Listen, I know everyone’s sick of hearing that as the excuse, but the truth is we were headed down a very isolated path to begin with and then we all got locked in our homes for a year and our circles got very small.
People developed isolationist habits that a lot of us haven’t resolved.
People drew inward. They stopped conversing with others. The hundreds of small interactions people used to have every single week of their lives with cashiers and people on transport and people they passed in the street or just waved hello to at work…all of that went away, and people have not yet recovered from it.
The world as it is makes it very easy for all of us to keep on living like we’re still on lockdown.
That’s not the only reason, but I believe it’s the biggest one. COVID messed the world up, and we’re not over it, yet.
You would be absolutely welcome to join our guild, but almost nobody in our guild PvPs.
We’re very social. Most of us have played together since Vanilla. We have quite a few who joined in BfA, a couple from Shadowlands, and a handful who’ve only been with us since DF. We have two guys who just joined during TWW and seem to be wonderful additions that we’re getting to know better.
You’d be welcome to raid with us, and we do dungeons (though most of us are in the 7-10 range right now and are not pushing higher at this point in the season).
That said, I’m not trying to recruit you. It’s just that I get it, and I don’t enjoy playing WoW totally solo all the time. My guild is the reason I play. My recommendation is that, no matter what guild you choose, keep searching until you find one you vibe with. WoW is a very big game and there are still millions (plural) of people out there playing it.
A group that plays how you like to play does exist. It just might take a while to find them.
I don’t think that is true. Sure, it’s easy to find a PUG. But the people in 80% of the PUGs I’ve joined these “tools” don’t speak, no question about how you want to run the instance. The tank just immediately start pulling and people start firing off spells.
I like to play a certain way. If other people don’t cool. More power to them. But there are no “tools” in game for me to find them. They are all about getting people into your raid guild to fill a slot.
There is something about that. I mainly play the game to relax, collecting things, often doing some trivial content - and so is my good friend with who I often play the game. I don’t mind doing slightly more challenging content, but I stopped looking at numbers and ratings long time ago. I’ve talked recently to someone who seemed to get quickly disinterested in talking to me when I said I’m not particularly interested in doing +10 mythics or heroic raids.
I don’t pvp, but I do random adventures and am an old school chatter box. So yeah, if you’re down for the occasional foray into some group content or just want to BS a bit hit me up. MadTitan#11137.
gotta be honest, that is not my experience at all. i’ve got 100+ friends online at all times and no matter what time of day i log in, somebody messages me to chat or run a key or whatever.
pyrii#1563 if you want to add me! i don’t pvp but i’m always down to tank, heal or dps keys and i can sometimes be convinced to come raid as well
Is there anything that prevents speaking to people before grouping? As far as I know, that can still be done. There are people in this thread that are offering to group with people… it should be possible to speak with them before doing anything with them.
For random auto-grouping, sure, you don’t get that opportunity… but that is what you sacrifice for auto-grouping (that is kind of the point of it).
The “tools” that I mentioned before are not even limited to the game. There are other options, even outside of the game, that make things far easier than ever before.
Seriously, I am not a person that spends a lot of time in a group, but even I know that things have never been this easy for meeting people and organizing groups.
People in general are probably just far less social with their phones always in their faces. This also isn’t the social platform it used to be that served as a weird kind of internet chat room from 2004. It’s just a game with a lot of instances now and niche groups playing amongst themselves.
Yeah…the whole world seems less social and more living in whatever comfortable bubble they’ve created. Seems to take a daring soul to reach out and make new friends now-a-days. Plus, the original MMO playing age group seems to be tied up just trying to get by IRL most of the time now…so they don’t have the time to be as social as in the past.
WoW will continue to be less social until they move off the weekly timegate timeout as progression model.
They need to lean back onto putting loot back into the content itself, and give players proper agency over their own progression. People are at the point they’re toxic at each other if they’re suboptimally playing because it’s about speedrunning into checkboxing for the weekly loot.
The thing is, if that were the case, I’d be getting a looooot more convo out of guildies, because I talk to everyone in the guild, at least the first week they’re there to try and build connections.
What really shoots down this theory is that… most of them DON’T respond, and after about the first week or two I leave them alone. And eventually? They leave the guild having said nothing for months.
People aren’t “shy”, they’re just asocial and some of them anti-social.
And that’s 90% of who we get in from all sources, folks who just aren’t there to socialize, they want to run something, get out, and speak to no one. I blame phones and other electronics, we’re more connected than ever, but it’s generally apparent average IQ and even soft skills like interpersonal communications have erroded and decayed.
Turns out like muscles if you don’t use your social skills, they atrophy.
I mean, I find a ton of them on trade when I had it open, so it’s not that they don’t want to talk, it’s that they knew their trade chat drama farming and general toxicity would get them kicked if they opened their mouths and said something like they do on trade.
Because the guild has a no politics and zero drama policy.
Dungeon runs stopped being a Sunday morning drive and became a track and field event, no time for chit chat.
Sharding meant you no longer saw players on your server regularly, so no relationships could be built by seeing the same folks all the time.
Discord meant no longer needing to talk in game.
Toxcity became common place, players knowing they are now anonymous thanks to sharding, no longer needed to watch what they say, this ensures nobody reaches out to try and make friends in game anymore.
I think there has just been a perfect storm of social degradation in world culture. The ability to communicate with almost anyone that you share a language with has caused problems that (socially) the human race does not seem to be ready for.
Throw in some government/political manipulation on social media outlets and it just makes a bad situation worse.
Then you have the realities of life… getting old, more responsibilities, less time to shoot the breeze, etc.
Not surprisingly, it seems to have all dogpiled into a bubble of protective silence. I find that neither good or bad… it just is.
