Indeed
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Things like…
- Elimination of gear trading from leveling dungeons by mixing levels;
- Quests that can’t be run by a group because they bug out;
- Removal of the ability of low levels to use the group finder to complete group quests. “We want you to solo everything all by yourself to prove you deserve to play our game!”
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everyone likes to blame LFG, but i honestly think its a mix of mmos being a dying genre, and the fact outside communication is far easier and far better organized than wow’s 20 year old chat system
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If you ask me it’s been the gradual dilution of loot.
Around about the end of BFA they scaled back the amount of loot drops you saw in dungeons, so logically to compensate for that nerf the go, go, go mentality just became the norm.
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My vote is Cross Realm. You could be questing around players you’ll never see again, so people don’t bother interacting.
They should’ve just merged servers.
When I played 20 years ago I thought the people I met really were the people I logged in for . The community was like 80% of the game . ( for me )
Now - not so much . It’s just a whole different vibe today .
I think the players that aren’t playing WoW anymore have either stopped playing all together or have jumped to FF .
I honestly believe when they added looking for group and did cross Realm zones, they completely and permanently screwed up server communities and socialization. I think when people were still held accountable on their own servers, and there was no chance of being a random troll that somebody might never see again that people acted better and were more responsible for their actions. I can remember people acting out and getting blacklisted on their own server, being forced to either change realms or change factions in order to be included in certain content. Being part of a server meant something once and now it means absolutely nothing since you can be in a guild across serversand acrossed factions.
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Times change.
WoW was a popular online chat back in the day before social media became so prevalent. M+, LFG, and other tools didn’t kill WoW, they saved it from obscurity. The game was always going to die after the social media boom. It was no longer unique to talk to people all over the world through video games.
People saying “WoW servers and less people to play with was good” are clueless. They don’t remember the days of old, when you’d sit in trade chat or local defense chat simply trying to find ANYONE to play with for hours on end. If you were on a dead realm, then forget about doing anything. If you were on a high pop realm, you still spammed through the spam to find people. The game wasn’t as natural and fluid as they claim.
Classic WoW is no where near the same in any way as the old Vanilla game version in gameplay or social aspects. It was very easy to play in Vanilla for weeks or more with out really talking to anyone at all.
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I disagree entirely that MMOs are a dying genre, but there is a grain of truth in that they’re in a dormancy period.
The reason why is because most MMO devs haven’t figured out what MMOs are yet. At the beginning devs thought MMOs were metaverses built to be lived in. Then Blizzard came along and simplified MMOs past the point of attempting to be a “metaverse” and MMO devs tried and failed to copy WoW. After those failed, investior interest in MMOs dried up.
The reason I say it’s in dormancy rather than a dying genre is because there is still a great deal of interest in the genre but most seem to agree that MMOs haven’t realized their potential yet.
Right now the industry, funcom in particular, is experimenting on making the “Open World Survival Craft” the next evolution of the MMORPG where instead of giant central servers, you have MMOs built around decentralized local servers with personalized rulesets. The unique advantage of this kind of MMO is that object permanence can exist in ways that it cannot in MMOs like WoW. (You cannot build a house anywhere you want in WoW, but in this new model you can.
That’s just one example of the direction the genre is being taken in. To be honest I don’t know what the MMO is. People much smarter than me have tried and failed to answer that question.
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One aspect i think makes a huge difference, i don’t know if this is overlooked already in this thread-
Flying Mounts.
There used to be a need to run, use mounts, and traverse between the lands. Groups of people walking around, talking, interacting. The world felt more ‘alive’
Then suddenly everyone could fly everywhere and the roads became barren, lands became empty and nobody interacted anymore.
This is more noticable in the contrast between classic wow and retail…
I was a long time Everquest player and it was awesome seeing people out in the world pulling mobs back to their indiviual groups.
WOW limits what you see outside of major cities and instances, the world always feels empty.
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Likely it’s because outside of Holidays, Events, Dungeon Finders and Raids; there’s no sense of social coordinationyý$@zzz-zzzzzzz-zzzzzzzzzz-zzzzzz-z-zzzzzzzzzz,a
The community grew slowly insular with Cross Realms, Dungeon Finders, and That Damnable Garrison.
We are in need of something to work towards if it’s not an Achievement or a Mount or AOTC, Player Housing is a good step in that direction, because what exists above a Player House in the game: but a Guild Hall where the Guild can display their trophies and accomplishments.
I recently left a raid pug at the start before the first boss because the raid lead was being so immature and rude with the sexually explicit weirdness. And it’s not the only time I’ve seen that kind of thing. I won’t repeat the specific words but you might be able to guess them. It was like a scene from “Idiocracy”. I was like, yeah I’m out.
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Retail is waaaaaay more social than it’s ever been. The issue is simple: discord. No need to talk in game when all the community exists in specific driven servers.
The fact that all socialization happens outside the game is an enormous issue.
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There are tons of active accounts, how many of those are bot accounts, who knows.
It already was kind of an issue back then, when everyone would use Ventrilo and Teamspeak over Blizzard’s own voice chat, because their’s was so bad lol.
And that kind of stuff only increased.
Blizzard is always horrendously behind the curve when it comes to having social features in their game.
They kinda trended in the opposite direction, and players are more self-isolating and playing solo now more than ever.
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The players got tired of putting up with the nasty minority of the population and played more and more solo. Blizz is selling a service, they have to adapt to their customers or the game dies. So the players changed it through demands for more solo friendly content.
Personally I got thoroughly sick of toxic people in dungeons and raids and even causing drama in guild and putting the GM and officers in the position of having to deal with the drama. I have kicked more than a few from guilds both as GM and as an officer.
In summary, it was the players themselves that made it less social.
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My thoughts:
- Society has changed and therefore the game has changed.
- ActaBlizzSoft pushing “esports”
- Tailoring the game to a low percentage of the population (see #2)
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