Adding dungeon finder was great for the new players who didnt want to play WoW and make friends in the first place, but it did irrepareable damage to the community.
Than Cross-Realm made it so servers that were self regulating via black lists for 5 years no longer had any control over who they played with allowing bad apples to reign.
Classic is thriving and retail is dying. Its because Classic is a better MMORPG and retail doesnt really matter anymore. People push CE and 3k io and recieve less clout than a Classic player on a Scarab.
Blizzard doesnt care about WoW retail players outside of streamers and the top 1% so it wont change either. Just gonna chug through the world soul saga than reboot.
In TBC I was in a dungeon run and one player did ninja mine a node without rolling for it. I reported this to his guild leader, he was kicked from the guild shortly after.
Today I think this was maybe a bit harsh, it was just some ore and a few gems, but that´s how it was back in the days. You had to be a nice guy, else you did face the consequences.
LFD/LFR made it easier to play solo, and as solo play increased, the more solo players were catered to. It ruined the social aspect we once had, but it also probably lengthened the life of the game.
Many of us who started playing in high school or university now have much busier lives and just can’t commit the way we need to to make organised group content work anymore.
I found it started declining when random dungeon finder became a thing, it basically destroyed all the fragile guilds on each server and only the most well managed and social guilds survived. I remember being in very active social guilds who actually went out and did stuff and used voice communication so we became friends, Now players join random groups and have zero concern for either tanks or healers trying to keep people alive and will even ruin keys just for fun. The last great server and guild I played with was on Grobbulus Alliance during WOTLK Classic Thanks Mayorwest and all you others in that guild for dragging me along with my poor DPS and reliving that era, It was so much fun.
People in this thread are putting too much focus on the random matchmaking tools.
Which, granted, ARE a major reason.
But people aren’t giving enough “credit” (in a negative way) to the faceroll modes Blizzard has added to the game.
Game used to have 1 difficulty. They’ve added 3 levels of faceroll below that.
It isn’t JUST the random matchmaking. When the monsters forget how to use any of their abilities, a blind ferret could do the dungeon or the raid, there’s no NEED to strategize or use teamwork. Much less be social.
Overdesigned encounters. There was a marked shift towards expecting people to do external research starting with Cataclysm. Random dungeons became sweaty and had 50 minute queues for DPS. Bosses started to involve heavy movement or had bizarre mechanics that were unintuitive yet also completely unforgiving. Requirements for PvP-like gameplay in PvE (snap CC, snare spam, tight interrupt rotations) were increased. All of this led to animosity and basically boiled over the PuG scene that was already at its breaking point from achievement gatekeeping and GearScore that started in Wrath.
I don’t think it was the solo stuff. Game’s always had solo stuff. Sure, you couldn’t get as well geared solo as you can now, but you take my meaning.
I think a big part of it was the implementation of cross-realm and sharding. The sense of community we used to have is gone. The environment encouraged socializing in a friendly manner, because your reputation mattered. You weren’t getting to do content if your attitude was nasty enough to put people off. You did right by others, and they would do right by you. You did wrong by folks, everybody would shun you.
Reputation isn’t really a concern anymore since you can always find groups for stuff, and in-game socialization in general has declined greatly due to people now frequently having strongly negative experience when trying it.
Two things come to mind that have shaped the game in the past 20 years - society & social norms have declined, and the direction of the games development has changed from a family oriented social game to leaned more towards competitive players. Those two dynamics have lead to a largely anti-social, competition centered, game.
I think it declined with the general internet decline. You used to get a feeling of genuine human interaction in text. But nowadays internet trolls and bots taught us that most of the interaction is ingenuine, and true human interaction drifted into discord voice. But it makes in-game chat dead, and not everyone likes to take that leap to start talking to strangers over mic.
My favorite thing is trying to have a polite, enjoyable convo with someone and they just walk off or disappear and I mean purposefully logging off.
The kicker? It’s almost always the folks “LF a guild”. Guess they didn’t REALLY want a guild or friends as badly as they state in their TRP info . (Or more likely their anti-social and rude personality is why they’re trying to find good friends and failing)
I actually think the main issue is the internet… And in particular guides, optimization, parsing/simming, etc.
In it’s infancy this wasn’t even possible on the internet, and many people I played with wouldn’t want to look up information because it’s cheating. I still feel that way, and I realize most players don’t.
But thottbott gave way to gearscore, and that gave us dungeon finder, fast travel, etc.
I realized it around the time Ulduar dropped during WOTLK… I quit around then, and everyone I knew before that point left, I’m the only one I know that came back.
. (Or more likely their anti-social and rude personality is why they’re trying to find good friends and failing)