The community is there if you want it. You just have to work to find a good one. It will never be like the vanilla days again though. The solo, lone wolf and “I have two hours a week to play” portion of the playerbase would riot if they were forced to play with other players like back in the old days.
My thoughts for increasing community interaction wouldn’t make it necessary at all, however.
Adding guild halls give you a place to log out, hop in, and contribute to if you want, but you wouldn’t have to if you didn’t want to. Guild cosmetics and perks would be nice, but not necessary, nor something you have to contribute towards.
For those that want it, it’d be there. And as another poster mentioned above, necessary functions such as auction houses would still be in cities, giving the world the players it needs.
That was the last offset they put in (afaik) to population serving tools - the group finder prioritizes matching you up with players from your own realm.
Now if they updated it after all the merges, I couldn’t say. I’m on an unmerged realm.
But that’s the point to me. They’ve stopped putting in offsets to developmental features that erode community, but continued building out features for the solo player engaged in group content.
Time to swing the other way for a bit.
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“Community” doesn’t exist in MMOs in the way that it did in Vanilla-WotLK. That sort of thing REQUIRES that interactions between players be limited. You knew everyone back then because they were the only people you could play with without starting over. People tried to present themselves favorably because it meant they’d be invited to groups again.
But running a game in that way ensures that a sizeable portion of the game’s players would end up in a situations where the game is “less fun” or god forbid “unplayable” because of server populations.
LFD/LFR/Group Finder and Cross-Realm Grouping have ensured those players get to continue to enjoy the game without feeling forced to start over or spend real money to transfer.
At the end of the day, this is a video game, not a dedicated social experience. It has to be designed as a video game first, and unfortunately that hurt the Social side of things.
The other option was mass server mergers. Blizzard opted against that, probably because of the poor image it puts out, and even now that they have a tool to do that without forcing name changes and other issues on players, they underutilize it for some reason.
Too late to put the cat back in the bag on this one, anyway. Anything they could do would be an awkward “forced socialization” thing, like how they force Guilds to remain relevant by keeping archaic lockout rules in place for Mythic Raiding. “Community” should be a natural thing, not forced.
You’d have to get rid of sharding and cross-realm stuff. It was the server-specific pve and pvp community that made vanilla great from a social standpoint. Theres much more community in classic right now, but that also didnt capture it completely because there were server transfers and cross-realm pvp from early on.
Vanilla was really sort of uniquely great in that you got to know many people on the server…the downside is that if you’re on the wrong side of the faction balance the pvp queues are really long and your ability to pug pve content is much lower.
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It’s not a dev issue lol, it’s a player issue.
I agree with you on that, however that doesn’t preclude designing in a way that fosters community, nor is community curation a bad thing. Something that Blizzard failed to do as they though this would be a 2yr gig, tops.
The company seems really poor in attracting staff that could turn the ship around. At the point they’ve let it fall to, they’d have to hire an external professional company, I feel. 
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I agree! Having consistent, centralized locations could and I feel would make a big difference to building more of a community sense to the game.
While some folks nailed a solid example, ye olde days when Servers were the community, that’s something that’s clearly gone. However, we still have one consistent example (for as inconsistent it is per expac, lol): The Hub City
Every expac, Blizz creates a Hub City that the players congregate at and flow through, and it does generate a semi-decent amount of community interaction. Although, the comedy is that it’s not even the city itself but more the actual trade chat. However! That’s more or less the building point that I feel could be expanded upon!
You nailed a critical element: Having some form of Guild Hall!
Just trying to coordinate some place in the general world isn’t the same, having a place that’s personal to the players and can be “affected” over time, similar to the Garrisons, would engender a greater sense of commitment.
I mean, that’s kind of the general sense that Blizz is constantly pushing the players toward anyway. It’s why endgame “group” content is the persistent focus; when players develop ties with others, it makes them more likely to play more and for longer.
As such, it only makes sense to me that this would be a solid addition.
On top of that, making it be something that lasts beyond a single expac is important! Too much gets recycled per expac, which to me defeats the entire point of an RPG. There should be more actual development and growth, which again, can create a greater interest since investment then yields long term rewards.
Anyway, I’m rambling… I’m sure folks get the idea, lol
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Oh, sure, I just think we’re too far in the opposite direction to reverse course in this way without causing a mass exodus of players used to how things are now.
That’s why I said I think the only things they could design would be “forced”. Because it’d be more stuff like archaic lockout restrictions. Stuff that SHOULD be available to everyone but ends up artificially restricted to Guilds.
I think it can be done, but the game stops becoming what it is at that point.
