I don’t know any raid team that ran five ranged. I’m sorry I have no idea what you are talking about.
However my point about meta in TBC Classic was dungeon related. Because there was no dungeon finder. People just didn’t want you if you played a spec they didn’t deem was good. Random people are awful. Dungeon finder removes that.
If you are looking for a guild, there are a huge number recruiting in Retail. I can’t speak for the Classics, I don’t really play those. Cata was my least favourite expansion, and with all that was going on in Retail, I gave it a pass.
A player in LFR wont see the need to gem or enchant but those that join guilds usually will. I don’t enchant or gem alts that just do openworld content, LFR/LFD. There is no point. It’s not going to give them any significant power gain and isn’t necessary for the content they are doing.
However when I raid mythic everyone is gemmed and enchanted. If someone is missing something they are usually given a heads up and it’s generally just an oversight.
The game is like society now. Everybody is in a rush, you don’t want to say anything that might offend someone by accident. So just rush through group content and keep quiet.
Back in the day, your interactions were bound to a server only. So you might even be guildless, but people were constantly seeing the same person over and over again.
Especially when they rolled out dailies in TBC.
So there was a sense of “community”.
And that was nice and all… but… like all good things in life, they had to end badly.
What happened is that people funneled themselves to a couple of overpopulated servers, while all the other servers were left empty.
So a bunch of people were left with the conundrum of paying a fortune to transfer chars to the overpopulated servers, or, have nobody to play with.
And transfer they did. Many of them. Until those servers could not take any more. And that is where the frustrations began.
So they did cross servers.
And that is how the “community feeling” in wow ended. The players killed it.
And by the way, same story for cross-faction. Its a fantastic solution to end faction imbalance once and for all.
But blizz did not force anyone to play majority factions in their servers. Its the players that did.
Cross realm also has it’s advantages. When I was realm based you really had to kill the world boss at the start of the week, preferably as close to reset as possible. Because once it got closer to reset no one was doing them. You really struggled to play if you were up at unsocial hours. Now it doesn’t matter what time of day or night you play you can usually form a group for just about anything.
It is a shame that we don’t run into our own friends and guildies so often. Even with WM on there are so many shards, obviously those shards make the game a lot more playable and I understand why they exist but you don’t run back and forth in the capital or a zone and see familiar names, or names don’t really become familiar to you.
Transfer…Lfg…Lfr… Guild killing …Faction Favorism …everything at some point played a signific-major part for the current state of WoW
While you say players Killed…nope.
The company killed for the profit at the point that the Subs is at the same price as was 20 years Ago and pets are like 2x the price for a skin pet …As we add new expansion we see the same model Raid 3x Dungeon 8x for espansion …
If they increase the price of sub now then the dmg is going to be further high.(Is any reason to don’t increase the Sub price with this inflation?? )
They mess up a lot.
If you look at attendance with population is quite low.
Of course people would Say …is end of Season… we have remix…we have classic…is 20 years old game …
Dragonflight has the lowest Attendance since last Expansion.
Is near 200k less people but Isn’t just 200k people…
The thing is …Guilds . The difference of Dragonflight Raiding Guilds with the Previous expansion is 12.6% …and Is Huge …
While the total population has shrink to a 4-5%~ The raiding guilds have further decrease in number at a higher percentage of 12.6%
If you have this data as a company you understand that people become more anti-social at the point that the Group Activities become a huge step to overcome at the point that the person that wanna Raid finds a Wall in the Guild Recruitmet.
There are a lot of things. To say frankly i really dislike the whole gameplay in everything that current WoW has …
I’m considering going to an RP realm just because of this.
I might even RP.
Right now I’m so bored of WoW due to the social meltdown that’s happened here, and I don’t want to play Cata where all my friends went.
I think, in terms of the choice between multi-realm with dynamic shards vs single-realm with a single shard, that is actually something that should be made a choice for players to make. These servers should be all about recreating the whole town thing and killing interaction with the rest of the region deliberately to strengthen it within the game world proper on that realm.
And if you don’t want that? Just stay off that server.
Many years ago I always greeted people in LGF, even attempted to chat when I noticed friendly people… not bothering with it anymore, it’s just not worth it.
Practically none. If you weren’t in a guild or you were running with friends you apparently knew in wow before wow was even a thing and your choice of character didn’t fit box a or fit box b or you didn’t fulfill another players quite often ridiculous demands ranging from your social security number to the mortgage details on your house. And I’m sure we all remember the joys of standing around in stormwind or orgrimmar reading the same people spam general with hilariously pompous messages like “LFM for KARAZHAN! MUST BE FULL SUNWELL EQUIPPED! YOU WILL BE INSPECTED, HAVE YOUR BLOOD SAMPLE READY”
No it didn’t. LFG in no way whatsoever stopped you from forming your own groups. You had your little clique of four friends didn’t you? Surely you would never have had to dip your toe into the filthy swill of completely random people you have never met before.
Their choice. They could have easily chosen to maintain their staus quo, they just chose not to and chose to blame an ingame tool.
