I still remember talking about anime news and events in wow trade chat and guild chat outside of places like 4chans /a/ and MAL. Which sucks because back in the day i didn’t even play alot of endgame, i mainly socialized and i feel like alot of people did this as well
Ironically, the reason WoW was so popular is also the biggest reason it’s losing steam now. MMOs started out trying to be hardcore Everquest when it was among the first MMOs, but folks just didn’t have the time and effort to spare to grind like that, but that was the gold standard till WoW Classic/Vanilla released.
WoW exploded cause it had a casual approach compared to any other MMORPG at the time. NOW all WoW does is try to scrounge money from the old audience those other MMOs moved past when they became more like WoW. In other words, WoW went from the trend setter to the trend follower.
Not even the MODERN trend, now the folks in charge want the Esports and tryhard endgame audience…WHY?? That’s the audience that caused the prior MMORPGS and MMOS in general to flounder, they never made money for companies. Games like league of legends made money cause they cornered that NICHE audience, not cause of sheer abundance of said audience.
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Modern WoW is basically a seasonal game. Retry and be on top every season… why? The game at it’s core isn’t meant for that
Esports ruined it. idk if i should blame fortnite or LoL. Which sucks because blizzard had other bigger games for Esports 10ish years ago. StarCraft (and LoL) were synonymous with the Korean Esports sphere and overwatch became popular itself
Society as a whole changing. It isn’t the game, nothing they did. Society is different now.
Xrealm technology is to blame, when they added this in 1.12 it was the end of WOW as we knew it.
While we still had a bit of pve community left, the pvp part died that day. In WOTLK they then added xrealm pve and it was game over.
That being said, we have a lot more people playing WOW today, that have no interest in social activities at all. All they want to do is hunt a score and top meters.
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Same with the Diablo ARPG crowd, so many folks are here in WoW wanting it to be a fundamentally different genre of game, and the higher ups invited these people, and pandered to them. THEY, not us, set the target audience by developing and releasing content for them.
We as the players can make suggestions, but as they’ve pointed out, what does or does not ultimately get created is up to them, and our only recourse is to play it…or not.
I can only hope that evergreen content like houses slowly starts bringing back WoW’s original audience it was meant for, folks who WANT an MMORPG; not a single player ARPG like Diablo, or a lobby game like LoL, etc.
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I disagree because while society has undergone some changes over the last 20 years, it hasn’t changed all that much.
It’s the difference between Smalltown, USA and New York City (or, to include EU players, the difference between a village dans le bocage in Normandy and Paris).
A closed server, which is what we all had at the beginning, held at most 5k players. The numbers were more like 3k - 4k on a given Vanilla server. It stayed that way for a long time, and so what we had was actual community. We saw the same people over and over. We saw the same guild tags over and over again. Everyone on the server knew who the guild leader for the largest guilds were.
If you misbehaved, your guild leader would get tells about it.
If you misbehaved, people wouldn’t invite you to groups.
If you were the nice guy who did enchants free for mats, everyone on the server knew your name.
You’d end up in dungeon groups with the same priest who wasn’t even in your guild multiple times.
You’d end up seeing the same druid at your favorite fishing spot and the two of you would work out how to split the schools like normal people, buff one another, and go about your business in a respectful way.
Closed servers with small population. That’s why WoW was social, polite, and revolutionary back then.
Open servers with massive populations are the reason that changed.
It wasn’t that humans changed. It wasn’t that society fundamentally reorganized itself. It wasn’t LFG or Mythic + timers or the introduction of flight.
It was that we stopped playing on closed servers with capped populations.
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Oh trust me, I still get those XD (mostly cause I and the guild have an open door policy that rule violations be reported directly to me).
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send in the strippers… i got a pocket full of cold gold…
Ours does too, we have a handful of PvP hecklers and they get some complaints.
As for the person you quoted, I just can’t agree. When you go out, is everyone in the building social and having chats, or are you shopping and minding yourself? If you take public transport, do you talk to everyone? No one is openly social wen I go out, everyone keeps to themselves. 20 years ago, yes, there was a lot of public chatting and friendly small talk and making friends with familiar people. Much like the game. Nowadays, even the store employees that I see regularly aren’t openly chatty with me, nor do I any longer go out of my way to start up a chat. Much like the game.
