This is such a ridiculous point to argue. The game has clearly changed in ways that make social interactions substantially more difficult then in the past. The players, or gamers in general, haven’t had some huge change in the past 4-5 years to account for the anti-social aspects in the game now. There hasn’t been some huge societal shift. People are people are people. Young, old, w/e.
Instead, we have a game that has changed in massive ways.
Realms are no longer unique. Good luck running into the same person twice.
Guilds are no longer needed to clear even some of the toughest content in the games.
LFR and LFG have made doing content incredibly simple. Now, you don’t even need to look for a group. Just cue up.
More and more solo content has been added to the game. Everything from pet battles to horrific visions, a huge part of the game is now completely a solo experience.
Classes are far more homogeneous these days and needing to group with tanks or healers or even dps is almost completely unnecessary for the majority of the content in this game. In the past, healers didn’t have the damage to quest well in the world, now they are just behind dps. Tanks and dps barely need healers at that. Outside of dungeons and raids, you don’t have to group even for ‘tough’ quests that supposedly require 3-t people.
Even leveling now is fine to do solo. I remember leveling in BC and needing to find groups for ring of blood and other essential quests. That’s almost completely gone now.
Teams were removed from arena and PvP in general is largely a solo experience now.
I can go on and on and on. The game just doesn’t require players to group any longer. You game didn’t adapt to the people, they created a game to make it more accessible to everyone, and in the process, we lost something.
In wotlk, I started doing pugs and ran into the same people every friday and saturday night. I ran into those people so much we got to know each other. One of those guys I eventually started doing arena with and now… 12 years later we are still friends. He was in college at the time and just a few days ago got married. All because we were on the same realm and just saw each other often.
The game lost that. Get this, when I’m on Tich… I’m actually phased to people on my frien’ds list… FROM TICH. It’s nuts. I’ll be on discord with friends and we will both be in the same zone and we don’t even see each other until we group. That used to NEVER happen. Now… I don’t even see people from tich at all. It’s all cross realm stuff. Good luck running into the same person twice.
So people wonder why the game has become so much more anti-social, well, that’s because being social is tougher now. Almost all the avenues for meeting people have changed.
It’s a combination of the two, IMO. The convenience features added over time have undoubtedly made it easier to do whatever content you like without ever talking to anyone else. It became more efficient to blast through content without any sort of discussion in advance, and then that became the norm.
Yes, because I have always needed a stupid videogame to force random internet people to talk to me, and be my friend Also posting in a necro skinwalker thread
It’s a good thing Realms are no longer unique. There is far less character assassination, blackballing, and forcing people to transfer because of a noob mistake or a loss of temper that can happen to anyone. Just a quick look at the cesspool that is the “community” of Classic’s forum shows a thread where a guy gets blackballed because he gquit a guild over OS going over MS because he was new. If you want this to become the norm again then Classic is waiting for you.
Guilds are still needed for most people, and not only that, but you prove that there is indeed still socializing as it takes a very outgoing person to pug their way to success. For most people that simply isn’t an option so they find a guild, and then only socialize with them. The pugger you hypothesize has to deal with all kinds of people to get the same results.
What’s more social - spamming for a group in chat for hours, failing, and then logging off in frustration, or queuing up and grouping with other players in a fairly timely manner to get wanted content done?
More and more solo content has helped keep this game alive. It simply cannot survive long term without it. You are being both selfish and shortsighted if you want to take this away from people perfectly willing to spend money on the game for that content. There is nothing wrong with solo content.
You are exaggerating here. When it comes to things like mobility for example there is far less homogenization than ever before. Just compare priest, lock, dk, and paladin mobility to druid, monk, and dh mobility.
You also certainly do still need tanks and healers. Also, healers could level up solo at all points in the game’s history. It was slower, but was not impossible. I could solo some elite quests as a healer that I could not do as DPS in vanilla.
Leveling has always been fine to do solo. Just simply skip what you can’t solo.
When were teams removed from PvP? You pug your way to Grand Marshal or Gladiator lately?
