Hello Everyone, I’ve always assumed WoW to be a social game due to the MMORPG genre typically falling into that category.
However most of my posts assume this as well when I suggest a idea that I think would improve the game I go off of the fact that most players are social, but am sorely reminded almost ever time that the game is no longer “played like that”.
So I’m really curious, how do you see and treat WoW, is it a social game for you with friends and people you enjoy, or do you play it as a solo experience and would rather more content become doable solo instead of forcing you to engage with others?
Solo: 15.5
Social: 14.5
It’s a solo experience. Other players are just NPCs.
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Interesting take I suppose, but thank you for your input.
People are right to say that the social dynamic in WoW has changed, everyone was a lot nicer in vanilla and it was very easy for me to make friends. I don’t generally enjoy talking with randoms on WoW, rarely do I find people that I’d get on with; keeping up friendships is also a lot of effort but I am fine to do a polite chat etc much like on the forums.
I love to be social but often need time to recharge. I prefer to do levelling and new content by myself but if I am doing group content then I need friends. Sadly, I don’t have any IRL friends any more (being chronically ill does that to you) and friends I made in vanilla have moved on with their lives. So, at times, I have just played by myself or with family (we are a gamer house) but occasionally I find a group of fun people to do stuff with.
I love that they have added followers for dungeons so I can do it at my pace and see the story before I go on a spam rampage. They are also testing story mode for raids; whilst I am happy to spam LFR, it always feels rushed. I know plenty of people who hate doing group content full stop, and when the story is gated by a mode they don’t want to play it feels rubbish.
MMO doesn’t mean you have to play with other people, it means that there are a lot of people in the game. It means that some content is designed to be with other people. They have said in pretty much every MMO I have ever played that it’s great for playing on your own or with others. I think people get too hung up on it and often it feels like they are saying “No, you have to be my friend! You have to play with me!” no we don’t.
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I play it as both.
Things I do solo or pug:
- Gathering / Fishing / Crafting
- PvP weekly quests
- Legacy content
Things I do in premade groups with people I know from outside the game or in-game for many years:
- New content for the first time (quests, exploration etc)
- Dungeons and Raids
- PvE Weekly quests
- World quests
- MoP Timerunning
The opposite. I would like them to allow content to be both soloable and doable in groups, with doing it in groups being more lucrative and rewarding from every point of view. I explained it in another thread in more detail, but I’d like for them to introduce “friendship” and “guildship” bonuses where doing any content with someone from your friend list and/or guild gives additional rewards (gold, reputation, higher chance for rare items or items to proc with tertiary stat or gem socket etc.)
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You make a fair point, forcing people to socialize is never the answer.ut I dislike the notion that it’s only the solo players that are being forced to do content in a certain way.
Imho it’s kind of annoying that WoW has shifted so heavily to solo content, with only reducing incentive to group up with other players.
The only thing you really need a group for is high end raiding content like mythic level, which 99% of players will never do. Which makes the game essentially entirely playable without ever writing a word.
And now if the people who enjoyed the social aspecct of the game want to keep enjoying theirr game they cant and are told to *bleep * off cause they said hello and asked how your day wa while waiting for people to sign up for the mythic+.
As all things this goes both ways, or atleast it should imo, butall we’ve gotten is more accesability for solo players to the point where it’s genuinely hard and you have to go far out of your way to even talk to people outsidde of rp serrvers, which shouldn’t be the case in a mmorpg, atleast in my opinion.
For me is a 100% solo experience. I do group content just with lfr\lfg tool. Nothin else.
I had some social interaction during the first 4 exp but now rarley speak with others. This is why maybe im so often in forum!
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The answer is to join social groups, be it guilds or communities. Everyone else is just going about their day pretty much. I haven’t ever been on the receiving end of toxicity from merely saying hello, though. At most, just silence and that’s fine. I usually just do /hi /ty /bye. It’s basic manners. You don’t go out into the real world and poke everyone you see, do you? 
Well no but that’s my quarrel with WoW players currently, they either ignore you or when they do talk it’s to tell you how bad you are or insult someone else in the group, whoever they’ve designated as the “problem”.
And of course if all people know from people talking is flaming or insulting, then it’s no wonder nobody will willingly talk unless they have to, which only spirals this problem.
The answer to which being content that incentivitzes social play, either by making it require coordination or just being fun to do with others.
But it seems that with the new delves coming out, the chances that we will get group content again as a forfront, near 0.
For me its social to the point i play with people i have met in the game. But i dont go out of my way to meet new players.