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Cat-like typing detected.
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That’s sad to hear. I have not experienced that in my own life “going into the out,” but I certainly believe you.
I would imagine it’s different from place to place, but I am very sorry to hear that your own IRL community has become so noticeably less social. It’s not good for human health and happiness to be so disconnected. We are not cut out for isolated living…even those of us who are introverted and enjoy time alone need other people from time to time.
Ah, send them to the backroom of the Den of Mortal Delights, I’m currently using the front rooms for…something else more private…
Wait… might be better to switch that.
There hasn’t been any IRL community in my area in at least a decade, and I’m in one of the major cities in the US SW. I assumed, based on it and almost every group I’ve had in this game for just as long, that it was society as a whole. Never thought more of it, though I do wish people were even just a little more friendly.
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the one thing people forget is WOW is just a game, it is not here to replace social activities and social meeting which all take place in the REAL world not some make believe game world, so just play it and enjoy it… and take time to go out into the real world which has now turned into a clown world
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The main thing is that people dont want to put any effort into their socialization.
They want others to present them and welcome them into a preset social community. They dont want anything to do with helping curate it.
They want to sit and complain that WoW is no longer social while actively avoiding any social aspects of WoW.
10 years ago was Legion. You had auto-group addon for expeditions that Blizz had to kil.
Previously was WoD, which was so social it was all the garrison’s fault.
Previously was MoP, which wasn’t social because the plebs were playing in the wilds, while the social guys were huging one another in pre-M+ super social golden dungeons.
Cata… People were burnt after LK, so anyway, and Cata killed the guilds.
LK, lfg killed teh sochal aspxt. BC, if you weren’t rogue/mage/war/heal you could be social all day long, trying to get a heroic team. And the group would break after the first pack ruined us. Vanilla was so empty that you could be “social” all day.
Sure CRZ and all didn’t help, but the seeds were there from scratch, you only had “social” in WoW because the playerbase - and I mean base - came from EQ / DAOC. Leave the elderly, and it all vanished in a day.
Which is quite fun because as terrible as they are, parisians are more social than normands ^^
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IDK, all I know is that vanilla to wotlk I made friends that I chat more to this day than any friend I’ve made in an expac since then. I still email my vanilla guild to catch up. Being part of a social group back then was not just about socializing but it determined how far in content you could go. Today I pug almost everything and join a guild that gets together 2 days a week to do a raid and not login anymore it starts to feel like a chore.
2nd comment pretty much nailed it.
Cross-Realm, and later the associated tools to actively group with cross-realm players.
(It was largely ignored or not fully used by the average player for a couple expansions due to needing to organize things through 3rd party websites or addons until WoD - at least in a raid setting. LFD was fully cross realm since Cata but dungeons were trivial either way so I never minded that.)
The game was ENTIRELY different before that.
I miss it greatly, but I understand that it was a horrid experience for players not on High Pop realms, so the current version is pretty much objectively better as a video game.
Things really did change though. I miss caring about my progression as more than an achievement checklist or means to gear. Guild Rivalries and stuff just don’t exist anymore if you’re not a relevant piece of the WFR. It’s easier to care about your standing when you’re competing with the 5-15 other guilds on your server doing the content than when you’re 1 guild out of 50,000 doing the content and you’re currently ranked #3214 or whatever.
Even if you recognize names today, no one even runs actual guild groups anymore so competing with each other is pointless. It’s a bunch of small clusters of people (like 5-7 usually from what I see) who then invited an extra 13 from the Premade Group Finder and call it a “guild run”. It’s not at all the same thing. Barely anyone does full guild runs anymore if they’re not pushing Mythic.
Forced 20-man raiding was also a mistake. People struggle to fill rosters (which leads to the “just grab 13 strangers from Group Finder” thing). Especially in the modern game where M+ completely dominates gearing. Obviously 20-man is Mythic-specific, but it trickles down to lower content too, and when fights are designed to make sense in 20m Mythic, it often creates walls where 10m groups, while technically allowed in lower difficulties, can’t really progress with average play, because the encounter expects x number of unique bodies to handle mechanics or x number of healer CDs to heal through big AoE.
10m should have been the new standard instead of forcing everyone closer to 25m.
Maybe it seemed reasonable when it changed, but it’s clear now that smaller group content just works better when it’s allowed to.