” was not added by blizzard to eliminate social aspects in the game, in whole wow history socializing been getting lowered with time and so blizzard only tried to help people be able to play or else the game would’ve died.
as for the shop boosts Blizzard only introduced such service after they observed how most players are willing to pay to speed up level, Whether it’s a new player or an alternative account, same goes for tokens! blizzard knew that millions of players are buying gold from 3rd party site and so they added the token.
-when they released classic 2019 blizzard faced the reality of classic which was about Thousands of players buying leveling boosts with gold and that’s why they put the lvl 58boost in tbcc, and now tons of people are buying gear with gold (gdkp) i won’t blame blizzard if they added tokens in wrath-c, blizzard are just acting based on the player behavior
So it’s the players who destroyed the game with their greed…not Blizzard!
I’d like LFD/RDF in WotLK solely for conveniance and maybe that’s why it’s bad.
People say LFD is bad because it makes the game less social and I can see why they’re saying that. If LFD were in WotLK you’d essentially be on a conveyor belt, getting slotted into groups, teleported to the dungeon, and once you’re done, repeat the process as many times as you want.
I’m sure that people will talk in dungeons regardless of LFD being in or not and I’m also sure that some groups would’ve formed without the use of LFD. What LFD does is remove the need to stare at your LFG channel and your LFG Bulletin Board until a dungeon you want shows up.
Quality of Life features while good for players, isn’t always good for a game.
I think you hit the nail on the head with your first sentence about the internet culture changing. I think there’s actually more socializing in WoW nowadays, just in a completely different way.
Just about everyone I know is socializing with friends/guildies on Discord while playing WoW instead of typing in chat because it’s 1000x more efficient and social to actually talk to one another instead of typing to one another.
Thanks to apps like Discord, I can now talk with my friends/guildies and even watch a stream of them playing, whether I’m logged into the game or not. I still have a lot of friends (20+) from Vanilla/TBC/WotLK that I met playing 15 years ago, but have probably made even more friends this time around and have played far less.
in 2005 we had team speak and ventrilo, people spent everyday on voice with their guild but in the same time they was socializing with any randoms they meet in game (world/dungeon/bg…etc)
nowadays people tend to only communicate on discord and that made wow looks like not a social game to many players who can’t find any interaction .
