Ive never understood this, even with things as they currently are in retail… in all the raiding guilds i’m in etc… always have good ties to the community and other guilds around the same level of progress etc… often join each other for alt runs, swap members out for mythic if people are having roster issues.
Community is very much not dead on retail, it might have changed and evolved from what it was, but you can 100% have good community in WoW currently depending on what you’re doing and who you’re playing with…
My best WoW community experiences have always been revolved around who I choose to continue playing with. There have been tons of people I met in random dungeons that I wish I could have continued grouping with before cross realm grouping was put in.
It never really mattered who I was walking by in cities.
If done right, I think cross realm grouping could absolutely make the game better. It wouldn’t be the same as it was, but it’s pretty impossible to rewind to how things were back then. A decade of private server knowledge and practice and modern theorycrafting has essentially ensured that is impossible to achieve.
This is only true if you let it. If you carve out a good vibes group and actively maintain that, you’ll find that there’s also other groups out there like yours and can connect. My experience of Classic started a bit lonely, but once I found the right guild and the right group of people, it’s been as good as I remember, and the server I’m on has a lot better community because it’s not huge and driven by ‘modern gaming patterns’. There’s plenty of it, sure, but there’s also a decent number of guilds who are all looking towards playing together and if you work to expand that… it does.
Literally it will if the majority of players are introduced to the toxic community, instead of being welcomed into a cohesive server community. Just because you’re a huge server where you’re drowning in thousands of faceless NPCs, isn’t a good reason to drag the rest of us into your hellscape.
I agree, it always comes down to who you play with and if you want to be social.
i’m generally a social person so i push that even in random dungeons i mean unless i just can’t be bothered…
But often times me and a couple of buddies in full mythic gear will jump into normals…
Preface for the group if they wanna just blast the dungeon or do it normal because not everyone just wants a 7 min carry through a dungeon and then pace it from there… usually just chatting with the people leveling alts or even sometimes new players.
thats something we couldn’t / wouldn’t do without the rdf tool, without the rdf tool we would likely just run M+ with each other and ignore anything outside of the guild.
I really feel like people against rdf didn’t play wrath, if you did and you were in a raiding guild you would know how big it was… how it revitalised the old zones people were out questing and queueing for dungeons, gearing up alts, so many ICC runs… man i remember the calendar was just full of cross guild open slot alt runs… we got so many people 25 man icc kills on my server just because we had an abundance of alts on the server thanks to rdf making life so much easier.
i can value that not everyone wants it, but if you’re that adamant about not wanting it, it shouldn’t matter if it is in the game or not. just stick to your convictions and don’t use it.
Or maybe most people just wanted fresh servers not servers that catered the timed run min maxxers, and a server with accelerated leveling and raids tuned around max consumes with no world buffs just wasn’t very appealing.
And yeah the handful of low pop realms after all the hype… total success…
The meta gaming behaviors are pretty far reaching, and there’s no way to actually remove them. You have to self select who you are playing with to find those that aren’t meta chasing to degrees you aren’t comfortable with.
That gets easier the more people you have to choose from. You can’t really avoid those attitudes being around.
The WoW community feel is all about who you choose to play with, and it doesn’t require a server cap or block to make your guild (or whomever you choose to play with) a positive group of players.
There’s a lot of nothing in your post to be honest. SOM didn’t fail. The timing was pretty bad with TBC out, and the assumption Wrath was on its way behind it. Plus the limited window of its existence. Especially since a lot of people had paid to have their 60s duped both to TBC and retired classic servers. Plus retail is still a factor for so many people that weren’t brought up playing Vanilla WoW-style MMOs, and prefer the refined, arguably easier as far as QOL additions that are in retail. The community for Classic is and was too spread out.
As far as you not liking Classic style leveling? Your alternative? Go play one of the other versions of the game, or play another game or don’t play a game at all and spend your time not complaining. Maybe you were around for OG Vanilla, I’m guessing you weren’t - because I don’t understand your whining for the most part
this is why I like MG. I don’t even rp much these days. still social. still fun times. WRA can be hit or miss. But these 2 servers and now grobb is a trend. RP servers can be more chill and fun I have found.
then you get the cesspits like a52, tich and illidan. Not all are bad on these servers. I have illidan chars too. AH leveraging. 3 AH’s…1 usually has a better deal on mog/mount lol.
but…for the 2 good people, there are 8 nitwits at times. so for the retail haters using it as a basis I ask 2 things.
what was your server.
and why did you stay there.