Yes because so many Heroic ICC 25 man guilds decided to become 25 man LFR guilds.
No you can’t. But by all means. Do run an entire week of LFR, go afk and see how much loot you scoop up. Also, record it so we can have verification of this absolutely ridiculous trope that is regurgitated ad nauseum by people who have no idea what they#re talking about.
They still were. They still are, despite LFR, the apparent killer of social guilds being in the game for over 10 years.
What better place to get to grips with their class in a raid environment than LFR?
RWF maybe? “Hey Mr raid leader of the best guild in the world, I’m an absolute scrub with this DK but if you let me tag along I’m sure I’ll pick it up on the way…”
I often have fun in LFR, I’m actually getting something of a rep for being one of the only few people who actually takes the time to chat with people in my own nonsensical way, or throw some toys about to crack the ice. My particular current favourite being the obsidian egg clutch. So if anyone reading this is an LFR and you are suddenly set ablaze and knocked over by an Obsidian whelp named Blitz it was very likely me. You can ask some other players what I’m like if I find a group or people who don’t treat this videogame like it’s their profession and their life is over if they just can’t kill that large set of coloured pixels, like the time I was invited to a forumer’s mythic runs a few times and I probably scarred them mentally for life.
So like Normal, Heroic and Mythic then? Well at least we can agree on that.
No. Again. Stop blaming people because you are utterly incapable of trying to socialise with people outside of your little guild (it to be more precise, cliques) and trying to justify it by blaming lfg, lfr, or whatever in-game tool you want to use as a convenient little scapegoat.
remember what I said about trying to start a conversation with everyone soon as the group forms in LFR?
I could count on one hand how many people will reply.
Tragically. Of the ones who don’t reply because they’re either too ignorant or just can’t be bothered, at least 95% of them will have a guild.
LFG and LFR and Blizzard didn’t make the game antisocial.
I’m lucky that I’m just not impacted by the changes that others feel has done great damage. I’m too engrossed in the game most of the time that the last thing I want to do is to be pulled out of that and have to type all the time. It’s not like I’m not a proficient typist either.
But being on discord with friends and being able to chat without it disrupting what I’m doing. Now that, that is bliss.
I wasn’t, either. I knew they were there, I lamented them, but I had found the people I needed.
These people quit.
Now I have nothing, and I am not having fun. I now know how it feels, whereas before I merely knew it was real.
To me, World of Warcraft as a social platform is central to its appeal. It’s not social media, because we can’t share media, but it is fundamentally a social platform. Even if you don’t like to actively interact with players, a WoW devoid of other players is almost unplayable, and ideally you should be swept up in something.
People keep talking about WoW’s early days as if it could only work then because we didn’t have Discord - but we did have TeamSpeak (that was basically our voice comm Discord), MSN, and discussion forums galore.
World of Warcraft doesn’t need to worry about these systems. World of Warcraft needs to make meeting other players meaningful. If it cannot achieve this, it has no reason to consider itself an MMORPG.
That has got to be one of the most false statements you have ever written. Almost 60 thousand posts, almost all of them well formatted and without typos.
Now, is that a compliment to or a critique of your post?
I’ll let you decide.
The WoW community always did this. A lot of people seem to think it’s an issue or that it comes at the cost of what makes WoW great, but that isn’t true. The issue is what’s going on outside the guild chat but in the game - or rather what isn’t.
I noticed the same in Classic. 1.x, we did talk. 2.x, some. 3.x, none. 4.x, people are kicking for nonsensical reasons.
The game regressed into an optimal grind, the game is simply too fast to be social.
Whether it’s XP, gold, gear, people are obsessed with efficiency. (The price of gold sinks and a competitive environment.)
As far as I can tell it’s irreversibly corrupted. People who remain want it this way. Bury it, move on.
(Go back to Era. Enjoy solo retail.)
I think cross realm was the best thing that ever happened. And in fact, cross faction should have happened 10 years ago. For similar reasons.
Because the issues you mention were real. Most people were too dispersed in too many servers to actually be able to enjoy the game.
It was the technological limitations at the time.
I don’t understand the link between “social interaction” and sub prices/cosmetic shop.
To have social interaction, you need 2 players to sit toguether and chat. If they wont… well… Then players killed it.
Because mind you, guilds are still around. And are the exact same thing as in 2004. Did not change.
And your data comes from ? Because official data from Blizz sais the opposite.
Again… data?
And define “raiding guild”. As in the ones that do mythic?
Because Heroic raiding is on an all time high…
And you forget. 2M keys per week. Completed.
Thats Raider IO data from S3. Havent checked S4 cause its pointless to do so. But that data is at best accurate, and at worst it underestimates the real value (does not count incomplete runs, does not count people with out Raider IO addon).
So…
What this shows is that people have shifted priorities. But they are still there.
The game became like this because the design paradigm has it as the optimal way to complete one’s goals in it. For anything outside of Mythic raiding, high level M+ dungeons and premade PvP, going entirely solo and only grouping for the absolute minimum is the optimal, most efficient way to acquire gear and to generally complete your to-do/want list.
