What happened to the WoW Community of the mid 2000s to early 2010s? People used to have playful banter in general and trade chat.
Nowadays? There is hardly any communication in-game.
16 Likes
8:07 PM, unfortunately
81 Likes
Retail is pretty quite about 80% of the time even in dungeons and pvp nobody really says anything. The most active and talkative people I met were on classic SoD and cata classic.
7 Likes
November 23, 2004
4 Likes
Folks spamming over and over again the same tired old memes that werenât ever funny was hardly âplayful banter.â It was just spam that teenagers accepted as part of the game. As people grew up, more and more people wanted to play the game especially as more and more tools began to become available to players.
The game is still alive and well, with a very vibrant community ⌠that is so diverse that thereâs effectively no community to speak of. Hereâs the reality of it:
Trade chat spam has decreased, and thatâs all one can say about the point you raised here. But beyond that, WoW is such a large game that there isnât âaâ community but several multitudes of micro- and sub-communities. When those communities have a general shared opinion, that gets painted as an opinion shared by a larger group of people despite it still being a minority opinion.
Take this concept, add then the proliferation of particularly offensive political views being shared in-game, and an in-general quite trollish attitude by those who actively participate in public discourses and you get what happened to trade chat.
So those who wanted to play the game and had grown up a bit simply turned it off and focused on their Teamspeak, Mumble, forum, Discord, and in-game guilds instead.
⌠basically, the internet left the 2000s and influencers realized that they could influence people online, and this started around the 2010s-ish. That mentality spread to MMOs like WoW and things like trade chat became largely unusable. Meaning that the only people who were left to use trade chat were three groups:
- People who have no issues being edgelords in public places.
- People trying to use trade chat for its actual intended use, and also folks selling in-game services.
- Bots.
And this is wrong. Folks donât communicate the same way folks did in trade chat as before, but plenty of folks still talk and communicate as long as you go to the places where people do talk about the game. Simply because⌠those places are full of people who have an interest in the game, such as Discord or a lot of RP realms.
13 Likes
People grew up.
You can try to recreate the past on Classic, but it wonât be the same because the players have changed.
15 Likes
The âcommunityâ which people fondly remember for some reason was the pre LFD elitists that did gear checks for VoA of all things and gatekept endgame much more actively than anyone ever has since.
So the introduction of LFD killed the âcommunityâ.
9 Likes
Wow was a social networking platform at that point. They could have kept it with Battle.net if they had done a Discord like system back then. But to late now.
3 Likes
It started with the Wow Token rollout in 2015 and ended with the Mythic Plus launch in 2016.
You used to have to find a group of people to do things together if you wanted to progress, but once the tools and metrics for carries, gear/score upgrade services, and achievement services were in place, the community was done for.
Mythic plus put ratings and scores front and center and suddenly people would judge any potential party member by their status and I know that people are checking armory on this toon to see if I have any ârightâ to claim this- proving my point.
suddenly if you couldnât or wouldnât get into a group on merit to progress, you could always swipe your credit card and buy the reputation you needed. The people that paid for such services didnât want to be seen using those services, but those services were profitable so they started filling the chat channels and drowning out the old community.
2 Likes
I think it died around Cata. They did that Real ID thing where it showed your name to everyone, then had to retract it.
You went from anonymous to having your whole name broadcasted overnight.
I play on Moonguard so there is still a ton of that. Its one of the only servers that is still active and not full of spam.
8 Likes
Wait, someone killed everyone in the wow community??? Am I next!!! Halp!!!
1 Like
I donât think itâs dead.
I canât speak for chat as I ignore it most of the time.
But the forums seem to be much more lighthearted than I recall 10+ years ago.
2 Likes
Itâs undead
2 Likes
People start posting troll content on sub-70 alts on the forums. The community didnât die. It was offed by bad faith posting.
1 Like
The forums were insane back in the day. People used to actually post books worth of suggestions because they believed Blizzard still read the forums.
I think they did lift a few ideas, I remember some Shaman abilities appearing that people had suggested on forums, pretty sure Lightning Lasso was one.
4 Likes
Not everyone does that! ⌠ok⌠ok fine. I do, but still! You didnât!
2 Likes
2 Likes
How can you have any sort of discussion in trade chat when there are 40 bots spamming their same message every 5 seconds? There should be posting restrictions that prevent that from being possible.
2 Likes
automatic report system that silences you (and you cant even dm your battle.net friends) or suspension in worst cases
everyone is afraid of talking nowdays
12 Likes