Not even a relevant comparison, try again. Other car companies would have been making cars, however WoW wouldn’t have died because ESO had a LFG function and WoW didn’t. People playing WoW would still have been more social because it would have been required.
LFG is fine, nothing against it. Even with LFG it’s the same way, end of xpac, people get friends to carry them because it’s easy and facerollable content.
Best part of LFG still lies within the Custom group section though.
For sure. I was just commenting on how even before LFG it was still hard to find legitimate groups toward the end of the expansion.
The staying power of Classic/vanilla is amazing. I thought the dropoff would be much bigger at this point even with AQ. Many people apparently prefer the simpler game design and experience. And crazy stuff like Grand Marshall/High Warlord grinds and events like the opening of AQ gates that have disappeared from retail.
I didn’t say the game died…? It’s just that the community is just as social in classic as they are retail.
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The game is designed to be antisocial. Timers and hard dps checks turn people against each other. How many people that are in friends and family guilds actively pug progression kills because they know the folks they actually like can’t do progression(as fast). I know tons. Look at dungeons–they reward you for going so fast you can’t even say hello without a weird comment or kick from group.
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Classic/vanilla forces people to be more social than retail but I don’t think that’s the main reason why so many people are still playing it this long after launch.
Being forced into something doesn’t change the nature of a person. When you do quests that forces you to be in a grp, you grp up and leave, you don’t have a social conversation.
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Don’t know if it’s a thing in Classic but the threat of being blacklisted in vanilla was the stick in the ‘stick and carrot’ which helped keep things more civil than in retail. Ignore just isn’t the same thing.
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The problem with the genre is that the games are fundamentally too time intensive for most normal people. Forum warriors might disagree, but why woild companies not make the game more accessible to a wider audience? Especially considering how much it costs to run and maintain the game.
Having said that, I would say Wow was fine with its old model, and was fine with accessibility. But, the end game was easier to get into for casual players.
If they just left the game with 1-2 modes of difficulty, and were not so obsessed with endless time gated time sinks, they could have had just kept things as is. With wolk there were more subs then they are now, and their design philosophy was working well.
I just find Blizzard has this annoying trait of changing things that work well already. And this is a big one. Things were not broken with older expacs, subs were great, yet still they changed everything. Blizzard got greedy imo and now no one is really happy.
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People bring LFR as a reason, but I think cross realm grouping is effecting the anti-social aspect of it more.
Because before cross realm grouping, you had to have good rep on your server.
I don’t mean just your performance, but as a human being.
If you’re a d***, no groups will invite you unless you name change or server change.
You also had a limited player pool to choose from, unless you were in a very high pop realm.
When pugging back when we didn’t have cross realm groups, I would commonly encounter the same players I grouped with before by coincidence. See each other in the AH, etc. I use to like that.
Right now with cross realm grouping, its just, link achieve/io score.
Take best player, get s*** done, and gg bye.
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I agree with you on that. I would add that time spent to learn and time available to play aren’t necessarily the same kind of time. See LFR as prime example for that.
Do a stupid forteen rank grind along the lines of Grand Marshal/High Warlord (doesn’t have to be pvp) and see how many and how much time retail players sink into that. This would be a good test to see if Classic/vanilla features can draw in players in retail (sorry but the 15-rank cloak grind in BfA doesn’t have the same epeen value).
I think the word he was looking for is “asocial”.
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Foul necromancy!
Back! Back into the grave with you!
When we say the game is creating an antisocial atmosphere it’s clearly because the game is encouraging people to not play the way they need to play for the last 1-5% of content that exists in the game.
Pretty simple example how many people were required for you to reach max level? 1 probably, right? Just you.
How many were required for you to reach max AP level? 1 probably right? Just you.
Same goes for rep, for gearing (to a large extent).
So what’s left? That M+ / Raiding / PvP scene which is a tiny percent of the actual game experience.
If you spend 95% of your time in WoW alone you’re not spending it networking in the game and playing with others. Worse you’re probably not encountering mechanics that would require communication.
So when the time comes that you need to do that you’re ill-equipped to do so. The people who’ve been networking and using comms are quick to get annoyed with you.
And so the toxicity is born. This is the root of the antisocial atmosphere in WoW.
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It’s more a combination of all the chores they encourage you to do on weekly/daily basis and that most of these activities are solo play. Takes too much time. Most people Have limited Warcraft time available to them. No time to push content with other players. They have designed the game this way.
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Short answer, is yes. People generally take a path of least resistance, and socializing is a path of resistance, even if it’s for the greater good, or their are long term benefits. Options, modes and functions in game which ease gearing, travel and questing, also incentivize a path of less resistance, or social disassociation.
A person could hypothetically stop what they’re doing in game, and talk with random people, but why would you? If your only answer is “because they can talk to people”, well, that’s not good enough.
So, the easing of in game objectives (quests, pvp, raiding, dungeons, trade), has weakened the social network in WoW. The social networking in WoW was also hurt by server mergers. I think if the mergers were handled much better at the onset, we’d have a much different picture of things today.
Well when servers had identity, instead of all the CRZ nonsense, people actually knew each other out in the world somewhat and conversations had more meaning. I met a lot of cool people just by healing dungeons for fun.
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Yea, CRZ is probably One of the biggest factors for sure. People from other realms might as well be NPCs. I use to be familiar with people on the enemy faction even just cause I’d see them all the time in BGs or fight with them over quest mobs. I couldn’t tell you the name of even one alliance player on my server now.
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I feel you. The only people I recognize are forum posters I occasionally run across.