Lot of people will say moderation… but honestly it wasn’t the main thing.
The game changed from a rather easy stat based rpg to slowly adding more and more mechanics making it an action game. That greatly raised the skill floor and the community didn’t just split it shattered and few parts of it enjoy mingling with others . Mostly from different exceptions of play and norms.
Look at the hunter MM spec argument and see how the different types of players are reacting and how they are reacting.
Yeah, but they weren’t always in the game.
The community began to transform once those were implemented, until today.
10 years ago, was Warlords of Draenor.
Cross-realm and LFG existed since late Wrath, and only onwards from there, the community began to deteriorate.
I really feel for WoW players that didn’t experience the first three expansions, because that was WoW at it’s peak in terms of community. Ya’ll don’t know what you missed out on.
Even heroic dungeons saw the playerbase split
At least if you were a butt back then, it stuck with you lol.
You could make your own grave if you were a nasty player.
Now? Nah, just go to the next dungeon queue lol.
It’s a lot like League of Legends in that the groups are always different, so there’s no real incentive to be ‘nice’.
I disagree.
It’s all about participation.
If you actively talk to people or just be around people. People WILL talk to you.
Some just don’t want to talk first.
Heck. I can stand around in stormwind and people will start up convos about my tmog of all things. Or ask questions about a mount.
I’ll afk outside of a delve and someone will whisper me asking if I am waiting and want to join them for a run.
Can’t say I’ve seen this either. I have plenty of friends on moonguard I met through lfg, m+ and raiding.
Again. It’s about being social and not being a jerk. If you come off as a genuinely nice/funny person. People will want to talk to you and add you.
merging north america with brazil… like who tf thought it was a good idea
While I understand that nostalgia impacts our memory of things, I don’t entirely buy the idea that we only think WoW stopped being social because I can go onto a classic server today and have meaningful social interactions with random players. You simply cannot do that in retail servers because nobody talks to each other.
Lot of folks moved to other games / life happened.
Someone 40 years old playing wow back in 2004 / 2005 is 60 now.
Kids that played it are 30+ now. Lot of em have kids jobs etc.
Then you have folk that never matured and treat people horribly that make others go “forget this” and they move to greener pastures.
Well yes, that is only one part of it. That is why I listed a whole lot of other things that encouraged social play during Vanilla, BC, Wrath, etc.
Sounds like we agree, only I added on that in addition to the game changes I listed, WE as a society and as people have changed too.
Everything feels rushed now. Rush to get to max level, rush to gear out then rinse and repeat every patch. Quality of life type changes like Raid/dungeon finder had unintended consequences that eliminate a lot of social aspects. Queue for world boss, lfr and basically go afk then you either get loot or not. Chances of running into the same folks again that will remember you are nearly nil. No real penalty for death in game besides a minor gold cost every now and again. There’s not as much exploring. Flying makes things trivial. Overall world size is waaaaay smaller. There’s no one thing that can be blamed. It’s death by a thousand cuts.
Sorry I didn’t mean to give that impression.
The more QOL features Blizz adds to let players play without talking to each other, the less reason there is to be social. Blizz tries giving us stuff like the new crafting system, where we are incentivized to make friends with our crafter (literally, they even did a quest about it, and that’s why you only get to set item quality minimum with friends), but many players complain if they can’t do everything anonymously without being social. Many players have social anxiety, so this is the WoW they wished for.
All that said, my friends and I still hang out in discord. Discord is where most of the social interaction has moved. It’s where you actually talk to each other and treat each other like real people. My guild is also very active, and has been continuously active since the first month of Vanilla.
Check out a recent video on this very topic “Having Fun in WoW is Hard”. He says it better than I can. Essentially, it takes a little more effort to find a guild that suits you and to make friends, but the rewards are SO worth it in the long run.
What was the main thing that made WoW not be really social anymore?
I read something a while back that stuck with me. It more or less went along the following lines.
When people started playing WoW they were in high school or college. The game was new and it was part of their social life. Then they graduated, lost track of their friends, got a job, got married, had kids, lost their job, got a divorce and are fighting over the kids and somehow the game just doesn’t feel the same.
Clearly it’s all the devs fault. They must hate us and live to make our lives miserable.
I don’t think it is the result of Blizzard making bad decisions. I think the decisions they made were focused on removing general annoyances and improving accessibility. In the before times, we compensated for the annoyances with social interaction.
The problem is that there hasn’t been any features to help players socialize more.
Most M+ players are in discord together. The higher the key, the more likely they are to be mostly chill.
I’m very glad for that. Crawling along a road for ten real-world minutes just to get to the instance, the raid, or even the questing area is mind-numbingly boring.
The world art is as gorgeous as it’s ever been, but I’ve seen it by now and it’s not what I want to pay to do during the scant gaming time I have left in my life.
10 years ago? So … DF … SL … BFA … Legion … Wod?
A couple of months into WoD?
I would have finished levelling and have mostly upgraded my garrison.
I think the daily server crashes had slowed down to an occasional hickup by that point.
The apexis sites were still an almost-unplayable lag-to-death mess.
I hadn’t yet gone to Ashran since recuiting the dwarven death knight follower because I was bit confused about whether it was a capital or flipped into a PvP zone (I had misunderstood a flippant comment a dev had made in an interview).
I probably rarely saw any other players any more as I would have been sitting happily by my private pond, fishing.
I honestly can’t remember if I was bothering to read the forum (I was using an orc hunter as my forum avatar for that expansion) … oh wait, yes, I got 600 downvotes on a post for saying something unkind towards the people harassing one of the writers on social media. To be fair, it wasn’t exactly my most well-thought-out post of all time.
I never experienced any golden age of socialization in WoW. Not 5 years ago, not 10 years ago, not 15 years ago (I was playing a different game 20 years ago so I can’t speak to that era)
I agree. That was my point about the quality of life changes having unintended consequences.
It was when they made it so you could very easily, and in an automated way, join a 5-man dungeon, and be teleported there.
This was a fundamental change to the game.
This is my take on it too. You still get a taste of what it was like on Classic realms but those days are distant memories now.
I started in 2006 when I was 26 (you do the math). Needless to say my life now is drastically different than it was then. I still find time to play when I can but most of the people I met in those days are long gone.
I’d say all things considered the game is still relatively healthy for being 20 years old.