I have tried several times to get into retail wow but i always get bored. The problem is always that i have no friends in the game, and the social aspects of the game seem to be gone. No one uses chat and you dont see a lot of players in the open world. In classic I’m always meeting people in dungeons and out questing, but in retail that stuff never happens. The furthest i got in retail was lvl 58 and in that time i did not even have one interaction with another player. All this makes it feel like im playing a single player game. Maybe i just missed the boat on something here, but to me retail wow has no community at all. Am I wrong?
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My issue is the low level experience, having the same issue with Remix.
There’s no attention or care put into the leveling design of the classes. The low level stat template hurts one of the biggest strength of RPGs which is character & gear progression.
It just isn’t trying to be anything other than the walmart escalator to 70 that it is and it shows. Idk, it pulls me out of the game and makes me lose interest super fast.
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Not that many people are leveling new characters at any given time, and the ones that are have about 20 different places they could be doing it. The price of having that many options for where you want to be playing is that it reduces the chance of randomly encountering other people out in the world.
Queue for low level dungeons and you’ll find groups almost instantly. The people are there - you just have to look for them.
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Have you tried joining a guild or community?
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The game can’t force community, the reality is that a lot of the game is accessible to play solo, and a lot of people who want to play it solo, do so.
There are still plenty of guilds out there that do things, hundreds if not thousands of active discords etc. If you’re expecting to wander into a great community, that may not happen, but there are plenty of them out there. Try WoW Made Easy discord.
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From my experience, the community building left WoW and moved over to Discord. If you’re looking to find meaningful conversations and meet people within WoW itself, it will be very hard.
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Okay, then do group stuff? The game is the same it has ever been, you just have more solo options now.
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Ok Ill have to check out discord. I really do wanna play TWW when it comes out and Im working on a mage on ReMoP, prob do a pally next. I like the combat mechanics and talent systems in retail, and the music and graphics are a huge upgrade over classic. Its overall much more polished and fluid gameplay.
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You did. Gone are the days of bumping into an adventure working on the same quest as you and making a friend.
Social connections are established through outside applications and social networks. There’s still tons of social wow players. They just don’t meet each other the same way that they used to.
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Blame those who got blizz to push everyone onto other communication platforms. All because they didnt like them. The community did this 100%. Disgusting and hateful. But its what we have left.
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With the level scaling tech and the sheer age of the game, you probably won’t be running into anyone. You can quest out ungoro crater for like 5-10 levels and never see a soul, because how many people are doing that?
It gets better at max level, especially in a guild.
The game doesn’t have much moment to moment downtime in content anymore though, so you won’t find people typing in dungeons because they’re pressing abilities. Because waiting 2 seconds on anything to come off cooldown is boring gameplay.
Voice chat is where the communication is. I’d argue group gaming as a whole has drifted this direction.
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Dude pick up a good realm and join the LookingForGroup channel.
Always find friends there you can talk and get together.
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I would love to see Retail get Level-Up Raids. NON-QUEUED, maybe once a day content, not that tough but you have to actually play the game, gives you like 4-5 levels for maybe 40 minutes on gameplay.
Flop Remix is experimenting with bringing these over to Retail. Probably one of the few good ideas they have with that thing.
It’s literally the developers’ jobs to drive players together.
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In regards to not seeing other players, there’s a few confounding factors. There are multiple layers that are in place to ensure the game runs smoothly. People are also in chromie time phases that will phase them to players in similar phases. But more than that, this game is also going to be 20 years old. In Classic, the gameplay population doesn’t have as many zones to be in at a given time. At this point in WoW’s lifetime, the population would be completely split across all the zones in the game.
You see a lot more players out in the world at max level. That’s where the concentration of players is.
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Yes. WoW sucks if you don’t play it socially.
Not much more to it than that, honestly.
Network or die 
My wife and I just resubbed so we could play a game together without having to jump through a bunch of hoops. Just log in and go do stuff together.
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vanilla had quests that had elites and simply couldn’t be solo’d, you grouped or moved on.
I’m not social but I found people to play with.
that simply doesn’t happen now and times have changed…
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Many people choose “die”. Wow has never reached its previous peak and I’d wager part of that involves the lack of community in a game about community.
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You can play the game however you want.
I play it as a single player game as I don’t enjoy playing with random people because they want to speed thru everything and I want to enjoy everything. I don’t even group for open world content in order to share kills anymore because of this.
However if you want to play it as a multi-player game, your best bet is to join a guild. You’ll probably have to sift thru a lot of chaff to find the right fit but there are description to cut down on some of that.
Also when you are out in the World, try talking to the people you do encounter. Greet them. Invite them to group up if you are questing in the same area. (If they don’t answer it doesn’t mean they are ignoring you, it just might mean they have the feature turned off, so don’t let it discourage you from trying with someone else).
I don’t know what server you are on but I have noticed Goldshire on mine usually has folks hanging out, dueling, ect.
Certain World Events also has people congregating in the same spaces which gives other opportunities for interaction. During Love is in the Air, the village by Shadowfang Keep is just nuts during that time. A couple of years ago, two of us randomly co-ordinated our kills, one range and one melee, and suddenly there were five of us working together, including a healer.
Do you need to put more effort in? Yes. But if it is the experience you want, that effort is probably worth it.
Not really.
My impression is he is looking for people to not just group with but socialize with. He might have difficulty finding that in low level dungeons given the average player just tends to speed run them for the xp and if you are not on the same page can become rather unpleasant.
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Do leveling guilds even exist anymore? I feel like it’s relatively easy to level to the point being in a guild to level is not sustainable so you probably don’t have people actually leveling, just hanging out in lowbie alts in Goldshire or whatever.
Which is kind of a bad experience overall. Leveling is relatively minor so you can’t build a community around it but a bad experience which is a bit sad. I will give ReMoP credit for bringing many new players to the same place and having them do actual activities together like level up raids. That’s a step in the right direction.
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