Are you THAT PLAYER that places all his toys and shizzles whenever there’s a group waiting for something?
Cause I am.
OOOOOO i got this needle you can poke other players with, and sometimes it turns them into a witch. Good stuff.
EDIT:
You don’t have to! We could do the ‘rhymes with’ thing!
I’ll start. Runt, duck, sick, trick, witch, walls, and swat!
Discord
…
Honest answer: The world was different in 2009. We were younger, more free time, fewer responsibilities. CRZ and LFG were not options. You were accountable on your realm. That is all gone and people are no longer held responsible for their actions or behavior.
A lot has happened but I would say one big factor is the group content no longer promotes it. It is all rush rush and to get the best before the next season or xpac. They built a lot of it around the top players and in order to really get to that point no one has time to be social.
Lfg tools and cross-server grouping.
So this is a fallacy. Wows still pretty busy but obviously, as games get older the player base starts to dwindle. However, even though the subscriptions are lower now then they were in 2005 there’s still millions of people playing. The difference now is you can choose to be completely solo and pug people without ever caring who they are or you can choose to be a social butterfly and make friends. That doesn’t mean it’s all of a sudden a single player game. That means you choose to make it a single player game or you choose to make friends.
100 percent agree. I still have fun but play way way less.
well there was this thing where we were told we dont know what we want “what dont you guys have phones? and you think you do but you dont.” that and a few other things.
M+, cross realms, and scaling.
This is really funny reason from my POV because I know of games that do not have a chat system so players can just go ahead and use discord, but in those same games people are screaming for a simple text based chat system.
Time and the advent of more online social communities, dungeon queues, discord- it’s no one thing. But if you look hard enough you can still find social communities, they are often social in discord rather than in-game.
But tbh you used to have to talk to people to do almost anything. “LFG” used to mean “looking for group”
The question was about WoW’s changing social experience, not about population.
And again, I addressed both.
Players. People have to make an effort to be social.
We just got out of a multi-year quarantine following people slowly becoming asocial and isolated by cell phones and the internet and non-face to face interaction, so generally the small town everybody knows each other feel is gone IRL as well,
WoW specifically has cultivated its current social or shall I say lack of-social atmosphere for years now since maybe Cata trying to lure in folks who aren’t really its target audience.
People generally tending to be less social overall IRL or in digital mediums + no need to be= no wasted effort to try. Why be social when the game doesn’t in any way encourage or demand it and instead pushes for content that rewards folks who find interaction detrimental or otherwise unwelcome?
Image of Archmage Vargoth is hands down my favorite toy to put down.
Merging servers and using cross-server queues.
That is the only thing. People love to blame LFR/LFD, and lately they like to blame COVID and social media advances, but the answer is: closed servers were communities. Cross-server grouping is just…a crowd of strangers you will never see again. As we progressed, we now have open world encounters with people who are not even in our server group. I see people out in the world who are layered in from other servers and server groups. You can’t even group up for questing with someone you’ll ever see again.
Relationships cannot be made.
Connections cannot be made.
World PvP cannot ever feel like it did in Vanilla with longstanding guild rivalries and successful subzone encounters.
There are zero social consequences in cross-server populations to make people exercise self-control.
On a closed server without layers (which is what we had in the OG Classic iterations of the game), you have the people on your server and only the people on your server. It was in your best interest to be patient with your server community and observe basic rules of decorum.
That is the only factor that changed how people behave. LFD/LFR would have no adverse affect on a closed server because how you get to the dungeon and how you form your group was never the point. It was the fact that you saw the same people over and over again.
Even in Classic, we have layering now to preserve a healthy server population…yet, you do see the same people repeatedly. Closed servers are communities. Open server groups are not.
Closed servers are not realistic in retail. I am not suggesting that we go back to closed servers in retail and it wouldn’t work even if I was suggesting it.
But that’s the answer to your question.
This one needs to be highly considered. I am one of the original players, ive taken some breaks but its easy to be social with other older people. The younger players are so loot hungry and more of them are quick to be jerks and super entitled.
Every raid drop i won the roll for was followed by a couple of the youngest members begging me to give it to them instead. They drop raiding or grouping for anything the second they get what they wanted and they never talk to anyone during the raiding down times and trash killing.
Only the older players bring cauldrons, feasts, vantus runes and full personal buffs, definitely a considerate and social thing to help the group and raid. Being able to handle criticism is also a huge difference in age divide, and a huge part of the social interaction. Not being able to criticize or handle criticism means you’ll naturally be less social to avoid those things.
They arent wrong for not being social but they definitely arent social, obviously there are outliers.
It’s not just dying, it’s basically a dead genre. WoW set the bar so high that only a handful of other MMOs could even compete, At least In the West. The Asian markets are different while they have tons of MMOs, they still can’t fully live up to WoW in their own right
The internet, ironically. We saw it in wow classic. Same game but now with an abundance of knowledge, stat optimazion, logging etc. Makes the whole experience feel more robotic and other players are toxic to those that don’t run the optimal specs/ gear that the Internet tells them to use