I doubt it. It was just as hard to find groups for things back in the day. Even toward the end of Vanilla fewer legitimate groups for low level dungeons were available. Folks just got their high level friends to run them through.
It’s the same in Classic. There’s no one forming dungeon groups the legitimate way. Plenty of 60 mages offering to sell runs though.
I still believe LFG was the best thing ever. It kept low level dungeons relevent and run the right way, with a group of appropriate leveled folks.
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This is absolutely true. Many guilds operate using Discord. I once joined a very large multi-server guild and their guild chat was dormant for months. Another accomplished raiding guild I joined had silent guild chat.
Also in the game-wide chat which is currently Trade Chat, even if people try and start up a conversation, two or three anti-social people will whine, gaslight,and shame everyone about talking politics. People can’t say anything anymore without some sort of abuse from these manipulating idiots who keep coming back with 50 accounts. And the ignore list isn’t nearly big enough to handle this! At least since the recent account bans conversations have started a bit. So that is positive.
The people have definitely changed and influenced the game systems, not the other way around. Nobody wants to have to deal with anyone else and their craziness anymore.
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And meanwhile, although topics like politics are not against the Terms of Service or against the game rating, which is rated Teen, topics such as explicit graphic pornography are permitted and encouraged by Blizzard. Personally, I don’t think adults should pick up teens in a video game. It’s disgusting.
Then why is classic also anti-social…?
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If Ford didn’t start mass producing cars, would we still be riding horse and buggies?
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!