I deal with illidan crap as said for AH stuff. But I still help a brother out on there. Like I said…not all of illidan is bad. Its jsut its stands out really lol.
This is different for every player. It absolutely does not fit my reasoning. While I find the power grinds of Retail annoying and do not like the gear becoming irrelevant etc I could easily tolerate it if I liked the community. I found that over the years the games community for got worse and worse and the game turned more into a single-player with a group lobby type of game. So I quit after subbing for years.
Ask 100 people why left Retail and you’ll get 100 answers. Every answer is fine for that person. While others do quote your reasons frequently (especically lately i’ve noticed) it’s not the only one.
I COMPLETELY disagree with this, I really enjoyed the Classic community on my server. There are dozens if not hundreds of others I’ve talked on these forums with the same opinions of theirs. Again the experience is different for every person but yours may have been because you just don’t care about this aspect of the game. You are more here to get relevant gear and not have a power grind as per your own statements.
i replied to your post mostly to say this - the majority of the people who moved to mega servers did for one of these reasons or both:
A very large number of players moved with their guilds or even their server communities. Guilds transferred together and often still keep in touch.
These people wanted to retain some sense of their communities, not abandon them.
A lot of people preferred smaller server communities but there was a fear of the next server dying.
While some people decided to just leave their guilds/servers “for greener pastures” a lot more fit into those reasons.
I do think that when a server reaches a certain point free transfers off should be offered. Edit: Oh you were talking about RDF being cross-realm, well that’s not in the game right now anyway as much as some people want that (I’d be fine with it) so for now I stand by the statement I said.
And a lot of people who did go to SoM were also playing tbc. They didnt want to raid in both games, but they did want the leveling with others experience.
I played SoM for a bit, but my main focus was tbcc. The fact i had also done all of the classic raids not even a year before made me want a bit more of a change in raiding. So i leveled in SoM but i spent most of my time in tbcc.
To be honest, I don’t think that’s why SOM failed.
SOM failed because we literally JUST DID IT. It was released only a few months after TBC released. Yes, let’s all go back and do what we just did once again, but this time, on hard mode. Had they waited until oh idk, maybe End of wrath, SOM may have had a relative success rate. Vanilla PR’s were popular for a reason. Look at Nost for example, sure they had a crew of devs that were more in touch with that era of the game but people wanted to play vanilla. What people don’t wanna do is play vanilla AGAIN after they just released TBC. People would rather continue their adventure into Outlands and carry on with the game, instead of going back and playing the game on hard mode immediately following having just finished.
Besides, when most of the community has moved on, and not everyone can afford to keep up a character on SOM and a character on TBC, they have to pick one or the other. Are they gonna play TBC and have brand new adventures in the Outlands with a good majority of the player base, or are they gonna stay and play vanilla on hard mode? They moved to TBC because it was a no brainer. No one wants to redo all their classic progress immediately after playing through classic.
Now had they waited until the end of Wrath and released SOM for each expansion in order, I guarantee there’d be a player base for that. Vanilla is second highest PR’s for a reason, right after wrath. People can handle the leveling even if it’s not the best experience because they enjoy what’s to come once they get to end game. However, not many people are willing to do it all over again when they just did it a few months prior, likely several times over because most players have multiple alts. At least if they waited until the end of wrath, that would have been 2-3 years of no classic, and people would have been much more inclined to replay it.
I’ve been on a few servers in classic. They have all been pretty similar. Lots of meta chasers at the top. A bunch of bad players that cling to the meta in hopes it will make them good, and then a small spattering of those that actually just want to enjoy the game outside the numerous guides telling them how to play it best.
Everyone is kind of largely doing their own thing. I certainly haven’t seen any major difference between the smaller servers and larger ones other than the number of people at any given time. Most seem to stick to their smaller social groups, which aren’t really dependent on server size other than your ability to expand them further.