Toxi, Nasty community will kill what's left of WoW

Well,

Having taken a short break from WoW I thought I’d log my priest and have a go at healing some 5 man stuff. I find myself taking breaks from WoW, coming back for a day or so then taking another break.

I think that the biggest problem with WoW is the community:

**Toxicity, specifically at end game is killing WoW **

Log into any ‘activity’ today at level cap, and everything… absolutely everything has become toxic. Log onto an M+ dungeon, people hurling abuse, swearing, rage quitting, talking down people after even a single wipe… even when there no wipes or even deaths, the talking-down, spiteful remarks remain.

Join a raid… and see people being kicked every few minutes.

Do an Island, people all run off doing their own thing

I could go on and on… but it’s obvious. Even that bastion of content access, the Guild… is DYING, not only as individual guilds die, but the game focuses more and more on non-group content, raid leaders I speak to outside of the very top-end M+ raiding outfits are having a hard time putting reliable rosters together for normal and heroic raids, let along even thinking about Mythic, and Mythic raiders are fed up as well with daft mechanics that seem to screw them over.

So many people I know have quit wow, I’m one of only 2 or 3 who were amongst a group of friends (of nearly 25 people) who rolled back into WoW at stat of BFA and even my sub runs out soon, probably won’t renew.

How did all this start!? Is it ‘Activision ruining Wow’, well they certainly haven’t’ helped with their recent antics, but to be honest… this rot set in way back in WOTLK.

LFG (then LFR later on) along with Cross Realm Zones made players anonymous and disposable, with anonymity and disposability, penalties for incivility and generally unacceptable behaviour had fewer and fewer consequences.

Cross Realm zones (and to an extend, battlegroups) destroyed what was left of ‘server community’.

What we have left, is the hardest of the hard-core fans…

Outside of the very top end M+ dungeons and raids, there’s nothing much for the average player to do, dailies become a grind, normal and heroic dungeons are eclipsed FAR too early in the piece, warfronts and islands are a sad joke (to which nobody is laughing) leaving Heroic Raiding and Mythic dungeons as the only ‘content’ for players to slog through.

The difficulty curve of the game is also badly broken, there is a HUGE leap from hitting level cap and and M+ dungeon of say beyond +7, the game goes form barely letting players know that they have ignored a mechanic to brutally destroying entire groups in mere SECONDS in higher level M+ dungeons.

This leads to all sorts of drama, which adds to Toxic community, you can cruise through normal dungeons, heroic dungeons, LFR, LFG, M0, warfronts, Islands… and be sitting on about 355+ gear level VERY quickly. with so much gear thrown at you that they actually put a machine into the game to RECYCLE YOUR PURPLES.

Then… SLAM, you hit a wall… you are a failure, you suck… you can’t tank, heal or DPS… you raidio score is crap… and you can’t get into any content… Why? Because you were likely not following fight mechanics but because of the messed up difficulty curve you got NO FEEDBACK FROM THE GAME about this!

So… you are sort of forced into M+ dungeon runs… and BAM, you die… a lot.

I am not calling for nerfs to high end M+ dungeons… if anything… lower end dungeons need to be a bit harder.

To fix this… well… that is beyond a forum post but…for future content updates.

  1. Scrap LFR
  2. Scrap LFG
  3. Scrap CRZ

Make ‘pre M+’ and ‘pre Raid’ content more challenging, create a difficulty CURVE and not a difficulty WALL, allow players to get feedback if they’re not following fight mechanics, instead of destroying them, by the time they get to M+ runs, they’ll be better players for it.

By making players less disposable, and restoring server communities, players will have to be less toxic, before all this stuff… toxic players were not successful, because they were toxic. The current environment REWARDS toxic behaviour.

Players are not quitting WOW as per se, they are quitting the community, which has largely been shaped and influenced by the changes that blizzard have gradually introduced into WoW since the mid-point of WOTLK.

