faction - you make compromises; i have a friend who only wants to play alliance and if i could do content without worrying about pug situation i wouldn’t mind going alliance to play with him but last time i played alli prior to swapping horde long ago it was hell on our server and that was back in MoP.
pacing- i literally will go at my own pace. i have a friend who has a desk job and can play at work while me i work as a cook it’s mentally and physically exhausting there is a reason i don’t play every single day and only on my days off for the most part. if they want to go on ahead go for it idc.
drama - doesn’t matter always gonna have drama even with pugs.
criticism- i don’t play the classes he does nor do i care. they play however they want usually we are on par skill wise so it doesn’t even matter. only thing we criticize each other on is mog and even then we don’t care it’s our mog.
seems like you just thinking too hard about playing with friends tbh. play for fun doesn’t always need to be some sort of race. we all live different lives, we all go through our own personal bs. handle it and play simple as that
if i play with friends and a key goes bad, i know that they’ll never leave, they’ll never get mad at people and become abusive, worst case scenario there could be some whispers back and forth saying something like “Omg, where did we get this guy from? lol”
The wider community, especially among the M+ and raiding pug scene can be absolutely toxic and all together unforgiving, i want nothing to do with that world.
you still got play with folks in wow, specially in raiding, dungeons, pvp, and so on.
and if you’re anything like a normal human being, make a friend, and they’ll ask to hang out sometimes.
happened to me
had like about 8 friend groups and had great moments with them, most of it was even end-content related, like just went into a city and played a bubble game.
I generally play solo , but I do see the appeal of playing with friends. Back in our younger days we used to go to cyber cafes and have a round of CS 1.5 , quake, unreal tourney with maybe some age empires, Rize of nations thrown in the mix and it was fun .
Back in Vanilla guild drama killed what friendships I used to have since as soon as I logged in gchat and whispers were filled with they said this, they did this dribble that it got to the point I hated logging in on the toon that was with the guild.
So yeah, I soloed and pugged without friends because they made playing miserable with their issues.
And yes, though I’m in a guild unlike before I just chat, if anyones online at 3 or 4 am, but still solo or pug because of that feeling of not wanting to get wrapped up in guild drama.
I prefer playing solo and treating the game like it’s single player. I have never played this game because it’s a MMO. I’ve played it because it’s the continuing story of Warcraft. That’s it.
I would love to play with my friends in game, hard when they are the opposite faction. That is why I hope Blizz does what some other MMO’s did and let both sides join the same guilds and let players quest, dungeon etc. together even though they are opposing factions. I think this would help with faction imbalance and make it easier to fill Mythic + and Raid groups.
Factions remain enemies and you are not allowed into the opposing factions cities, etc. but it would be great to be able to quest and do stuff with friend who play the opposing faction. Plus, if you are like me and have two Guild’s, one for each side, it would be nice if I could choose which guild name I like better, move all of my opposing faction characters over to that guild along with resources and gold. Then I would not need two bank alts.
Without that would be faction changes on all of my characters on Alliance which would cost a fortune!
I like it becuase I know I can get better players on average than the randomness of pugging so it lets me push higher content. It also comes with being able to plan consistent routes and CD usage. I could probably tell you off the top of my head where I use a big CD like ashen in every dungeon because we run routes that are so consistent. Also I fond it more fun hanging out in discord chatting that just listening to music etc.
I do agree though that if you have friends at different levels it can get a little difficult sometimes.
