Gonna throw this link in to the chat. It is a post I made a while back about this same question.
If my old guild called the Fabled Order was still around, I would have never joined Moon Guard Realm.
They were the top notch DnD nerds I have ever seen.
It really wasn’t just one thing, the community changed over time and became a lot more selectively social .
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Ditto for online dating. Met my first GF on WoW and that was considered weird even a decade ago. I think covid changed alot of that
It’s player base.
I wouldn’t play it, if so. Story has never been good in its entire run, the characters have all been boring, and character depth, mechanically and aesthetically, is very limited.
I rely on fun combat and something to do at the relative end game to enjoy WoW. Once, a long time ago in Wrath, I may have had a different opinion. I could have played it solo for that period without much change to how I was playing.
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Convenience. You don’t need people to do content so most people don’t bother forming social bonds for that content.
WoW is still social, but it’s social in circles where you can’t pluck people out of the ether to accomplish your goals and then never see them again.
There’s a bunch of stuff but one thing that sticks out to me is the popularization and normalization of competitive, sweaty, super-optimized play that discards the majority of the game like the peel of a banana. When WoW was at its peak that was the realm of a small handful of cutting edge raiders, with everybody else sitting somewhere between chronic alt leveler and raiding but solidly behind the curve.
That’s not to say that kind of play isn’t social, it is, but only within the circles of players with that mindset. It tends to drive out the other types, which makes for a rather thin (and often transactional) social fabric.
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RDF back in the original. It caused people to no longer talk to each other in trade to look for groups, now you just press a button. And then cross realm stuff caused us not to be able to know who was who.
Har har. Last time I try to Text while tired.
I’m in the most actively social stretch of my time with WoW since I started in vanilla. I’m still friends outside the game with people I met in WotLK. I genuinely don’t believe the game got less social, I think it just stopped being forced on you. Don’t see a problem there.
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LFD
We are currently on nightslayer pvp realm and its a blast. You ought to join us 
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nah, fell asleep at the keyboard.
I see these threads a lot, not that I mind, but it always makes me wonder how social things were back in the day. I’ve always played WoW like a single player game even back before Cata. I know a few people like that. Maybe doing some social content, but never to the level that people on here say happened.
I wonder if any of it is nostalgia for the past. Maybe not. I don’t know anything outside of my own experience, but I do wonder if we aren’t remember the good times and conflating them to be all encompassing in our memory?
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I played since this game came out. Back in vanilla (gramps over here…), we didn’t have LFD. If you wanted to form a group, you had to ask around. Then you had to GO there. So there was more idle downtime to chit chat. Dungeons were not a zip zip breeze like they are now. They took time, you had to use CC sometimes, so there was more talking.
There were no shards, what you saw is what you got. So that guy you saw while leveling, you’ll likely see again. Then when you’re at max level, you see them again in a dungeon and you’re like “oh hey again!” Names were known, people were remembered. When you just do random queued content, you’re just a face in the crowd. You’ll likely forget their names as soon as the dungeon is over.
Yea, I mean I remember those times. I didn’t play vanilla, but I joined very late BC and have played classic. I see the point on what you are saying, and I’m sure it was more social for some people, but I just wonder if it was AS social for as MANY people as what people remember. Memory is funny like that.
Like, again just drawing from my own experience, I can promise you I wasn’t more social. I just…did less content. And I know I wasn’t the only player like that. So it just makes me curious.
is this a bad thing? from any perspective?
remember mega guilds when there was actually a benefit to recruitment ?
too much fun, I guess…
I know some people like to draw false memory. I don’t have a lot of good skill, but my sense of smell and memory are very good.
Then again, each person’s experiences will vary. There were even some people back then who didn’t interact with others. Those people ended up not doing a whole lot but that was their game. You don’t have to do what’s socially expected. You can reach max level solo and just farm herbs if that’s what you’re into.
You mean all those perks? Have Group, Will Travel? RIP
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guilds actually got gold when members did from quests…
999 member guilds and always a lot of people online to play with…
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