Do you want to change that and enforce social behaviour again (insert the meme with the dude from that large bank)? Do the following:
Remove Group bonus exp. Remove Guild tasks that reward gold. Their rewards will be repurposed exactly below.
(borrowed from Phantasy Star Online 2) Being in a group with someone who has been on your friend list for some time gives you increased gold drops, increased rare drop rate (in the case of WoW this can mean increased chance for sockets or tertiary stats on items) and increased experience gain. To avoid cheating and changing friend lists often, one will need to be in your friend list for over 30 days to count. Similarly, being in a group with someone from your guild also adds increased gold, rare drops and exp, stacking additively with the bonus from friend presence. The bonus is higher the larger the presence of eligible players: 1 friend → 1%, 2 friends → 3%, 3 friends → 6%, 4 friends → 10%.
Incentivize overworld grouping: Being in a group with anyone for longer than 10 minutes consecutively in the overworld adds another 5% on the above bonuses. During those 10 minutes players will have to at least coordinate on what to do next, so even a small amount of socializing will take place.
Enforced downtime in instanced content. In the old days some of the socializing was also a way to “kill” time during mana breaks or after bosses when players might need to do corpse runs / revivals and rebuffing. Nowadays the dungeon design paradigm requires players to chain pull in order to avoid losing on-going procs, while healers enjoy near-infinite mana. I remember typing once “oom, I need mana break” in a +13 (in a previous season) and one dps asked “wtf is that”?
Generally enforced downtime: Tied to the above, another factor that has diminished socialization is the constant flurry of actions. Regardless where one is, there is no need to just sit down and prepare for the next quest / boss. Even dragonriding now requires pressing buttons every 2-3 seconds which means that trying to type while dragonriding is cumbersome; that isn’t the case with sky-swiming. So maybe the implementation of a fatigue system that drops depending on how often a player is acting and simply requiring a short downtime every now and then will also help.
I know the above are an unpopular opinion and will downvoted to oblivion by players focused on efficiency.
-=EDIT=-
Edited the above slightly due to grammatical and syntactical errors.
They were, which is why I think the choice is an important one.
This is plain false. I know because they told me. I think there’s some interviews out there too now. In fact they even tried 500 person realms.
The reason for the two factions is that they wanted a world larger than the ideal size for the server community - so they made two communities per realm!
They wanted a “town effect” - a situation where the pool of players is large enough that there are more than you can ever truly know, yet small enough that it’s likely you’ll meet the same people many times, and have a reasonable expectation of being recognised or otherwise locally famed.
But it does come at the cost of potential instability and maybe being unable to play with your friends if they rolled on another server.
But it was NOT a technical limitation. This was the Warcraft 3 engine and it had the added expertise of EverQuest and Quake 3 devs. If they’d wanted dynamic sharding, you bet they could have added it. They ran millions of dynamically allocated ladder games in Warcraft 3 with this engine already, with 300+ creatures on the map. No problem.
I get the same kind of reaction even using emotes (Hello, Nod or anything of the kind)
And I definitely agree with you, this seems to be trend for a while now.
I still stumble upon some random groups that talk and just have fun during the runs, but these are becoming more and more rare.
Another time I got shamed for saying nods in frustration
I was told to F. Off with this bull s.
(And this is the same people that complains the game world feels dead…of course it does without healthy player interaction)
I guess people already forgot what RP stands for on a MMORPG
And that was not hard roleplay…
Anyways, I wish this part of the game was very different.
Before cross-sever play was enabled, servers were like small villages: after a while, everybody knew everyone playing there and you had to deal with those ppl; either by knowing how to avoid them or you knew immediately you were in good company once you saw character/guild names. Coming across the same ppl again and again during PUGs on your server etc. eventually had you know “everybody”, you had a reputation on you own server with other ppl.
Nowaday WoW is like the world/a big city: you interact “internationally” in an anonymous way and are briefly forced into contact with ppl you barely know and are also aware that you most likely won’t see those ppl ever again, hence you …
a) don’t need to get to know them closer, to force yourself to interact with ppl against whom you have some prejudices because of one reason or another (triggered by the wrong “greeting” - I’m personally allergic to “sup”-people - / mog / name /race / faction / bad dps in game) and…
b) can be rude without having to fear repercussions, as there are always new ppl who can replace the ones you offended, no one in another group - at least the odds are extremely low - will remember how you behave toward others and the “police” is overwhelmed by the amount of ppl in their city and can’t properly deal with each offence.
They were not, though of course by today’s standards… xD
But they could have changed things. They already knew how to dynamically allocate more servers. They had already split the world into perfectly segmented zones just for that reason. They deliberately decided, in the end, to do it this way. To avoid loading screens and for the town effect, both is which they proudly advertise on the box.
But it is a VERY common misconception. Despite its various interesting benefits, almost everybody thinks it’s a technical limitation, which is also why almost every WoW clone tried to get rid of it. I don’t blame you.
But it’s still false.
And subsequent devs either didn’t get it or didn’t agree as well. That’s what this discussion is about, really.
