Cross-realm and shards sort of and a lack of meaningful non-instanced group activities.
Guild Wars 2 is an interesting beast in this regard. I play “solo” but with all the map events and world bosses and the fact that I can heal without being a party I play with people more in my GW2 solo adventures than my WoW ones.
Nothing like collecting herbs and then seeing an army run past because it’s time to scale the mountain, raid the castle, then hopefully kill the giant dragon on the other side.
We could seriously use places designated for events like this, where it’s not necessarily “required” to have a group or other people, but the environment itself encourages it inadvertently. Other games have this with FF having the Gold Saucer as an example, their intentional MG Goldshire. It’s just a nightclub folks can gather and socialize and do various RP in.
And these places are fully interactive, they have things like chairs to sit in and stages and tables to use. WoW regrettably falls behind in this regard and shows its age. We could use an old world zone revamp that makes chairs and tables and similar furniture and surrounding assets full interactive like they’ve become more and more of in BFA going forward.
I love the dungeon finder, but it is inarguably the first in the line of dominoes that destroyed the social aspect of the game.
When you have a functionally unlimited pool of players for dungeons (and later raids with LFR), you have absolutely no incentive to socialize with players nor to be a pleasant group member in your groups. Even if all 4 other players block you and never see you again, you still have a functionally infinite pool of other players to play with.
Perhaps anecdotal, but it’s something I have seen over time. Guild chat going from anything goes, but said in good fun to a person who has to pick something silly to make a mountain out of a molehill.
When it comes to the reasons WoW’s not social anymore, all the changes to the game itself absolutely pale in comparison to changes outside the game as the key factor. When WoW came out, Twitter did not exist. Facebook was still new. There was no Discord. There was no Twitch. WoW was one of the most social areas of the internet simply by virtue of being a place a massive number of people could jump into, typing messages seen by large numbers of people (your guild, zone chat) in real time.
People today get the socialization they USED to get out of WoW from these other avenues now. You want to engage with public discourse about a topic? You go to Twitter. You want to talk with a community of like-minded people who share your interests? You can find that a lot easier on Discord, where you can freely post in long discussions, post images, etc., while jumping into voice channels with ease simultaneously.
Most WoW guilds will usually have a Discord server they use, and that Discord server will in turn tend to have various channels and rooms where you’ll see people playing games other than WoW. Why limit themselves to guild chat for WoW to engage in discussion? In fact, those people don’t even need to be subscribed to watch their friends overcome a big raiding challenge, they can just watch them stream it over Discord.
Again, it’s true that the game itself has gone through lots of changes that harm the need for socialization. I’m not denying that. But it’s by far the tinier fraction of what’s responsible for the sense of WoW, in-game, being less social. If you didn’t have Twitter, Discord, Twitch, etc., WoW’s own antiquated mechanisms would be getting used a LOT more for socialization, even today.
One thing I still find funny, Blizz made it possible to have Horde in an Alliance guild, or Alliance in a Horde guild, but still limits where and how you can even speak to and interact with said guildies because you CAN’T go into opposite faction territory, OR speak to each other outside of G/party chat without Tongue Pots.
Just goes to show how much thought they put into anything NOT an Esport and world first, which is all they’ve been after for years, Esports money from M+ and World’s First folks.
They pushed out most of their old MMORPG audience for a new Esports ARPG crowd and displeased BOTH by not fully delivering either experience.
No i actually agree with this, but it’s more millennials. id argue reporting people and the oversocialization of people have led stuff like trade chat migrate to guild discord or discord in general
Simply put, Activision Blizzard got its wish, they got their “ideal” playerbase… not the MMORPG folks that gave WoW its Classic to WotLK boom, but the M+ and raid or die folks who just want to run the content without speaking to anyone and then leave.
Folks who honestly would prefer a single person ARPG or FPS but who for whatever reason Activision tried it’s darndest to convince to play an MMORPG they would not find interesting, then continuously changed core aspects to try and justify this business blunder. It didn’t work, and now like the Titanic, they’re trying to right the ship and turn around AFTER the black Iceberg has sheered off half the metaphorical ship.
Well bad news, it’s EASIER to break something down than to build it up, it’s gonna likely take AT LEAST till Last Titan to fully get this ship in shape providing it survives, Midnight with housing MIGHT half the time needed if we’re lucky.
Which leads the question as to why did Discord become to dominate? WoW is old enough it was alive when Vent, Skype and Teamspeak were around but those died
Social contract and the idea people could report someone for false reasons and get someone in trouble for said false reasons. Basically people started being saltier than normal and the toxicity climbed and Blizz made bad choices on how to deal with it so now nobody talks anymore and stuff kinda sucks
Also super convenient for folks in other timezones, I got folks as far as South America and know some not in the guild as far west as Australia, know how hard it is to tell them all a time zone in their appropriate zone equivalent?
It also has a translator, unlike WoW and some other media platforms, so since some folks especially from different regions don’t type in English and whatnot, it helps with that. Overall it’s just HANDY to have.
There wasn’t one really big thing that caused WoW to stop being social, rather it was a culmination of many decisions that deconstructed WoW’s social environment. Here are a couple examples:
There’s no mechanics in the game that help players get comfortable with freely interacting with each other. Initiating social contact is inherently at least a little bit rude and you really need mechanics in the game to help players “Break the ice” so to speak. In classic what they did was have quests where you kill one specific named NPC that respawns very slowly. In a crowded area this would cause a queue to form. Sure some players would prefer waiting longer in a queue but eventually players will figure out that you can make the queue move faster by making parties of 5 so those five players get credit for a single kill. Now a days quests are designed to prevent queues from forming which is on its face a good decision but nothing since has come along to help players break the ice.
Early game dungeon content is anti-social and unfun, especially for new players. In classic the design necessitated that you take the content slowly. Like you’d run out of mana so you need to eat and drink in between pulls which gives the group ample time to talk to each other, if for no other reason than to pass the time till we’re ready. These days the dungeon queue is full of people who want nothing but to speedrun the content to power level their characters to max ASAP. If you are a new player this is an extremely unfun environment to party in.
Players are too spread out from each other. There’s nothing to focus players into specific areas. The infamous “Barrens Chat” back in the day arose because pretty much every horde player getting out of their starting zone had to go to Barrens to level up because Silverpine Forest was unfinished. Not to mention Barrens itself was so enormous that Cataclysm split it in half.
Opting for cross realms instead of server merges. Server merge is a taboo in MMORPGs because when MMOs opt for server merges, it’s a clear sign that an MMO is in decline. So the decision to go for cross realms is understandable. But the players you run into from crossrealms purely exist to give the illusion of populated servers. You cannot make friends with or build long term connections with someone from another realm. When a server merge is necessary, it’s simply necessary and you have to eat the consequences of that because the alternative is a long list of dead realms.
Just to be clear I’m not saying these are bad decisions. These aren’t all the reasons why WoW is so anti-social. A lot of these changes are very good decisions. But there still needs to be decisions made to allow the social side of the game to happen.
Social is what puts the massively multiplayer in MMORPG. Without it’s just an underpowered RPG and we might as well go play a different RPG.
It was the forum-like-posting in channels aspect of Discord being combined with voice chat that made it dominant. I mean, there were some primitive chatting type options with those other things, but Discord was much stronger on that stuff out of the gate.
People love linking things to each other as they talk to each other. It used to be that someone in Ventrilo might say, “hey, I posted X on the forum” and then you’d have to open your browser to go to the guild forum to look at what they posted. With Discord, it’s all seamless.