How do you want me to provide you with proof? You want me to find scientific articles about it? … Oh what the hell, just for you!
Eklund, L & Johansson, M. (2010). Social Play. Stockholm University.
http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/10343.55072.pdf
This was written some time after the introduction of the Dungeon Finder. Here’s something I found to be interesting:
Reputation and trust have been shown to be important in MMOGs [14]. Reputation, however, has only a local effect on the particular server where a player’s characters reside, since those characters are only visible to players on that particular server. The effect of ostracizing someone and reporting that character to a “ban-list” or using other means of sanctioning such as blocking that character from future cooperation has limited or no effect across servers.
Which is exactly what I was trying to tell Jazem; putting someone on ignore does not really make any difference whatsoever.
Crenshaw, N. & Nardi, B. (2016) “It Was More Than Just the Game, It Was the Community”: Social Affordances in Online Games. In Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7427655 (behind a paywall, sadly).
Okay so this one is perhaps more relevant when it comes to the consequences cross-servers has on the social aspect. Here’s a rather long but relevant quote:
2.1.1. Group Finder. A key change that affected social experience came with the Group Finder interface, starting in late 2006. Group Finder automates the process of finding others for the collaborative activities of “dungeons” (small group activities) and “raids” (large group activities). In December 2006, Blizzard introduced “Looking For Group,” the first version of Group Finder, named after a phrase players used when forming groups in chat channels. The interface allowed players to hasten the process of creating and organizing groups within a realm by advertising that they were looking for group members, or searching through a list of partially-formed groups. Even with Looking for Group, however, there were often still long wait times. In a patch released in December 2009, Blizzard attempted to remedy this problem by providing a larger pool of potential group members that drew players from multiple realms. While more players decreased wait times, the new system changed how players interacted within a group. For example, players were not concerned about maintaining reputations and relationships with people from different realms because they were strangers whom the player was unlikely to see again [7].
But when it comes to these articles the main thing anyone cares about is the results. This is what they have to say:
- Results
While social experience in WoW is central, it is also fragile and vulnerable to changes in the system. Players reported that changes have affected the social experience of the game, and contributed to a decline in sociality. Some did not mind this decline, as the game was easier and more efficient to play, while others were disappointed and felt that something important had been lost.
Now, I did not wholly read these. I skimmed through them. Perhaps if you look through them carefully you may find something that I missed that completely changes everything and puts you in the right!
Your argument is essentially that “Classic is already dead” because “no one is social in Classic”. And I tell you that that is not the case based on my experiences, and were they to re-implement the dungeon finder nothing would change for you but everything would change for me.
So if you want that garbage then go and play retail.