Culture has changed, I agree. That doesn’t eliminate the psychological aspect of actually sharing a “physical” space with others. It’s not novel, you’re right, but it still adds a different layer to interaction than just chat.
Apologies, that was a reference to the post I was quoting from, and was not in reference to the health of the game. The “ship” in my post is the “community ship” not the “sales/playerbase ship”.
I disagree, if it was society then this feeling wouldn’t exist in classic, which it does.
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I have received nothing but silence from Classic. People randomly invited others to group for a quest, never said a word, then left group. No one spoke in chat unless they were asking “LFD” consistently. There was no sense of community there either.
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The wider our world gets, the more we come to realize that the jerks abound more than we originally thought.
That is as true in here as in the world in general.
I don’t think you can. WoD cleaned out the social/joiner types and I don’t think they will ever be coming back. Even if Blizzard knew how to attract them the changes would alienate the current player base. It’s pretty much lose/lose for both sides no matter what happens now.
Personally - I am not putting any effort into community stuff these days. WoW is solo play for me. 
My thoughts towards the community element of Retail
I’m 50/50 on the matter. Society is going down the tubes. As far as WoW goes, the problem is too ingrained now. Classic clearly shows that since people kept talking about wanting the community aspect of pre-Cata WoW back, and yet they still don’t talk and communicate in groups.
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I wouldn’t say as a whole. I’m 100% in favor of all the positive things about society and 100% against all negative things in society. Yes, I know. I’m very helpful. 
Only you can bring it back. Times have changed and people have changed how they relate to each other in game. I feel the community is gone forever.
There are definitely features that disconnect us in my opinion. The best feeling was being on a thriving server full of RP and PvP and the only thing that separated us is when we had raids clashing against each other and phasing had to step in otherwise it was a server crash.
Now it just seems that server choice is just a cosmetic feature and almost everything you do is like queue’ing up for dungeons where you meet a random person you more than likely will never see again.
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This may be true to some degree but those features are related to server utilization and capacity so they won’t be undoing those changes.
Yeah not possible buddy I wish.
Yeah and that’s the conclusion I’ve come to as well. It’s unfortunate since I’m more of a community type player but it’s not going anywhere.
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The funny thing is my wife in my same guild and server we can’t even see each other 1/2 the time in Oribos unless we are grouped. We also play on one of the smaller “connected” servers.
Its simple. We kill the Batman.
Import some of the community mechanics seen in other MMOs, then improve them.
Some starters that could be improved (because while OK in their other games, each game kinda only halfway did it).
Some of these ideas are ‘bad’ in the MMOs they come from… I’m suggesting Blizzard look at the motive behind the idea, and fix the ‘bad parts’ to make a new idea that works better:
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Bonuses for having people in a dungeon or raid that have never done it before - This one comes from FFXIV. Everyone in a group gets a bonus if someone is that group is new to the content. It makes people more accepting of “noobs” and has done a LOT to reduce PUG drama. It could be expanded or tailored a bit.
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World events. GW2 and FFXIV both have ‘events’ systems They get players out into the open world. Both have fallen off a bit in places where they fail to offer current rewards. GW2 maintains popularity of these better by having newer ones tied to new and/or popular story chapters, popular grinds for achievements, mounts, etc. FFXIV shows how these can fail in vertical progression games if they’re only tied to leveling content.
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Bring back world bosses. Remember these in Pandaria - world bosses people actually went to? Unlike the ones that people mostly ignore in later content? Look at GW2 and ESO for how farming world bosses is a major part of the content. Now… tie it to communities and guilds. Guild points for buying “something” that are earned by doing these in guild or community premade groups. The something could be minipets, mounts, transmogs, etc - points that let you unlock ones you don’t yet have that are from old content. Could also be a place to farm up valor points…
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Server vs Server PvP. Instead of faction. ESO and GW2 both do this. It gets people talking to others on their server. Both games offer lessons on ways it has worked and ways it has failed.
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Remove timers from M+. Put in some other gauge. Timers force people to speed run, which means no wasting time socializing… Over in GW2 I’m do high ranked fractals. I find that as I’ve done these I’ve felt more of a sense of being on a team than I do in M+ here. It’s not timed, but the further up you go the more challenging it gets, so you have to talk to each other. The older fractals show how to do this wrong. The newer ones show how to do it right.
Mini-raids. FFXIV has single boss ‘trials’ - they’re not very social at all. GW2 has Strike missions. They also fail. BUT both were attempts to an idea: small group challenging content that can be run by less hardcore players but which require socializing. Examine it, fix the flaws - do it better here.
- imagine the ability to form a 5 person team and go to any old raid boss scaled to the current level. Just that one boss. In a content format that turns on WoW voice (like what happens in Overwatch). Cannot be queued for, has to be formed manually. Drops that boss’s old gear, but at the current tier’s ‘normal raid’ iLevel. And valor points. And that gear can be upgraded with valor points up to heroic tier (but not too quickly).
Overwatch notion: auto-turn on voice in groups. You can disable it, but have to do so each time you join a group. By default it’s on.
- Some people would HATE this, but… it gets people talking…
Commendations:
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FFXIV has a commendation system. But in an epic fail move they made it a ‘weekly quest’ to hand out 5 of them… so people just spam them out… Instead… tie this to the queue system, as a ‘semi-friend’.
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if 2 people have comm’d each other, then when one queues for something, the other’s LFG icon flashes. If they both queue, the system tried to pair them. Make it account and not character based. If only one person has comm’d the other… the one who has NOT given out a comm sees a list of ‘people who have comm’d me in the last 7 days’ - and can comm those people back. Failing to do so removes the connection from both.
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make all ‘friend’ elements work like the ‘battle.net’ friend system, but character based. Leaving the ‘battle.net’ one for account. As in… anytime you friend someone it only works if the other person accepts it, and once done you can cross server invite each other, and use it to chat. And either party can remove it without notice to the other person.
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Sorry if this has already been said, but it would be very difficult now simply due to the fact that most of the community was server based and with the WoW population not being what it once was, if you took away the cross realm systems, some servers are so small it would be impossible to get anything done. Possibly even if there were cross faction PvE. Blizz would need to do a lot more realm connections and allow cross faction PvE, but even then it still might not be enough if they don’t fix the problems that are causing players to leave.
Honestly, I felt it the greatest when I finally got a smartphone.
I was late to the party, I got one 2 years ago when it became necessary to do my real life job.
And suddenly all my social interaction in real life disappeared. Where I once talked to people in the lunchroom, I was now just another person staring at my phone.
I don’t know that we can undo any of this. Nobody is going to give up the things that have caused it. The answer might be something pushing forwards, rather than backwards.
I seem to remember when I didn’t raid a lot of times I traveled with people to dungeons across the world and not just click a button for a bunch of randos from other servers. The game itself is setup for easy access and sacrificed the incentives to encourage socialization. That ship sailed long ago and I don’t think it’ll ever come back unless Blizzard is willing to toss out LFD/LFR as it stands and remove cross realm zones and things (except BGs) while merging servers so there’s a bunch of medium to high population realms.
So yeah… won’t be happening anytime soon…hic!