Anyway, that’s my 2c, feel free to tell me why I suck, posted on an alt, don’t have AOTC, my gear is crap, etc etc.

-Thanks :slight_smile:

23 Likes

Its always been pretty toxic, but your right it has ramped up. I feel it’s not a huge problem as most players are pretty nice.

11 Likes

Me quitting the community has led to me quitting the game. I don’t run any group content, so anything I have left gets old very fast.

10 Likes

I agree with killing off crz/sharding but uh killing off lfr/lfg? You’re gonna piss of A LOT of people.

17 Likes

So this is another no lfr thread. The “community” does a fine job of gatekeeping with raider io

14 Likes

Ha, you should’ve heard raid nights in Classic raids, Barrens Chat, and so forth.

Game’s actually a lot less ‘toxic’ as you call it than then.

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LFG/LFR isn’t going anywhere. Taking away “convenience features” will not do anything to rebuild the community; it’ll just make people quit en masse.

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So… the solution is to find a guild community that is kind if you want to do group content. Removing LFR/LFG/whatever won’t accomplish what you want. If the toxic people are all there… don’t use it. With or without these tools, you’d need to put the effort into finding other people to play with, be it via guilds or chat. Simply opt out of using those tools by… not using them, and put the effort into finding people for yourself.

3 Likes

Even being at 20,952/21,000 and no world quests up, I still can’t be bothered to read this.

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You think people are toxic now? Wait until you take away many peoples ability to play with others

Dont like it? Dont use it

19 Likes

I always wish that there would be a way to drop people in current wow into the old wow community.

I think their heads would explode seeing how we used to treat each other. Current community is wearing kitten gloves covered in goose feather pillows compared to it

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Mythic + should be unforgivable. If you’re signing up for keys and don’t know mechanics and die, at least you learned something and wont let it happen again. The problem right now is, the content has been out long enough you should know whats going on because it’s really frustrating when someone causes a wipe when you’re racing the clock.

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it’s just a coincidence that we noticed more jagoffs in the game when dungeon finder went live nine years ago. prior to that, the few daily heroic quests my main did were quite rewarding and made pugging seem cool, but the cat got outta the bag when everyone wanted gogogogogogo gimmemyfrostbadges when random heroic dungeon replaced that.

5 Likes

While I agree and hate them I require them because most servers die in the middle of the night so I’d probably bounce eventually along with a bunch of other nightshifters.

While I dont like lfg and lfr because it trivializes things wow has to compete with other games. I miss the good ol’days when I would log in during early wrath in the morning and knock out my daily heroic but those days are gone.

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Really? Did they have expletives back then that aren’t used now? I remember Barrens chat and how toxic it was but it hasn’t gotten better over the years. It’s worse now because the player base has shrunk and it’s the bottom dwellers that are still here spewing their venomous bile. The one constant is that Blizzard continues to do nothing.

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I don’t … even … LFR and LFG are not the cause of toxicity.

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Join the alliance. Yes we still have some toxic people but the majority of the toxic fan base play horde. I pvp’d and raided pretty seriously in legion and horde by far was more toxic.

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Hahahahaha! All these threads about Blizzard over-policing?

What world do you live in? I live in one called reality.

People are getting banned over Guild Invite spam it’s so bad. People don’t even talk in public chats anymore for fear of the mass down-vote brigade.

Venomous bile? Are you talking about words and things you don’t agree with? Venomous bile? Really? Those are the words you’re using. Listen, hon. Please, sit down in the corner.

Using exaggerated descriptions or big words doesn’t make your argument anything less than, “The mean people said things I don’t like and called m’face stupid!”

4 Likes

That’s not my experience. I used to be able to tell just by how foul and juvenile trade chat was whether I was on Alliance or Horde. Horde pvp is an endless succession of an Alliance player “making a strange gesture”. So much focus on gestures there’s no time to win it seems.

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Good luck finding that for any end-game content on the Alliance.

1 Like