Bold words for someone who hasn’t even maxed out their fishing in BFA.
If this is your reasoned reply then we don’t have anything left to discuss. You’ve conceded I’m right.
And therein lies the problem: you only want to be grouped with people who play the game the way you want to play it.
So forcing grouping is not going to solve anything.
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More often than not single player and no contact with other players needed are used interchangeably. I doubt that people are arguing in good faith that WoW is a 100% single player game.
I’d argue that mods or the ability to be played offline don’t make a single player game. But that’s just my take on it.
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That isn’t what I asked you.
I asked you why you would expect people conditioned for group play and understanding of their class / role to be fine grouping with people conditioned for the opposite?
You can’t fault either party here. You have to fault the system that created this division. Instead you’d rather post about my fishing score. It is what it is. Nobody really wants to admit they’re wrong on the internet. 
Forcing grouping actually fixes all of these problems. By being forced to group you are forcing new players to learn their classes, forcing communication and an understanding of what roles are.
So when they do arrive at the end game it all makes sense and there are no surprises. It’s the same as a public speaking class. The more you do it the less anxiety there is when you need to do it.
I’m going to vote that it’s people.
This is absolute bull… Classic was so cancerous that a good portion of people were /leaving general and trade. It was like if you took some group of 4chan/reddit incels and threw them into WoW. The stuff they would talk about was horrible and the behaviors were terrible as well.
Tag a quest mob while someone else is near you? Get all kinds of hateful whispers or they’d train mobs to you to get you killed. Try to invite someone on the same quest, either they decline you and continue to beat you to tags on everything, or they accept it and then never say a word, even if you try to chat. Then once they are done using you like a tool, they drop group without a word.
The simple truth is that I care more about my fishing score than I ever will about my dps.
That’s not a fault of the game, it’s a feature. It’s what (in my unproven opinion) fundamentally makes MMOs such a lasting genre: the freedom to play in a variety of ways and towards a variety of goals.
I have never turned down a request from a friend to help them with group content. But it’s not something I seek out, it’s not something I’m ever going to spend a lot of time mastering. Climbing the mythic progression or PvP ladder is never something I’m going to aspire towards. So if you want to be grouped with me, you’re going to be grouped with a fisherman.
Your concern over fishing is a non-issue. Nobody is talking about making fishing a group only affair.
What the concern is that you as a fisherman might decide to go into a raid not having ever done anything like it while expecting seasoned players to accept it. That’s impractical.
But I don’t want to raid.
You don’t but others do.
Others expect to go into a raid party not knowing their class / roles and not communicating and expect to be taken and when the group wipes because they don’t know what’s going on they expect the group to be cool about it.
That’s impractical. I’m not blaming them by the way. I’m just telling them that the game conditioned them to fail by giving them a solo and ezpz leveling route. The entire world prior to dungeons and raids is insidiously easy mode.
All socialization in this game is based on guilds, join a good guild, have a good social experience
And warfronts would have been fixed by removing high-end raiding/mythics and thus changing the expectation that the endgame would be hard instead of fun.
But I’m not going to lobby for that because I don’t think the game is improved by throwing all other playstyles under the bus until only mine remains.
We need to find better solutions.
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I think that’s also an issue. Instanced content is exclusive by nature and forces the developers to come up with more and more challenging content to an exceedingly smaller number of players.
I’m a fan of the game being accessible and challenging at the same time while not growing two different communities and then smashing them together at end game.
The solution is to prepare people for end game while they are leveling. Namely group content through a much more challenging open world. To that end putting some of this high quality instanced content back into the world so people spend more time on the regular doing these mechanics and encounters while not being excluded for practice.
But my endgame is fishing.
(ok, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but the point is that my endgame isn’t your endgame … you’d be putting me in content I don’t enjoy just to prepare me for an endgame I don’t want to play; and no matter how prepared people are, you will eventually have to say “no” to some anyway when they hit the limits of their ability/time/experience)
( by the way, I’m not saying that having some harder paths available would be bad just that if you want everyone playing the same game, the difficulty will have to be the lowest common denominator; I also understand that I’m not able to fully appreciate the scale of the problems you are facing in recruiting from the pool of new/returning players )
( and I promise I’ll stop editting this post now 
)
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“Being part of a guild” meant only ~30% of the population was doing raids. Even now, with LFR you only have ~60% of the population doing raids. Devs didn’t want to spend their time making vast content for a minority of the population.
The answer is in the middle of course.
A reasonably challenging endgame experience in the world where networking skills aren’t so difficult and the content isn’t demanding you be a 5-10 year pro. In the world to discourage the exclusivity demands of instanced content. A more forgiving approach to building community and preparing new players for the actual MMORPG experience.
I’m a strong anti-instance player who grew up playing MUDS, CTF games like Tribes and EverQuest. Back then it was a fair balance of challenge and networking that made the games very special.
No, this is where you’re getting it wrong. Players don’t mind a difficulty curve so long as it’s progressive and non-toxic. M+ participation proves this. We need to be better players to warrant being in a mythic+ group and we acknowledge with continued participation that we are fine with that.
Where this goes wrong is having an impossible difficulty curve like between normal, heroic and mythic raiding. I think LFR was a mistake as is mythic difficulty. Normal raids with progressively harder bosses in the open world where players cannot be excluded is a fine start to fixing the problem. Also reducing the time spent getting to level cap while introducing some group needed parts and trial sessions so players fundamentally understand their class and role. This is where the game becomes gold.
The problem really isn’t anything to do with the game itself. The fact is that, back in 2004, the idea of talking with someone else online in realtime was a new and exciting idea with very few popular locations to do that. Nowadays, such services exist all over the place, for those who would enjoy being social. Like, the majority of my guild’s discussions and organizing occurs over Discord and Facebook. Why socialize in a game that was barely designed for it when I have numerous services and sites that let me do it with more tools?
No it wasn’t. MUDs have had this functionality going all the way back to 1978 with Roy Trubshaw’s game.
The stuff that released in the 90s was coined graphical MUDs which later became MMORPG.
Doom, Quake and Diablo all preceded these MMORPGs and had online chat offerings while playing the game.