Back in 99’ EverQuest was the go-to MMO. Yes, others existed but EQ was the first of its kind. A graphical MUD unlike any other and the MMO genre boom happened.
I played EQ in 99’ and it was basically group-required. You could not leave the starter zones without having a group to do things with. Within the first two days of release EQ communities were building. Not because it was the fashionable thing to do at the time but because it was REQUIRED to actually go anywhere in the game.
PC merchants were selling movement buffs, groups were advertising for tanks and healers, camp xp grind spots were being called, etc. The community was growing all through a cleverly designed requirement system and for years on EQ remained the only MMO that mattered.
Community was the best thing about EQ. Everyone on the server was known by most people and people were always around to help out. Unsurprisingly when you needed a tank you got a tank because in EQ tanks couldn’t solo either. You didn’t have to wait 5 real life hours to get a party together in EQ because in 99’ you didn’t get far from the starter zones without knowing somebody well enough to party with them. Your community was already formed long before you reached the dungeons. Most of the time you just went somewhere and found a group already there. Often times they’d have a spot for you already or opening soon. You were all learning together.
WoW came on the scene shortly after with a better known intellectual property (tens of millions played the Warcraft RTS before WoW) and logically took the mantle from EQ and while it had some single player focus it was still in the same vein of EQ 99’s approach to requiring groups to do most things.
Over the years WoW drifted from these group requirements. Quests requiring parties disappeared or became irrelevant. Solo play style quests started popping up to narrate stories and mini games that were basically single player puzzles started happening everywhere. LFD and LFR replaced the community building that would be required otherwise.
To the extent today you can pretty much know nothing about your community, nothing about how other classes play and nothing about your own class even and be reasonably geared and max level.
WoW is a great example of what happens to an MMO when it doesn’t discourage in fact encourages solo play. The community is broken. It’s either extremely toxic at the top end to players who have no idea what they’re doing or at the low end nonexistent because players in those brackets are afraid to look like fools for not knowing how to play. There’s a huge disconnect between 1-120, world quests, dungeons, raids and M+ / Mythic raiding.
Once you cross that threshold you find all the people who play the game often. All the people who know the classes inside and out and know the encounter designs. They know all of this despite the fact the game encourages gamers not to know this. Obviously they don’t represent the majority.
The majority of people are like the fish in the schools. They follow the trends and requirements put in front of them. They don’t do anything unless its required. Like work for example. Most people can’t be bothered with working if they don’t need to work to survive. Most people just seek the path of least resistance in everything they do. That’s why only a small percentage of people are superstars. It doesn’t make the majority bad. It just means they are driven differently.
Loads of normal people played EQ too. And those people got in the game and like a school of fish dodging a predator they realized right away they had to do things like a community. They had to group. Someone had to heal. Someone had to tank. If nobody did these things nobody got anywhere in the game. If there was a serious lack of a role someone would up the ante just to get the task done.
In WoW the schools of fish avoided the party content. It wasn’t required to reach max level. They simply logged in to do quests and logged out. Nothing in that practice required grouping. Over time the schools of fish in WoW lost contact with one another. Over time they opted to play less important DPS roles. Tanks and healers got harder to find. Community dried up and toxicity developed between the gatekeepers of the group content and the schools of fish trying to enter that content with zero clue and zero growth in that direction.
Now in BFA the evidence cannot be clearer. With time gated content everywhere disinterested players are subscribing for 1-2 months at expansion launch and then leaving for months. They don’t build communities because that’s not required. They don’t help one another because there’s no need for another person. They don’t know much about the classes or their own class to know how to break into mythic content. Worse they feel it’s too much work or too painful to do it and they’re right. It’s something they should have been forced to work on months ago.
Now I get that loads of people will leave the moment WoW requires party play. The thing is I don’t care anymore. WoW is supposed to be an MMO and to me the writing is on the wall. It needs to become an MMO again to bring community and luster back to the genre. Otherwise it’s just going to be more and more of the same timegated, trivial, boring crap.
Make Azeroth Great Again!