Solo content is just boring to me so i dont bother with it. I like to play with people i have met along the way, Several of these people i met back in TBC.
Fortunately there are ways for me to ignore the “Boring” (to me) content and focus on what i like doing. If i had to grind for stuff all the time i would likely have stopped playing by now.
Vanilla and TBC had this unintentional design where overworld content was doable solo but at a slow pace, due to needing to stop for hp / mana drink after every 3-4 enemies. Doing it with a friend or someone you just met allowed both to complete content faster, while also still requiring a bit of downtime which allowed the group to socialize.
Today’s design is entirely antisocial in the sense that going solo for anything in-game that isn’t explicitly designed for groups (dungeons, world bosses etc.) is both faster and more lucrative than waiting to find just one more person and tackle it together (let alone even more people). Not only is the current game design centered around constant uptime, it even penalizes downtime due to loss of short-time procs and putting them on cooldown. And not only does it do that, it even discourages grouping because World Quests either have solo progress or the enemies gain more health and damage if they are damaged by more than 1 player!!!
And we’ve even reached the point where a total noob like me, with just 500 ilvl, can solo anything that isn’t a world boss, and we duo world bosses with my sister who has lower ilvl than me. Why on earth would I even want to go through the hoops of finding a group when I can just go antisocial mode and solo it? Why would I want to wait 2-3 mins to find someone to help me when I can spend just 1 minute longer fighting that elemental storm boss?
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I fall into both sides but lean more towards solo. I would love to be more social but find myself doing everything solo. Everyone I know quit in wotlk… With lfg and my friends/family quitting around the time it was added made it easy to queue pewpew and go next. I ended up mostly just questing and pvping but I would love to get into pve in TWW and make some friends again, make wow a lil less lonely but would still have to say solo…. Confliccccction.
My point exactly, people are so obssesed with making things solo that they dont see how insanely solo orientated it alrready is in almost every aspect of it’s design.
And then, when you suggest something that even possibly hints that you may want to do this with another person or it incentivizes it even a little, you’re penalized that it would be a terrible mechanic and doesn’t fit the “Go Go Go” mentality.
I’m honestly getting kind of fed up with it slowly, both how entitled certain people (important, not the majority) are when it comes to how the game should be handcrafted to their liking regardless of how that effects the overall playerbase.
Rant over, thanks for listening.
Hope you find some m8s to play with man, hell if nothing works, sending a post here or in Looking for Guild is never a bad option
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I have friends i play a lot together with. It got to the point that even moments i am not playing, not even in the game, i hang out with them on voice. It also happens we all do our thing in the game but we still hang out on voice 
Before wow i played a lot of solo games, and i basically started playing the game because of the socializing part of it. Without it i would not play wow.
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Social as far as guild goes. Pugs might as well be npc
Other players in the game are mostly “decoration”; I enjoy their passive presence to not feel “lonely” like in a single player game, but I’m always annoyed if their incompetence or unavailability keeps me from progressing in the game.
If we could do all content with AI-NPCs, I’d do it, but since we can’t I prefer doing the content where I’m only forced to play with the least amount of other people that can potentially ruin my enjoyment of the game: hence I really love M+.
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How do I play WoW:
- questing - solo
- farming stuff/collections - solo
- M+ - mostly pugs. I don’t count it socializing, because I don’t usually say a word.
- raids - mostly with guild. The most social content for me, because it’s static raid group with lot of interactions and coordination
I don’t have real life friends or colleagues, who play WoW, so people I play with I know only in the game. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depends on your point of view), high level PvE content requires a lot of socializing, especially Mythic Raiding, which could not be even pugged due to high requirements of group coordination and outdated legacy lockout id system. If I would have a chance to achieve everything in the game solo, or “semisolo” (via automated matchmaking or something like this), in my own pace and my own schedule - I would be happy to play that way. I feel very frustrated and angry, when my own personal progression depend to other people due to design of the game. I already quit WoW several times because of that before: it was extremely hard for me to find static/guild for raiding or deal with PuGs. This expansion I’ve finally managed to figure out, how to find a good guild, how to deal with pugs, how to push myself into Mythic raiding and I’m happy about it. But I still believe if game would allow me to do everything alone - I would be much happier.
So for the count I have going on, should I put you under solo or soccial?
I’m a roleplayer that does PvE and PvP on the side, so for me it’s pretty much 100% social. Even when I’m doing things solo I’m usually on voice chat with other WoW people.
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If you ask me, prefer solo, but pushed to socializing a lot by the game.
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