Don’t get me wrong… WoW is still more social then lots of other online games. But why play an online game just to never talk to anybody?
I join tons of different guilds… Join VC in tons of different discords. Offer to teach or carry people for absolutely free. And it still seems like nobody even attempts to make friends anymore.
Anybody want to play with me? I mostly PvP… my toons around 1800 MMR atm. I also M+ and heal mostly. Have hit 2k or 2.5k the past 3 expansions.
I love WoW… biggest problem for me is actually being able to find players to play the game with. Idc if you are bad bad… just talk to me… lol I promise I don’t smell bad.
Internet has changed, video games are no longer as social as they used to be.
WoW’s player base is aging. Most of us are 30-40s and up with kids now. Either people have friends / family outside of WoW or just don’t have the time to build friendships anymore. I have a 6 year old (who never stops going), a 4 year old and a 1 year old. Only time to myself is after they go to bed and sometimes they wake up. I can’t spend the amount of time playing that I used to when I was younger.
WoW retail is more of a lobby game, there’s nothing to really force people to build friendships anymore. Everything is built around convenience therefore you don’t really need other people to succeed.
Cross - server groups means you never bump into the same people twice or at least very rarely.
Seasonal type gameplay means people come and go a lot, harder to build lasting friendships if people are dipping in and out all the time.
The world is more connected than ever, but more anti-social than ever.
Combine all those together and there’s your answer.
It can be done, but it takes a LOT more work and effort than it used to.
I keep talking with people in-game quite a lot. The big difference if someone wants to be social is that you have to make an effort to be social: take the first step.
Don’t offer things but just comment random people like “that’s a nice transmog” (when you genuinely think it is a nice transmog), get people to chat before a key starts by just talking quite openly and brazenly - folks will join in.
Folks are still entirely social, not everyone of course not, but folks are still social. But it takes figuring out how folks tick and to be willing to get people to want to engage with you to talk.
Keep yourself in a grind set place and people will run out of things to talk about. When your time of socializing is filled with activities you are expected to focus up it leaves less room to build social bonds. Part of why I quit mythic raid and climbing M+ is without people I built friendships with in casual places it so quickly became a room of randoms working.
Been a lot more social and fun again when I gave myself space and resources to put into that.
Is this true for everyone, no, I’m just one panda on the Internet sharing my experiences.
In my honest opinion… it’s because most people are self centered and hard to communicate with, set over the top expectations for others but not themselves, will act all self-righteous and then act horribly all while they can’t take a little back and forth banter. There are always some gems in the rocks, but a lot of people are just rocks through and through and this has always been the community and it’s behavior.
Times have changed. People have changed. People don’t have any patience anymore or tolerance. I used to sit around and chat in older MMOs like Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot between pulls because of the downtime waiting to regen. Here, people lose it over not taking the perfect route and taking longer than necessary. God forbid you even try to talk in group chat.
I wonder if, in the past, when a cafeteria had few people, people would try to sit near each other. Now, it seems like I am unusual for wanting to sit near someone when there is an empty table nearby, as if the better solution is both of us sitting alone. Maybe it is, I don’t know.
Of course they did, because they didn’t have internet to consume 24/7. So if you get bored enough, a fair amount of people will talk to each other.
When you couldn’t look up anything on the internet for information that you wanted, you had to talk to people. When everyone didn’t have gps, you had to ask someone etc etc.
Internet has brought some amazing quality of life, but it has also played a huge role in creating an anti-social world.
I don’t want to assume your age but you seem wise so I think you will know it anyways. When people talked to each other before, strangers, casually, how did they know what to say? I like the rule of pets - hobbies - goals (I didn’t come up with this) but I suppose people were better conversationalists in the past, and maybe you all had better techniques for finding what to talk about. What do you think?
Because terrible people now play and blizzard doesn’t do anything about it aside from slaps on the wrist or public channel mutes.
There are people on Twitter giving blizzard crap for the upcoming additional color blind settings being added because it does not benefit them. The playerbase is full of absolutely horrible human beings who are impatient, self centered, unapologetically rude and vulgar, and in general awful… Leading to more and more people not wanting to deal with others and asking for more and more systems to avoid socializing and instead automate what was once a social aspect to the game.
Why queue for a random dungeon with other players for the weekly specific dungeons when I can do a follower dungeon? Why do m+ with toxic folks when I can do delves solo? Heck, if comp stomp was available all the time of probable do “PVP” stuff more.
The game isn’t as special anymore because people suck. I hate that it’s that way but it is
Each to their own perceptions to the “Why” 