A dozen years ago, you had to log into the game to interact with the friends you made there. That simply isn’t the case anymore. Those friendships have moved to discord and other places and can easily move between games.
You can’t use emotional blackmail to keep people coming back, as they can talk to their friends without keeping a sub. You have to focus on making the games FUN TO PLAY or people will move on to other, funner games.
Forced socialization won’t save WoW or WoTLK-c
Sure it can! Just design dungeons that actually punish players for playing poorly and encourage them to communicate in order to reduce the chance of wipes. Boom! Problem solved. 
I can get the oldschool lightly social dungeon experience right now, in current year! …Just not in modern versions of the game. It’s because dungeon design has degraded on a mechanical level and communication is usually seen as unnecessary.
I agree, forcing players to socialize isn’t a good idea.
Healthy socialization is a by-product of a healthy game. Currently, there’s too many people with different playstyles wanting everyone else to play how they play. Ideally, each person should be allowed to play how they want and over time they will encounter players who also play how they do and then - they socialize.
i agree. the time to fix or do something about it was back then, not now. making changes they should’ve done a decade ago won’t work, especially with these new generations of needing instant gratifications.
There was nothing to fix back then and nothing to fix today as far as community and social interaction goes (not to say there aren’t gameplay issues that could be reviewed). The community from back then and the social interactions that occurred because of it had nothing to do with the game.
For many people, it was the first time they could engage with people from across the country or even from different countries in an easy and accessible way. You could talk (read type before TS) for hours without long-distance charges and even virtually /wave or /cheer people. It didn’t matter if you were even playing the game content. I remember entire “play sessions” that consisted of sitting where ever my toon was when I logged in until I logged out hours later never having moved except to stave off the dreaded afk/logout.
As the OP astutely points out, all those interactions have moved to other more modern venues that are even more accessible. People don’t need WoW to interact with their existing friends or even to make new friends or meet people. It happened during the first few xpacs of WoW because those new communication channels didn’t exist or weren’t mainstream and accessible. Why would people choose to reduce their interactions to a chat window in a game in today’s world?
It was never about the game. It doesn’t matter what you do to the classic or retail versions of WoW, you will never revive that community because it never died. It moved and isn’t coming back to the early 2000s level of interaction.
Idk i used the bulliten board for a dungeon the other day, and now im the best man at the rogues wedding, and im actually donating a kidney to the tank, i think the healer made me their kids god parent.
This is what we could miss out on guys!
Wait, you all didn’t delete your discord and move to a strictly public Mumble server in order to help maintain the spirit of Classic??
I used to use the server forums from the time when WoW was released to talk to others (horde and alliance) on the server and used the guild websites from Vanilla on to post on the forums and sign up for raids pre-calendar. We used ventrilo for voice chat.
Sure Discord is a bit more advanced but it was NEVER all in-game for me (I guess the Blizzard forums were “tied to the game” but the guild websites weren’t…). It’s kind of strange that this doesn’t seem to be the case with many other people.
I was pretty happy with the overall 2019-2020 Classic Vanilla community and server stuff but find that things are way too much “like Retail” community-wise now - just a little over a year later. I haven’t quite figured out the reason for that. It may just be what the game itself encourages.
Whenever I read threads like this what people say just does not fit my experiences.
It’s basically the only reason I still come here; a habit from 10-15 years ago.
I do miss realm forums being active, but have no interest in the discord or subreddit. Something about the dedicated site is the only thing that does it properly.
It’s a consequence of larger server populations imo.
always a bigger fish.
Blizz: Cross server RDF bad
Also Blizz: 30k+ megaserver good!
I just redownloaded ventrilo
So you’ve been forced to socialize this entire time? Who was twisting your arm for 2 plus years?
Are you tanking?
But in all seriousness it really is never going to be the same and a big part of that is because a majority of us have already done this.
If they truly wanted us to be more social they should update thier in game voice feature or try and implement in game discord capabilities.
Discord is, for the most part, for relationships you already have, it’s not a replacement for meeting new people.
So saying that socialization in game isn’t important is just wrong.
I made tons of new friends on Classic, can’t say the same about Retail, GW2, FF14 and other modern MMOs.
Here’s how you fix the socialization problem, get rid of these people or punish them that treat people like garbage … problem solved. Most people are good people but it only take s a couple bad apples to ruin the barrel over time.
I feel like “forced” is a bit much, but there are benefits to creating “incentive”. A goid example might be if you get a 5% exp buff for doing a dungeon with guild members. Something that gives solo players a reason to try find a guild/group of players.
Of course solo players should be facilitated, but not catered to. A solo player shouldnt be massively behind people who find guilds/groups of people to regularly play with… but neither should they be expected to receive the rewards that come from coordinating a large group effort.
Blizzard tried those kind of incentives with guild perks in Cata. It doesn’t increase socialization, it actually just destroys casual play because people end up feeling forced to be in a guild for those benefits instead of the people they’re playing with.
There are ways around this though, for instance you can easily front load the majority of important perks instead of having them near the end of guild progression.
I think more detrimental to guild perks however, was the introduction of 10 man being equivillant to 25 man in terms of loot. With loot being equal, many guilds i knew fractured into smaller isolated communities because there was no reason to grow their community beyond the 10-15 people.
What was really detrimental was merging the 10/25 lockouts. That actively prevented people from going outside their normal group.