-Remove incentives for speed running content
-Create long sprawling difficult dungeons where communication and class utilities and CC are needed (have Checkpoints to help with time commitments) (still have the shorter dungeons but create actual dungeon crawls alongside them…)
- no cross realm
- no teleportation to dungeons. You have to March there, and the dungeons are tucked away in elite areas
- make professions meaningful in ways outside of gearing ( alchemists can make gas grenades that CC mobs for example)
-have server wide events like the opening of AW
Shared struggle is a very real way to build community. (Look at the love for Dark Souls among its fans)
I’m not advocating for these changes, but if I were tasked with building server communities that is what I would do.
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Well, just in case I haven’t been clear, just because I want them to invest in fostering community does not mean I want them to reverse the things that allow “non-community group play”.
I think you can have a balance of both camps. I mean, the world seems to keep turning after all. ~.^
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Yes, because they’ve made adaptions inorder to fit into the atmosphere of modern internet gaming.
The overwhelming majority doesnt want to socialize. Just the opposite actually.
Most people solo play for alot of psychological reasons.
You have to take into account WoW’s core audience is between the ages of 30-40 now. They dont have the ability to be the “hardcore”, “no lifers” that they were when we were 12-18 playing Vanilla.
They also live lives of responsibility, expectations, and stress.
Group environments in game place responsibility, expectations, and stress on players.
WoWs core audience plays WoW to escape those things. Blizzard gradually adjusted over time to accomodate the change in their playerbase.
It is what it is.
We arent 14 anymore, we cant 100% invest ourselves into a game anymore. Therefore Blizzard isnt producing a game that requires you to fully invest yourself, rather they try to make everyone happy.
Via creating a atmosphere where you can succeed at a very high level, as a solo/casual player.
But also leaving the “hardcore” elements in play, by creating things like Mythic Raids, and M15+.
Sooo… having a guild space requires total time investment? I don’t think so.
The Guild Hall is a reprieve spot, not the primary content. Actual time investment would differ little to none from now.
I have a full time career and I’ve returned to school recently. Having community doesn’t require any further time commitment than I put in now.
The vast majority of guilds dont actually interact with guildmates lol.
Like, most guilds are just composed of people who want a chat room, without the expectation of having to play with those people.
That’s exactly right. Guild Halls would allow you to restore a bit of that activity without further time commitment
If you want to though, you could invest time and get cosmetics and whatnot. It gives you a social place without a strict time requirement.
Very true. IMO social media was the beginning of the end because before facebook and twitter people would log into MMOs just to sit around and shoot the breeze with others. My first MMO was SWG and I spent numerous hours sitting around a campfire with others or hanging out at the cantina talking to dancers. Even when WOW came along players would hang out in the game for hours talking while grouping up for a raid or dungeon. People talked about sports, movies, other games, their family…whatever. Now that people are doing those things almost 24/7 on their phone, it’s gotten to the point that they need an escape from it. Games work great for that. Now when I log in, I just want to complete my content. If it’s a raid night, we shoot the breeze at certain points, but the main focus is downing the bosses. When our time window is up, we break for the night and I log off.
Having said that, I still don’t understand why non socials congregate to an MMORPG, a genre that is all about social interaction and doing things with other people. There are so many other games out there that are single or multiplayer online. They’re better off playing those type of games (Diablo) then coming to a game like WOW and demanding the entire gear progression design of the game to be changed.
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I think we’d have to replace most of the players with new ones.
Geeze how many times do I have to say this.
Player housing done the way other mmos do it DOES NOT keep players out of the world. It is a place to decorate and hang mementos and trophies. What are players going to do there? There is nothing to do.
Garrisons were not housing. They were your own personal city in an expac with no shared capital city. That’s why players stayed in their garrisons (that and no content at the end).
Guild housing COULD take players out of the world. It depends on how the feature was made, but at the very least it would do so if a guild was just hanging out before a raid. If you put any garrison-like features in it, guild housing will most certainly make for an empty world.
—Garrisons killed the MMO feel.
—Class Halls were just a place you had to run to do certain tasks. They weren’t anything like housing at all.
—The Pandarian farm was as close to decent housing as the game has ever gotten. Partly phased but you saw lots of players outside your phased area, nobody hung out much in the instanced part after doing farm tasks. The Pandarian “cities” were always well-populated.
Wish I could like this more than once…
The great Sylvanas Windrunner tried to save us all, but that young renegade Alliance pseudo-king ruined everything by killing our allies in order to quench his thirst for power.
#DeathToTheAlliance #ForTheHorde