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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think those aided in it becoming less-social, but definitely isn’t the only reason.
Source: I’ve played Classic since launch and without those QoL features people are still anti-social, and toxic gamers. If anything, I’ve had less social experience in Classic at end-game than I do in retail.
The biggest issue to me is the cross-realm open world zones, and killing off of PvP and PvE exclusive servers. The exclusive server worlds is what made the community thrive imo.
Most players need a nudge to get out of themselves and be social with one another. The in-game systems like LFG were designed to help make that easier, but the players took that as an opportunity to be less social. I started noticing this around WotLK.
This is what the community wanted, and it got what it deserved. Now almost no one talks to anyone. And why should they if they never wanted to in the first place?
So that’s exactly the issue, the issue isn’t LFR/LFD exists. It’s that servers are too small and can’t support LFR/LFD. If you could literally only queue with your server you’d find that you might suddenly have long queue times as you got added to people’s ignore lists.
The people changed. People are anti-social now. Stand at the scrapper, and say hello to everyone that comes by. You wont get many hello’s or engagement of any kind.
I used to have hour long conversations all the time in vanilla. The social aspect was one of the best things about wow. My at the time girlfriend used to tease me about always being knee deep talking to someone, and never actually playing. Causing her to always need to loan me gold. I might have also been a serial talent switcher.
Yeah, basically that’s my entire point with this. In my opinion, Cross-server zones was a huge one, and the removing of PvP and PvE specific servers was a driving factor in the killing of WoW’s communities.
The way I like to think of this whole cross realm thing is comparing New York City to a tight-knit, Suburban neighborhood. Bleeding Hollow used to be a very popular PvP server, and you recognized almost all the same names doing WPvP, selling bags, enchants, etc, etc. That’s your tight-knit neighborhood. Then if you look at WoW in itself… it is New York City. A huge mass of people getting from A to B, doing what they need to do to survive the day. There could be groups of people there that can be considered a community, but there’s so many people that it really doesn’t matter. Blizzard basically took the small towns and abolished them, leaving everyone in a sea of people without meaningful connections.
On top of that, you can dive deeper into current gaming culture, average age of WoW players, and so many other factors like that.
People who just use blanket statements like “accessibility” and “QoL” changes as the main factors that aided in WoW’s social decline are being disingenuous. Classic is living, breathing proof that these QoL factors are not the only, or even main reason, why the social aspect in WoW, and other video games for that matter, is not what it used to be.
I agree. The canonization of Moirhaime as “the guy who cared about the community above all else” around here borders on cultish. He admitted outright that he didn’t think a WoW MMO was going to do the business it did…but when Vanilla launched and shattered every expectation at an unprecedented scale, he saw the dollar signs written on the wall and went right for them.
But hindsight is 20/20 and he’s allowed to look back on the decisions they made and be critical.
I grew up on Bleeding Hollow as well. I used to know all of the big names before everything got shared. And if you ticked someone off, it was entirely possible to get blacklisted back then, because the community was so tight knit.