If we’re being honest here, I don’t play this game to be Social and make friends, despite the friends I’ve made playing it being amazing people. All of them are either guild adjacent or friends of friends.
Random people are wildcards and I don’t wish to roll the dice on making friends with someone that’s going to have a mental episode and dump that on me in a month. I’ve already dealt with that enough to never want to deal with that again.
People talked about whatever it is they wanted to talk about.
Most people talk about general stuff - the city they’re in, the restaurant they are at, the weather, and then go from there.
Do you like the food here? Where do you live? Where do you work? Oh what’s it like living there? Mostly its just expressing an interest in someone else and asking questions about them that you might find interesting.
I don’t think people in the past were “better” at it necessarily, it’s just they were forced to do it. I still live near a small town. I bump into the same people every at work, gas station, grocery store etc. Eventually if you bump into someone enough times more than likely a conversation will develop at some point. Sometimes you choose to get to know someone a bit more, sometimes you don’t.
Most conversations just involve small talk with strangers. But if you continued to talk to people, eventually you’re going to find people who gravitate towards the same things you do.
In today’s world, you rarely have to interact with another human being if you dont want to. You can order anything you want on amazon. You can do self checkout. You can even have your groceries delivered out to your car or mailed to your house. Before all of this, there wasn’t an option. You HAD to go out and interact with people, thus at least forcing you to develop some sense of conversational skill.
It got too many players.
The city of London has over eight million people, every one of whom is trying their hardest to pretend they’re the only person in all of England.
Tokyo has over fourteen million and they have basic human interaction as a product you can buy because you’re certainly not going to get it in real life.
The more people you shove together the less they want to interact with each other. It’s human nature. WoW has become like that too. There’s so many players that people instinctively retreat back into themselves.
Since more subscribers means more money, Blizzard is insensitived to design the game in a way that allows people to keep ignoring each other rather than push the social aspects and lose players until it reaches a level where socialization is practical.
Well my guild, Viatores is always recruiting and we have a good time there. The only thing is that we are in stormrage.
i love talking when i get into CTA, call to arms, dungeons or keys. I’m just a usually chatty dude. Humans intrigue me. Sometimes I’ll get some chatter back; most of the time I do not.
I will say, there’s a good chance folks play this game to escape any kind of societal expectations, which include interfacing with other humans. I can understand how that statement will seem paradoxical - why join an MMO if someone wants to ‘get away,’ and perhaps that’s just a hot take. But sometimes, I think, people just enjoy the game and may not want to go beyond that.
And when my inner extrovert buff comes off it’s ICD, I have to remember that!
A lot of people also forget that the only thing some of us have in common with most of this playerbase is this game. If we’re just in Dornogal, I don’t have a ton to talk to you about. You probably don’t want to hear my thoughts on class design and numbers tuning or my various external fandom interests, and I don’t want to hear how your 5th cousin’s wedding went because I just do not know you.
In the rare instances that someone does want to talk about the stuff that actually interests me, I’ll sit and converse. Sometimes that leads to a friend. But those moments are few and far between.
I’ve been told it’s like being at the shopping mall. They like having all the people around them. They just don’t want to talk to any of them.
Yep. Barrens chat came back in the redo’s somewhat at times. I as a retail convert didn’t bring it lol. it was OG’s who showed me those ways lol.
The only way I get any sociable-ness is in communities. If I didn’t have that I wouldn’t be playing. There’d be little point.
This might be a hot take, but i believe its always been like this. The only person you can rely on most of the time is yourself. Its just that in the old days mmo game design just didnt make it possible to make progression without relying on someone else. In the early days, you had no option to get through a game alone so most people just went with the flow and did things as a group.
As more mmos and multiplayer games were made, people migrated to whichever was more convenient for their needs, some people went the easy route and others still reached out for others. But over time, especially as the average mmo player got older and got more responsibilities, they left the games that didnt cater to their needs. MMos had no choice but to adapt as competition for market share got more fierce so more and more convenience was made available. It didnt help that as time went on more and more players simply didnt want to interact with others regardless of what rewards await them.
Now there will always be a portion of the total gaming public that want sociability, but even they will go to the game that makes it more convenient to satisfy their needs. And even if you set aside everything, there is one thing you cannot avoid and it is availability. You cant be there at your friends convenience 100% of the time and vice versa.
The game is less social because of time, time passing, things changing. There are multiple generations of people playing WoW now, as old as it is, and such things as generational gaps are a real thing. Many people, of many ages, all with different beliefs, values, behavior, attitudes, and perspectives.
Other things affecting the social part of the game is that it is huge now, people are spread out, and you don’t really need any help from someone else until you’re doing group content or end game activities. Zones are empty, quests have been nerfed to be able to be soloable (with only the odd outlier here and there) over the decades.
Server culture is a real thing too, I can’t remember the last time I read a general chat conversation on Wyrmrest Accord beyond the newest patch zone or just someone being friendly and map pinning a rare.
All that said, I still try to be social. I also don’t take it personally when other people don’t want to talk, or don’t reply. I still greet people when they come into my keys though, I joke around when others engage back with me, and I find it easy to make friends after good dungeon runs. I made 3 or 4 new friends this week by just gearing up a tank alt.
Not a hot take at all… you’re just being realistic, people like to pretend the game is less social because they personally don’t see it in-game… it’s just not really in-game anymore, it’s in like discord and what not, because WOW is a overly censored.
Because people, especially the terminally online have become so insufferable to deal with. A single disagreement is now seen as an unforgivable affront to their whole person-hood and they lash out the second you say or do something they disagree with.
Lotta truth in this. The toxic ones seem to stand out most. But the silent majority are probably quite normal and silent for a reason - they are also the actual casuals.
There are simply too many people online these days. The internet was once a small, tight-knit community where most of us understood both the spoken and unspoken rules. Back then, the majority of people online were highly intelligent.
Now that the internet is easily accessible to every Tom, Dick, and Harry, it has been flooded with brain-rotted, low-IQ individuals who shout the loudest. Naturally, no one wants to deal with them—so we’ve become less open, less friendly to randoms, knowing all too well that there are far too many annoying idiots out there to waste our time on them again.
That’s the truth of it.
Something tells me you smell bad.
Idk man. Im in like 4 different guilds where i hang out talk and ive met a bunch of people who ive even met irl. My ex was a wow player and we only broke up because of different life goals (she wanted to get married after like 5 months)
I honestly find retail more social if you jusy put yourself out there
Why has this game gotten so less social?
20 years later with a lot of different players
Not really true. There were always toxic people, but there was a least a thin veneer of decency, because there was no cross realm. If you became known as a pile of garbage, your pool of people who would group with you, small to start with, because smaller servers, would rapidly deplete and you would eventually have to reroll/transfer/name change.
I’d argue that is the same reason the game is less social. Everyone has an endless pool of replaceable people to group with. Why be decent or sociable if you can instantly replace them at a moments notice
this game has one of the worst players i have ever had my displeasure to play with so yeah im not so interested in talking to anyone. just get the dungeon cleared so i can leave.
