I’m more social in classic than I am in retail, but I don’t enjoy classic more in proportion to the demanded socialization. If it had LFD instead of needing to be on when a bored 60 will nuke the dungeon for you (or less chance yet, you find a group around the right level), I’d probably play it more if anything.
This feels like a theoretical problem that doesn’t have a basis in reality. I mean, unless you only want hyper-social people to play your game, in which case see how that goes.
People are not People… the people that have left have been replaced by a new generation whose opinions and expectations have been moulded by mobile games and transformer movies. (And besides, what part of sitting in a city capital city spamming trade chat for hours sounds appealing? ) If you want to do this, nothing stops you. But as for people, yes, people have changed.
I’d say it became more asocial than antisocial, but yes.
LFR is a poor example since the people who use LFR were not raiding at all before it existed. LFD is a better example, since people did find groups before that.
That’s only half the issue, though. The other half is that you can’t invite people you meed in dungeon groups to your guild because they are on another server; you can’t even /friend them.
yawn.
the game has changed dramatically. saying that an entire population of players has grown more anit-social AS opposed to the OBVIOUS and massive changes the game has had just makes 0 sense. people are complaining that we don’t interact in the same way… yea, because we can’t any longer.
there is 0 reason to over complicate such a simple problem.
Of course it did. Any system that automatically puts people into groups of “free win” content (LFD, LFR, arena queues) encourages an anti-social, selfish style of gameplay.
Thanks for your incorrect feedback. Let me know when you got some stats to back it up with.
I realize this thread is 3 months old but.
I dunno, on classic I didn’t really notice much of a difference social wise compared to retail.
The social aspect of the game was largely forced on players. People who are anti-social resented that and complained. They could go back to manditory social interaction, but they would lose a lot of the already dwindling playerbase. Those that stay might be surprised at how much more fun the game is when played with other people, but the pace of life is just faster now. People don’t want to spend an hour putting a group together. There are people complaining right now that it takes too long due to how hard it is to find a tank. It might be best to just let it go.
yeah creating systems like x-realm and groupfinder definetly didnt contribute to players not caring about people they were grouping with since they didnt have to worry about repercussions for being a bad team member. /S
Many of the friends I made in game during the vanilla & TBC era were people I met from forming dungeon groups, or looking for help with an elite quest.
We put each other on our friends list, because we got along, and would then reach out to them directly when we wanted to do other things, rather than exclusively look for strangers in chat.
I’m still regularly talking and hanging out with many of those same people I met 15 or so years ago.
I’m not going to make a judgement here whether it was better then vs now, but the lack of an automated grouping system did incentivize players to form social bonds to get things done.
Yo! Back of my forum buddies!
Lose the attitude, it’s ugly and the hostility is not warranted, Astrius is one of the nicest people on the forums.
You’re making yourself look bad.
The more some jerk tells me “I must be social and play by their rules or they won’t let me in their groups” the less I want to be social with them.
It’s not the groupers being anti-social…it’s the group makers being anti-social.
I’m gonna call some BS on this. The primary culprit for the lack of social gameplay falls squarely on GC and Cataclysm merging the 10/25 lockouts, and essentially killing the friends and family style raiding guilds. Back in Wrath, there were ALWAYS PuG raids going on, in some form or fashion. I personally had 8 active characters that raided every week whether in a casual fashion or pushing Heroic content for achievements.
The “hardcore” raiders whined about seeing casuals running around with gear, and wanted to see raiding more punitive and limited. GC’s own “Get Gud!” post was met with ridicule and scorn, and at the end of Cata is when LFR Dragon Soul was first introduced due to the abject failure of getting casual players back into seeing the raid storylines. Making both tank and healer roles more difficult and punitive going into Cata also didn’t help, since it turned off existing players and discouraged new ones from enjoying the role. Just need to look at the long queue times and people complaining to see where that still hasn’t been addressed.
LFR as a concept is fine, the execution was absolutely terrible as there is ZERO incentive or reason for people to behave, without any actual accountability. Honestly, even if they gave incentives towards premade groups again, the game has shifted enough that it’s hard to argue to go backwards, especially considering other MMOs who do shared content more smoothly along with soloing.
I miss the “glory days” of WoW too, but let’s be honest about how they crafted their own decline. You want people to be more social and play together? Focus on better tools and balancing to do just that.
Vs how it used to be… Yes very much so.
It was the shifting culture of gamers, has nothing to do with what blizz gave us
I would say they were always less social with players they didn’t know, Blizz just removed some of the required social aspects like spamming in trade chat to find a group. Even in Vanilla I only socialized with guild mates, everyone else I spent as little time talking to as possible.
Short answer: Yes
Long answer: Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees
People will always take the path of least resistance if given the choice to do so. In this case, doing as much as you can by yourself and without having to worry about the extra problems that might occur when you include others. Why go through with the hassel of having to gather and corral a bunch of other schlubs to help you do something when you can just do most everything alone? Even the act of getting a group going requires no personal interaction with another human beyond killing MOBs together.
Ease of access has effectively put the social aspect of WoW, such as it is, on life support. For some, it hardly matters. For others, it’s a problem.
You could have done these things. But many people were not in the loop of skilled players. Most players never reached level 60 during vanilla. Judging by the fallout I saw in classic guilds I belonged to, that didn’t change.
Paladin is an odd example here, because even the best paladin was limited to healing. If they wanted to do damage or tank, it didn’t matter how good they were, they were still a meme class playing meme specs.
If normal/heroic dungeons were removed, that would certainly help you sell paid carries, wouldn’t it? And since paid carries don’t improve the skillset of the player being carried, it would also keep the majority of players from doing dungeons.
I guess that’s what you want. Exclusivity.
The vanilla experience was a unique one. The game was new, and everyone was learning it together. A lot of people who weren’t particularly sociable ended up making lasting friendships with some of those people. This is the internet, and if we’re hanging out on the internet, we are by definition less sociable than people who hang out with real life friends.
But people leave games. Your friends left, and now you want the game to make other people play with you. Go make friends. It isn’t the game that’s stopping you.
You’re free to make friends if you like people. That’s what normal people do. They make friends irrespective of whether those people will be useful to them.
I’m a loner who doesn’t do group content the way you seem to say you do. I have friends on my friends list I chat with every day.
This.
/10char
Well it did.
But that’s not WoWs fault, that’s just gaming culture in general these days.
See it all the time, people get into the game and just start looking for whats best, where to go, what to do, etc. A lot of people can’t seem to just pick up a game and play it anymore.