Do you know what kept casuals subbed in TBC? It wasn’t that we saw all the content or were given super flashy epics. It was that we had friends. We had friends because everyone needed friends in this game, so we had a drive to build up that friends list. Certainly the content was inconvenient for casuals, but it was the friendships we’d built to overcome that adversity that kept us coming back to WoW.
Today, we have boatloads of convenience, but we’ve lost any reason to make any friends. People don’t come out of their shells and will generally just log on, do some stuff on their own, and log off. Even group content feels solo.
Blizzard gives us all the content, all the epics, all the mounts, all the flashy things that make our characters look epic. But they’ve taken away something intangible. They’ve taken away the incentive to make friends. And that’s an issue for a social game.
People no longer need to be part of the community, which in turn shrinks the community. Every person who isn’t making friends is one less person available for everyone else to be friends with.
I’d rather not have to spend 2 hours just trying to form a group for a normal dungeon. Or 5 hours trying to find a queue for a BG on alliance side.
If you want friends, what’s stopping you from making them? You don’t have to stay only doing lfr, dungeon finder, or random bgs. If you want to go higher, you have to make friends.
You can do all those things solo, but the game is so much better when you’re doing it with people you see every week.
PUG’ing mythic+ can be a nightmare. Doing mythic+ with your friends/guild can also be a nightmare, but at least you can joke around or talk sh_t with them while you’re doing it.
Hey there, so there’s this thing called classic WoW coming out on August 27th and it’d be PERFECT for you! You should leave retail for classic if you desire people communicating. Leave us who love the current WoW to play it and stop bothering us with “no one wants to talk or play together anymore!”.
The community would be a lot different if the game was still built to promote friendship making. Generally for every asocial player that would quit, there were other more social players coming in and staying. That’s the community the game ran on.
I do miss having friends and pugging raids back in the day. I miss waking up on my day off in wrath forming a group seeing the same pally tank spamming for a group me groaning not the guy again he cant hold aggro but I still joined because reasons and made some friends sometimes.
That being said its not so much that you have less social people you are just meeting them more often, you still need friends for the most part to get really good gear regularly. But times change IDK if I could play the old game with the hours I work I remember my server emptying out by 3 am and thats when I get off work now.
People act like Classic is this magic pill that’s going to get people do the same thing they are doing in retail. The social aspect will be the same if the same people who are playing retail are going to be playing Classic.
