How could one ‘prove worthy’, since there was no Achievement to link before WotLK? Did Raid Leaders invite people at random? Maybe asking them to explain tacts on /w beforehand? Or using third parties similar to raider. io? Maybe pugging wasnt even a thing?
I read here and there mostly from Vanilla players how Achievements turned people to elitists but tbh i refuse to believe there wasnt a single method of filtering experienced players from the mass.
What killed social interactions were dailies, X-server and LFG/LFR early on, and more instancing, phasing and sharding later on. It made the game more accessible, but it also made the playerbase bigger and more anonymous - you didn’t need anyone, nor did you need to behave - the chance of meeting these people again was slim.
Before that, you were like a citizen in a small hamlet… people would recognize you, or know your guild or even your alts. These days, I hardly come across people from my own server when leveling and I’m on Draenor.
Achievements were just on of the things to keep you busy, but I don’t think they impacted social interactions too much. If anything, people helped each other to get the hard to get ones… up until every nobody and their mom could raid and everyone had tens of thousands of gold pieces.
Checking gear, gems, enchants and talents on armory and if it looked good u would get in on trial runs. Most guilds/raid groups had their own website where u applied to join.
Edit: for pugs i guess it was inspect before the run.
How did dailies affect social interaction in any way ? Especially considering there were already some kinds of them back in Vanilla.
How I love to read people talk about what killed/is killing this or that side of the game, they happen to come up with such unrelated and oftimes completely contradictory reasons.
This pretty much killed the social aspect of the game. Not to forget the Guild Traits which caused bigger guilds to grow bigger and small guilds to get smaller or eventually die. In a big guild, you were pretty much anonymous because there were so many players in those
If I’m being honest achievments were to me one of the best features ever added to the game. They give you something different to do, provide challenge, at times reward you for it and many of them can take you out of the classical “kill X” routine. Just like anything else, it is what people do with them that makes the difference.
Last big achievment I farmed seriously was dungon glory hero during Legion in order to unlock artifact appearance. It was a barrel of fun.
There were much less pugs to begin with. And in those cases it was mostly about having friends in high places or be really well known.
In terms of guild recruitment, it was like a job application, so you had to make a good first impression by having your enchants and gems properly sorted.
Many guilds also had class officers who would skim over your talents and see whether you had you build right. (no, talents weren’t as customizable as people like to be nostalgic about)
If you made a good impression, you then got a trial and would get a chance to prove yourself within the next lockouts.
So not much has changed in terms of guild recruiting for guilds that take themselves at least a little bit seriously. Personally I find that it’s in a much better state compared to all guilds requiring forum applications. So many guilds had so many questions like job interviews like “what do you think is your strongest aspect as a player?” and for me it’s always so cringy to have to reply to such questions.
Dailies really became a thing in BC. Instead of doing grouped content, or joining up in guild activities this caused people - in my guild at the time at least - to focus on the same solo content every day, more so than ever before.
I did not say dailies alone were responsible, but they didn’t help in social interactions. If anything, trying to clear a daily at the same time of dozens of others often resulted in less than honorable behaviour.
Could be you didn’t experience it like that, but I did. I hope you understand my argument now, even if you do not agree with it.
No, of course not. I wouldn’t even have bothered answering if so.
That is a rather shortcut way to explain things in my humblest opinion.
You do realize TBC removed absolutely nothing from the the kind of group content we had in Vanilla, as we still kept just as many reasons to stick to each other and that side of the game didn’t falter in the slightest. Another point worth mentioning is that dailies were doable in groups just fine, and that is how I used to do them mostly back then with my guildies. In fact, some of them were just not soloable at all such as taking down the avatar of Terrok in Terrokar forest.
Finally, if there is something dailies provided most it was doubtlessly world PvP, which I would qualify as nothing other than interactive.
Surely you must be jesting. Many of the dailies which would have you kill stuff were best done in groups, and it was a common thing to see random people tagging along each other in order to finish them. Indeed there were others less keen to share their time, but I would never go so far as to claim that they were in majority, and thus label dailies with such a negative brand.
I did experience that of course. But what I didn’t do is consider the issue as lying within the dailies system itself simply based on a side-effect it had on the least intelligent life forms.
We had in the past working server communities and most regular players did know each other and how good they were at the game. So while leveling in vanilla you would meet a lot of the people and do dungeons and stuff together with them, later on when you acquired some connections if you had a good reputation you would end up in the raiding guild if you were interested into the endgame content. In TBC you couldn’t get into the most raiding guilds without making an proper application to get into them, and most would take you first as a trial where the class leaders would follow your progression and made in the end an evaluation about you as a player and how good you are for their guild before you would be accepted as the raider.
In TBC we used to have to take a screenshot of UI also screenshot of recount dps .plus you usually had to apply to the guilds forum and fill in a questionare that had a hidden question usually to see if you where paying attention or not
Also the GM/officer would go to Org/SW and inpsect you to see gems/enchants where best for you and cookie cutter talent spec according to elitishjerks site .
I would say pre ZA patch TBC it was just for PuGs anyways inspect and hope nothing else really.