You could go on and on, but you still wouldn’t have a valid point. Socializing is up to YOU. Expecting to artificially force people to socialize with you is a prescription for disaster. They are not going to do it. They’ll just quit which is what I think you are really after.
what is this argument even? character assassination? blackballing? you’re using that as an argument for cross realm content? this does’t even affect 99.999% of the players on the game…
cross realm was introduced to help low pop realms at first and then was pushed on to every realm. I’d assume it’s to minimize server load and spread traffic around.
for what reason though? content doesn’t require it. there is substantially more people pugging these days… just hit up lfg. even guilds are sitting in LFG for MYTHIC raids man. why? because they can’t fill spots. SHOCKING.
again, why is this even an argument?
convenience doesn’t make the game more social. that’s the whole point. it’s the conveniences that make it harder to socialize because you have less reason to interact to form groups.
look man, i’m not arguing otherwise. I’m only here to say WHY the game isn’t as social as it once was. I think the quality of life aspects of the game have improved the game, but we lost something in the process.
i’m not even slightly exaggerating. are we playing the same game? that has been one of the biggest arguments for the past few expansions. the game is substantially more homogenized now. very few abilities are unique and less and less classes/specs are taken for what they bring… because what they bring isn’t needed any longer.
yawn.
yawn.
yawn.
been playing healers for the last decade and saying it was slow is a massive understatement. I can keep up with dps now with cds as a healer. back in wrath, I’d just swap specs because the damage was so incredibly bad it was take most tasks 2-3x longer.
A valid point? What in the hell?
I’m telling you exactly why we have less social interactions and you respond like that? yea, lets blame the players. clearly the players have changed so much and are less social now. you didn’t even offer up a valid point. you didn’t offer up anything. most of that is barely passable on an anecdotal level.
The game has CLEARLY changed a lot over the years and how we interact with players has changed as well. Lets stop trying to complicate a very simple matter.
My point is proven by the simple fact that there is nothing in the game that makes “social interactions substantially more difficult then in the past” except that are less forced than before indicating positively that peoples preferences have changed. They simply do not want to interact in game to the degree that they did before, because otherwise they would.
Most of the points you brought up are in response to players demands; the othes are balance issues and power-creep issues; problems for which Blizzard has been struggling with.
But the quickly two issues specifically, CRZ and LFG. CRZ was a solution to populate otherwise empty zones. LFR/LFR were a direct response to players demand for some way to see end content and find groups without spam trade for hours; only to be denied by people who wanted gear levels equal to or higher than the content seeking to be run provides.
The point being is that the game changed in response to people, not the other way around. Forcing people to socialize in ways they do not way will kill the game; other games that have tried have died. WoW is a successful game by any standards; for a 15 year old game to have this level of customer engagement means that they are doing something right; part of that something right is adapting to player preferences.
that is two VERY different things. one is contending that the players themselves have changed, which they haven’t. the other is saying the players wanted those changes to happen, which is FINE. I’m not arguing otherwise and hasn’t even been something I have addressed.
Preferences have never changed. We have always wanted quality of life improvements in the game. When LFG became a thing, everyone was happy. No one was saying… well gee, I wish the game was more inconvenient and I wish it took longer to make groups…
The game just used to have an incredible amount of down time. There was positives and negatives to that, but in the end, it gave all of us more time to sit around and just chat. It sometimes took hours to make groups to clear 25 nax in wrath. The whole time that was happening, people were chatting and discussing strats or just shooting the breeze. Regardless of the WHY or WANT, that is something we lost.
yea. duh. who cares if players demanded it. players have been asking for improvements to the game since day 1. Like… more graveyards. Players asking for positive changes doesn’t mean the players are NOW more anti-social.
That has been the whole point here man. People are arguing that the players are NOW more anti-social which is garbage. The people playing now, in makeup, are no different then 10 or 20 years ago.
Yea, and there is 0 issue there. The players wanted to see the content. They weren’t doing it because they didn’t want to talk to players. They weren’t doing it because they were anti-social. They wanted LFR because they wanted to see the content…
You are arguing a completely different point then me. I don’t care why those things came about and would completely agree that many of them came at the requests of the players… I’m simply saying that we have grown more anti-social though because of those tools. GOOD OR BAD. I don’t care.
I would argue that the game changed because Blizzard made the decision to attempt to appeal to a wider and wider audience over time. Instead of tailoring several games to match differing demographics they decided to milquetoast their one game to bore all demographics equally.
Absolutely. Look at the PvP communities…solo shuffle…solo Que rated battlegrounds…the idea of guilds or communities or group content like Rbgs is gone for the solo Que player.
Don’t they have like dungeons you can do with NPCs? Bah…massively multi online role playing game….nonlonger massively or
Multi….all going Solo
I think this is the problem with the old school wow mentality. It’s not enough that your gear is good. You have to make sure that others don’t have it before it’s meaningful and you can feel like you’ve earned it.
As terrible as some aspects of retail WoW are, I’m glad most gamers have evolved beyond this and the ones who haven’t can go play some iteration of classic.
Well yeah, obviously. If you need to find your dorm room on the first day of school, and you could A) ask one of the attendants standing around or B) Follow the signs, there’s a significant portion of the population that would follow the signs and forego the conversations.
Also posting in a necro skinwalker thread 
