You don’t need to chat with people while leveling because Blizzard removed all the friction required for leveling, there are no quests where the game doesn’t explicitly say where to go and what to do.
You don’t need to chat with people to do dungeons or see the raids, tools like RDF and LFR solved that issue and forming a community for anything less than Mythic Raiding is largely pointless since M+ gives better rewards and is much simpler to just pug.
Community still exists, but it’s separated in niches, not because some people will mass report you for talking, but simply because there’s no reason to talk to people outside your niche. The most social interaction I’ve had in DF outside my friend and raid groups has been to find someone to craft gear.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, nor intrinsically a good thing. It’s just the end result of when your community largely exists to overcome inconveniences within the game itself, making the game more convenient erodes that community.
Between content being both cross-faction and cross-realm (not to mention sharding and connected realms), the game is already a mega-server in everything but name.
After trying classic, hardcore and sod, people definitely talk ALOT more in classic. Like constantly, 24/7… which is funny cause the game is the same, i see people talking in trade and general and even in parties all the time. It’s kind of fun to rp in classic too.
If everything you say is something reportable, that’s a personal problem and one that showcases that you aren’t fit for social environments. Work on fixing that first and foremost, but no - just because everything you say, according to yourself, is reportable doesn’t make others less sociable.
It is inflammatory, according to you, to say that people do socialize in-game but that only stuff that’s reportable is stuff that gets sanctioned…?
Here’s some advice: go outside and leave the internet alone for a couple of weeks.
To some degree yep you’re right it is a megaserver, but the population is still splintered between a bunch of small server groups, and then big servers like mine or area-52. They may as well rip the bandaid off at this point, and combine it all. It’d do a lot to flesh out the world with players. Instancing will handle the rest as usual.
Time to kill on mobs is like 10% of what it is on classic, and the rotation on my hunter is hunters mark, pet attack, and maybe serpent sting if I’m not trying to regen mana. There is a lot of downtime in classic between fighting mobs, traveling, or waiting for respawns. All of this motivates people to chat because the game gives them some breathing room.
I turned off trade and general at the start of WoD and haven’t regretted it for one moment.
General & Trade were always pretty bad, but at least you only had to deal with them from time to time. Once I saw that crap was turned on in our garrisons, I immediately shut it off and never looked back.
True, but you also totally missed the ball as to the reason
The social aspect “migrated” over to 3rd party programs like Discord because people wanted to speak freely without worrying about false/mass reports and use adult language (which is technically against ToS ingame)
Most of the playerbase is working-age adults by now, so the mass-move over to Discord makes sense (free speech allowed, swearing/adult language is fine, no Karen “hall monitor” types lurking with a finger hovering over a Report button, etc)
I don’t recall the last time I saw “racists” or “sexists” in any global chat channel to be honest… or any spontaneous/random conversation happening besides very basic questions here and there (“anyone else lagging?”)
There isn’t any “tryhards” or “racists” in the chat channels, almost no one talks (about anything). The global chat channels are basically dead besides the WTS/boost seller spam, that’s kinda the whole point of the OP’s observations lol
The masses are terrified to talk in /say /general & /trade
They think politics and stuff happens there, I don’t see it but whatever.
I think the masses are just scared after Code of Conduct went out.
Once in a while there’s some minor politics banter/back-n-forth that pops up (usually a couple snide remarks that quickly fizzle out), but other than that the global chat channels are dead as far as people randomly socializing/chit-chatting with each other lile they used to in the early/og days
