That is a strange encounter but I really don’t see a line between that and “I signed up to run a dungeon with 4 strangers and now I’m offended that one of them typed.”
It’s more like going into a pickup game of basketball with a few randoms at the park. Expecting total silence would be the odd thing there.
Wizzing all by yourself, handsome?
I do understand that and that is true. We chat at the grocery store in line, or talk about the price of Saltines that are on sale. We share recipes, we chat about the weather. But we are also standing around not trying to go anywhere important. Just shopping and waiting in the check out line.
Public transport is just not really a thing in small towns. Everyone kind of knows everyone in some way, or has some connection.
Think of Group Finder as city public transport with strangers you will never see again. It is designed to get people to an end goal as fast as possible. It is impersonal. It is a different experience. It is what it is though.
I don’t think you can change the global grouping of dungeon finders into a small town gathering, and never really could. Short of getting rid of it totally. That whole debate over the social impact of a dungeon finder tool on Classic was massive - they resisted having it at all for a long time because of that impersonal impact.
I’m not offended in either situation, the washroom is just weird and I don’t understand it.
In dungeons, it’s over in 5 minutes and I have to do multiple to get the quest done. I don’t even have my chat window with instance chat open in TW.
Come here often?
Nah I usually just pee
(Works better speaking than in text)
This is why I’ll use the “family bathroom” that just has one toilet and can be locked. If I don’t see someone waiting with a baby to change outside I’m going for the solo experience.
That’s what I do for #2, it’s just the polite thing to do 
If you are pugging TW, I wouldn’t expect much talking. TW is now churn and burn for speed leveling. Occasionally you may get a talkative person, but they tend to not last long, because people just want to get through the dungeon and requeue.
It’s the nature of pugging. You’re with random people in a random dungeon pertaining to that event.
I do most of my chatting in Trade Chat or zone chat. The other day I was discussing how awesome it was to pet animals for a quest.
With all that being said, I try not to talk in randoms because I’m usually queuing with my husband, and he’s in the room right next to me.
Yeah TW is just a horrid dungeon experience all around so people want it over and done with. Unfortunately it’s a poor setting for the “timewalking” experience with dungeons that there isn’t even really an attempt made to present as they were when current. They are just power level/speed runs wearing the skin suit of old content.
Exactly. But they still serve a purpose. Especially for those players who didn’t have to level naturally through old content like us dinosaurs. TW is still the best route for getting rep. Yeah, you can solo old stuff, but the rep you buy with TW badges is far faster.
When you next get in a line for anything, checking out groceries, buying a coffee/smoothie/slushie, etc, say “hi” and nothing else after that to the person in front of you.
Odds are they will look at you weird or be a bit creeped out, or offer an awkward “Hi” back. That’s how I feel when people just up and say hi to me in game whether I’m in a dungeon, raid or otherwise.
Then there’s the realistic series of expectations running through my mind along the lines of "You’re about to ask me to join your guild/give you gold/sign a guild petition/or in the case of Moon Guard offer me cookies to advertise your local bakery.
And only one of those things I will care to respond to.
Umm, I talk to people in line at the store all the time. No one looks at me weird… except my husband.
But I live in a really friendly city.
I feel like you can get people to at least say Hi at the start a fair percentage of the time. Anything beyond that is probably not going to happen though.
People aren’t really there to chat and the game is designed in a such a way now that there isn’t any real downtime unless people are just playing poorly. Older versions of the game you had Healers (and sometimes DPS) who would need to sit and drink for mana – and for more than 3 seconds. You had pulls you might want someone to Sheep/Hex etc and you’d mark them. That sort of stuff doesn’t exist anymore.
The player character is much more powerful vs the mobs than they were a decade ago or more. This enables people to run forward and group more stuff together even if they’re not a twink.
If people can play that way without death being likely, they’ll do it, because it’s faster. We saw a lot of this in early TWW from people leveling their 70s with DF Patch Gear in TWW content tuned for about 100 ilvl less than that.
I don’t buy that there’s some kind of “speed meta”. People just move forward and pull a lot. They’ll use their movement abilities and some classes are faster than others as a baseline, but it’s nothing crazy.
If you’re running into people ACTUALLY moving at 150%+ speed baseline, they’re twinks (Warriors will be roughly 190% movement speed if they’re set up properly), and if they give a single crap about you not keeping up (in that they expect you to magically make up that speed difference), they’re garbage people and that’s not the norm. (Though falling behind in that situation IS, just not the heckling over it)
I talk to people in line too, but just “hi” and nothing else after that is what I’m referring to.
Gotcha. Thank you for the clarification.
Although, I smile a lot IRL and that gets a totally different (positive) response where I live vs Vegas, where my folks live. It’s as if the soul has been drained from the people in Vegas and they are walking shells of their former selves.
That still doesn’t explain why the same exact thing happens in ff14 dungeons when ff14 is widely considered to be a friendlier and more social mmo than WoW.
The toxic player base in one sentence.
They are playing the game. Just not in the way you want them to.
Yeah, there’s time to type out full-length conversations—if you’re AFK and not helping the group. Ironic that you want to AFK while we do the work just so you can socialize. Lol. Don’t queue if all you want to do is type to people—do that in Trade Chat or your guild.
Pretty unhinged and brain rot take to say random group finder is for socializing, lmao.
Yeah, I’m a big recluse but in public to strangers only I’m not shy at all to strike up a conversation, granted they got a good vibe.
In dungeons or raids, all I can say is never start with “Hi”. The only thing raiders and dungeon-goers can be engaged by, and speaking from experience, is complaining. “Time to mow several useless acres of trash.” has gotten my rando raid groups talking in the past, that sort of thing.
We only speak one language, and that language is ‘What the hell am I doing with my life?’.
You do realize that you’re the one misunderstanding social dynamics here, right? Expecting random strangers who don’t know you at all to act the way you want is completely unhinged. By that logic, you should also be behaving how they want—it’s illogical at best.
It’s pretty obvious you’ve never been outside or had to interact with real people because, in reality, most people don’t acknowledge strangers—we’re all just trying to get through the day. Just because someone doesn’t say hi back doesn’t mean they’re personally slighting you or that they don’t socialize. They have a social circle of friends, family, and a life—you’re just not part of it.
No one should be taking socialization advice from a 16k post count social outcast on the WoW forums. Lol.