i made a similar post when classic was released so i figured i would make one for this one as well. for some reason people have it in their brain that if they play old content people will magically start talking to them as if a large portion of the player base dont have antisocial tendencies. this is not an insult, it is just a statement of fact. forcing people to go through an LFG UI or spam “LFG [name of dungeon]” in a chat will not make them more social, if they do not want to talk to you then they wont talk and you should not expect them to
all you people so worried about “removing social aspects” of the game really need to calm down because those “social aspects” you are talking about have never been removed, people just dont want to talk. complaining that people are not talking during a pug dungeon run is like complaining about how the people riding on the bus wont talk to you, or how people dont randomly walk up to you on the street and start chatting. do people do those things? yes, but expecting it from everyone you meet is just asking to be disappointed
i am in no way trying to insult people but i just get irritated when people blame the fact that people dont want to talk to them on things like LFD, fast travel, flying, or even sharded servers when these do literally nothing to prevent social interaction. and as with vanilla classic i see people getting super hyped about how much better their social experience is going to be when [insert scapegoat here] is not in the game and it will force people to talk with them, be their bestest friend, and they will go on long adventures together. but i am here to be the bearer of bad news, none of thats going to happen (i mean there is still a chance of it happening), you did not become massively popular in classic and you will not become massively popular in TBC classic … and thats OK, despite what you may think you do not need a bazillion friends to enjoy the game
thanks for reading my barely coherent rant, and i hope i have gotten through to at least some people (most likely not) and look forward to another one of these rants when WotLK classic comes out … because the forms will be filled with people complaining about LFD and how Blizzard will need to remove them
I’ve made friends from farming repeat dungeons with strangers.
In actual Burning Crusade I got an invite to my guild from pugging with a couple of their members and they thought I was good enough to join, a lot of members are still in contact. We have had people go to each others weddings, become roommates, vacation together.
just wrong. theres many people that are anti social sure but when the game takes away any need to be social? you get a single player game where, once in a while, you group with a bunch of NPCs that you couldnt care less about.
Anecdotal, but i am proof that you are wrong. I am quite anti-social. I pretty much don’t say a word in retail. I don’t even think i talked in chat for weeks, except with some friends.
But when i played Classic, i was regularly talking to people. Both strangers and friends alike. In dungeons/raids and in the world. Every single day. And i also came across a ton of other people doing the same.
I haven’t played since ~mid phase 2 though, so maybe people have gone back to the retail mentality.
What keeps people from being antisocial in classic/bc is more the fact that replacing people is a huge pain in the rear. It’s easier to put up with lesser incompatibilities in the group when you have to put your whole run on hold to dump them for trivial reasons. Vote remove and automated replacement completely bypasses this.
Funnily enough, I raid in retail and classic at a fairly hardcore level. In retail my guild barely talks, I don’t know anyone on my server. Dungeons are deathly silent snooze fests, but on classic my guild is super active and vocal, I have a good rapport with tons of folks on my server between other guilds. I’m part of a black lotus/alchemy mafia that runs the AH, and have engaged in far more antics than I can easily recall.
So contrary to your post, despite playing both versions of the game the same way, and for the same amount of time. Classic has been a much more socially active/engaging game, and I have made more friends in classic in the past year than I have in the past 5+ on retail (where I have made no friends, and the only folks I know are IRL friends.)
I wonder if maybe people just cant focus on conversation because the content is harder. Weird how that happens. Classic is so boringly easy that people can chat it up while doing content.
Back in 2004 the primary demographic of people who tended to play MMOs were the anti-social type that we’re talking about.
In 2021, gaming in general, even in MMOs, is more widely accepted and popular. You don’t get (at one point) 11 million subscribers by being a niche game. The average demographic tends to be very social in real life, and plays WoW to get away from that. While that is indeed antithetical to what an MMO was designed for, that is the unfortunate nature of the beast now.
