Good afternoon! I hope the day is going well for you. Bit of a long post, so I’ll put a tl;dr for your convenience.
TL;DR: Wanna get back in game, scared AF of people&my own lack of input speed. Want to relax and have fun while playing something I may enjoy, without worrying about somebody lashing out or being an active detriment for me for no reason.
I’ve had the itch of resubbing to WoW for a while now. But I have to admit one thing: My general experience with the game since taking it up in Warlords of Draenor, and playing on and off casually from then on, has been… Stressful.
Before anything, please don’t take this post/thread as me complaining about the game; I’m aware that it is a perfectly functional and enjoyable game for many, and I truly hope it remains so for them.
Context below
Summary
Until now, everytime I’ve tried to get back into the game, I’ve been faced with really, REALLY bad interactions with people. To the point of not wanting to do things like low M+, or LFR, or even try and get into a Normal pick up group for the current raid tier.
And yet, that is the most effective way we can improve and learn, isn’t it.
I’d like it very much if I could prepare to do some instance, do my research, gather together a group or raid, and relax to a point, since all I want is to get a single piece of content done, without people being horrible people. I don’t speak skill-wise, but behaviour-wise.
In a nutshell; Trying to play on my own for group content is stressful, as other players simply don’t seem to want to cooperate.
The answer to this problem should be easy, right? Finding a nice guild/community to run these things with. So far I’ve tried this a few times already, and I haven’t had luck so far, as I’ve often ran into cliques and raiding only guilds under the guise of “friendly/social”.
I understand that the only 100% constant in all of these interactions is me. I do try my best to learn things and be as cooperative as I can, but I fail to understand if I’m still doing something wrong in all of these interactions, or if WoW’s social game just doesn’t match with my personality. Or maybe I’m simply not good enough to play the game at all;
I do tend to take things at my own pace, sometimes as slow as I can.
Maybe that’s could be a problem on my part in retail WoW? That there’s no way to play slow, or that I’ll probably struggle to keep up if an instance group or raid decides they want to go VERY fast.
I still don’t know what classes or specs would fit me best to play with, because even slow classes like Warlocks or Death Knights still seem very fast to me during gameplay.
Let me reiterate: All of the above has been my own perspective, which may or may not be biased, and all I’m doing is sharing it for context, to get as accurate counsel as possible.
What do you do when you want to have a relaxing time doing group content and your choice guild/communities aren’t or won’t be available? Do you set m+ groups with “chill” or similar on the title/notes and hope that people catch on? Or that doesn’t work as well anymore?
Should I take up either tanking or healing if I want to have more control over what kind of parties do I create? Should I just forget about m+/raids and just do delves if I can’t handle people?
I genuinelly want to like the game. But it feels like in order to play, I need to interact directly with horrible people that will sour the experience at every step.
I understand that every online environment will have bad apples, but everytime I’ve played WoW, it feels much more common.
Please confirm or deny this for me, or let me know what do you think, so I can either be on my way or roll a new character.
Considering you’ve read all this way, I appreciate you and the attention you’ve put on the post.
Please have/keep having a nice day.
I also really like creating transmog and doing things for my characters. Customising looks, making new builds, etc. Even professions can be fun.
