Rofl. The original difficulty is something I cleared weekly. Mythic raid is a difficulty I won’t even consider approaching because the fun vs frustration is entirely out of alignment.
Vanilla, TBC, Wrath difficulty for the average raider is not comparable to 2024 mythic raids.
First, I want to say that I appreciate this perspective and it is a valuable take.
BUT - I don’t think the game discourages the group aspect. Objectively, the game allows group/community events to come together quite easily, either you can choose to socialize organically or through their multiplayer grouping systems. They even encourage group activities in recent open world events if DF was any indicator, with no LFG required.
I think the player-base interacts with one another in a way that FEELS anti-community. Classic has a different set of rules and expectations for respect and camaraderie that Retail doesn’t hold anymore. Buffing others on the road, manually putting groups together through chat, randomly helping others in quests, etc.
Honestly, there’s little time to even type to other players in retail. Even in casual TW, I am constantly moving. The game itself has a different goal, so players act accordingly. Many people are in retail for the end, not the journey. Sometimes that can make others feel isolated and left out. For me, I just take the time to find others that seem to be taking it easy and /wave, buff, or offer help to those in need.
Be the change you want to see. Start a guild. Level with a newbie with no achievement points that you randomly find, make conversation, and be helpful if you can. Newbies are the people that get excited when a boss falls for the first time, when they get a new piece of gear, the awe of a new zone. Sometimes the shine wears off after all these years for people that have been around the block once or twice, or a hundred times.
Or, as you mentioned, do those things in Classic where it is a little easier. Same kinda situation, just a different set of expectations and older version of the game.
It’s tough, but recentering your perspective to realize the game is just that… a game. It is only as good of a community as the individuals in it that play. When I feel worn down, I pick an old achievement to work on. Right now, I’m doing the Tiller quests and achieves for Dog!
Best of luck to you, OP! Hope you find what you are looking for out there. 
The original difficulty has gotten harder because most people are better at the game now than they were 20 years ago, yes.
I am glad we agree that the original difficulty is not what is currently called mythic.
Except, as I explained above, that’s not true, sorry if you got bewildered by the renaming when WoD launched.
Maybe this picture from Blizzcon 2013 will help?
I think a lot of people want community spoonfed to them, rather than put in any effort to help create it.
I was afk during WoD. I tapped out when Pandas were announced and came back in Legion.
Regardless, Blizzard providing a convenient and clearly wrong equivalency chart doesn’t really change anything.
The average raid difficulty when it comes to mythic vs old raids is not equivalent. The same equivalency chart could be provided for old dungeons vs current normals and it would still be wrong. Current normals are incredibly easy, short, and boring compared to Vanilla through Wrath.
Really? I think WoW just attracted a lot of antisocial players in the BC/Wrath era with the mass market appeal/marketing. People who should never have picked up an MMORPG in the first place. And then Blizzard started caving in to their “I don’t want to interact with other people” demands, and here we are.
They don’t want community spoonfed to them, they want other players there on demand, when THEY want them to be there, to do things THEY want them to do, in the manner THEY want them to be done.
Same reason we get all these complaints about “nobody’s picking ME, they have to pick ME” and “the people I group with didn’t do the quest I WANTED” or “they didn’t do the dungeon MY WAY” and so on.
Too many people look at other players as disposable cogs, not as actual people. And Blizzard rewards and caters to that mindset and play style.
this is basically what I mean when I say spoonfed.
they don’t want to do anything like join a guild, make friends, etc
but the moment they want to do some sorta group based content, they want the community to magically appear, embrace them, and do the content
Gotcha.
Yeah, community, to me, means give-and-take. You’ll never receive goodwill from others if you never give any in return.
I agree 100%.
hell. community, guild, friends. those are why I even play WoW. while I am sure others can, I can’t imagine playing without.
but community takes effort to foster. helping others, etc.
The only reason TO play WoW is for the people you play it with. In and of itself, WoW isn’t a very good game. Or, at the very least, there are numerous superior alternatives, if one is looking to play a game alone.
While I don’t necessarily agree with all points made.
I can say something feels “off” to me as well in retail, but I think it is more about the gating. my experience is that Sunday, Monday’s feel dead while folks wait for reset so they can play again. Maybe I am seeing stuff, but that’s what my undeadsense is telling me.
It’s totally up to each player if they want to be social or not. Even back in vanilla there were players that didn’t want to take the time to form groups. I love the convenience of LFG. LFD, LFR.
I don’t want to spend 2 years doing quests and trying to catch up to no-lifes that hit classic level cap as quickly as possible and pretend to be awesome with the hot parses at 60 years old reliving their youth.
The problem is when Blizzard dumbs down the content 99% so that any randomly-assembled group of people who will never cooperate, still manage to magically win, every time.
Six months between patches doesn’t work for people who beat everything the first day because they’re just playing the tutorial.
Which wouldn’t bother me if those people just did their tutorial and then didn’t complain about it. But then they have to start complaining about the choice that they made to stick to the tutorial. We never hear the end of it.
The reason why classic feels that way is because of 3 primary factors:
I would not want to play classic due to reason 1.
Reason 2 is a big problem in retail, but without it, you would find retail would become even more of a ghost town than it already is. Blizz would have no choice but to shut down half the servers if they removed sharding.
People forgive classic’s lack of reason 3 due to the whole concept of it being an old game. But nobody in 2024 really wants to play a modern game without such conveniences.
This is all because blizzard caved and catered to the casuals so alot of the players who actually pushed the content didnt like that there work was only good for a 3-6 months then 3-6months later the gear they worked so hard to get became obsolete and players who didnt really earn the gear where given gear at an easier route. So they quit the game.
careful OP, you’ll offend the cash shop item buying retail andys with a post like this!
That’s also a fair criticism. But at some point along the line, WoW was forced to become a seasonal game. I suspect they had no choice but to make it so as otherwise you would be required to play through every raid/dungeon all the way from vanilla before you could get to TWW content. And if you think about that for a moment, you quickly begin to realise that nobody would want to play a game like that.
lol
Probably should have separated these by more than a sentence.