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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