We’re fighting an uphill battle. The average gamer nowadays just doesn’t care about social interaction because they don’t need games to have social interactions. They get plenty of them IRL. COVID has only temporarily flipped this on its head, and I fully expect things to go back to normal when it’s over.
It’s also important to note that modern gamers grew up (or are growing up) with online social interactions being the normal substitute for real life interactions. So the social pressures that those of us decades ago fled to MMOs to escape now exist in the online space for people. So not only do people get social anxiety IRL, but online as well.
I am extremely antisocial on retail, I talk to nobody and play with nobody if I go in dungeon its only if I’m forced to for a quest, otherwise I’m 100% solo player.
In Classic, I team up with people for elites quests, talk with people to get into dungeons groups and even joined a guild at some point, I just have a different mind set in Classic since if I do not group up and do minimal social activity, I won’t get anywhere.
In retail you do not have to socialize for anything beside Mythic+ or raid which do not interest me.
You assuming this social interaction is happening in a raid… it isn’t. I’m referencing social interaction outside of raid. Nice attempt to strawman though. Hell even comparing discords is night and day. For retail, no one is ever in channels talking, in channel or in a chat shooting the breeze. The only thing ever really posted is weekly raid sign ups. At pretty much anytime of day I can find folks in the “Lounge” or “Chill” channels on classic, and the chat channels are always active.
Classic is just better at fostering a community than retail. Its the Big City vs Small Town scenario. In a big city with throngs of people, no one talks, interacts, or even bats an eye at a stranger even if they are bleeding out on the sidewalk as they walk by. In a smaller town, you get on a first name basis with your neighbors and the clerk/owner of your local gas station pretty quick, most folks will engage you in small talk at the very least.
This applies to retail where multiple servers are joined at the hip and players are phasing between them, and you have a LFD with an endless supply of fodder to fill dungeon slots. No one pays attention to you, you don’t pay attention to them because at the end of the day you know you’ll never see them again.
On classic servers, I know players by name even outside of my guild. There isn’t an endless supply, my servers a finite community of players with varying reputations. You have an incentive to make friends and work together because there’s a limited number of people who will put up with you, and at the end of the day its not a single player game and you have to have folks who want to group with you.
Without cross server LFR/LFD you actually have to try to form groups, and are more likely to remember and befriend the good and/or chill players you run across for future runs.
Working together to defeat hard content and then downing the content requires more talking and should encourage a stronger bond after getting through it together. What you are saying here makes absolutely no sense.
interesting post OP but I disagree with you. As for your stance on this before Classic sure it was a good debate, but now that we have had almost 2 years with Classic anyone who plays these (take Norse for example) can see that there is a difference.
it’s not just LFD (I personally saw more change with LFR) it’s the LF lobby, the CRZ, the cross-realm everything, and everyone just judging each other based on numbers in retail that does it. What is the point of having a conversation with a stranger you will never get to know? Just knock out the content with stranger #35525 be done and move on to content with strangers #63525 and #82531 who you will never get to know but instead, you will judge based on their raider io score.
After coming back to the WoW for Classic after unsubbing after a 12 year straight run and still trying out every expansion and quitting as I no longer found WoW interesting I can say for sure that Classic does encourage a community and retail does not. I am a huge fan of the community aspect of WoW Classic - guild, server, PVP and otherwise and TBCC will be the same in that aspect.
I later went back for Shadowlands, played it for 3 weeks, found it kind of fun, and then just stopped as it was the same as BFA for me. There was just no underlying thing that encouraged me personally to keep going as I play this game for the social aspect and it just wasn’t there - despite me playing on an RP server and finding a guild on Retail it was still not there.
I thought it was me that changed when I started becoming uninterested in wow but it was definitely the game for me.
Retail has things going for it - challenging content, graphics, collections, transmogs, pet battles etc. The community is just not one of those things and this is already widely acknowledged by pretty much everyone including many Retail players.