The thing I love about WoW is that there is no right or wrong way to play it and people are doing the content and activities that interest them.
Some want a challenge others want casual fun and everything in between.
So I can raid, do m plus, work on my profession army, complete achievements, go on mount and mog runs with a mate or solo. I love questing (the first time, when it’s all new) but I don’t want to do that with someone else, is want to be able to take my time. Levelling with friends is usually dungeon spam. Sometimes questing if its not new.
Discord is fab for socialising with friends and guild mates. Communities can connect you to others with similar interests.
This evening I was running legacy content with a friend, we chatted for hours while mog farming. It was great fun. This friend is someone I met via these forums. A complete stranger, now a friend, whom I do various content with.
Retail is still favoring group gameplay and social interaction over PUGs and random people.
Of course, if you are talking about questing in Stranglethorn Vale, you can now solo it, so there is no need for social interaction. If you want a successful easy endgame run in WoW, you choose a dedicated group of friends over PUGs or random individuals.
In my experience I wouldn’t say rude or judgemental but I really never did have any of these legendary social interactions people are talking about. It was pretty much how it is now, you join a group you say Hi and after all of you have achieved your goals the group disbanded and you pretty much never saw each other again.
wow is exactly the same social space which it was back then
the only different is that 15+ year old nerds with no irl friends back then are 35+ fully functional adoults with wifes and families and have literaly 0 need to socialise with strangers on internet.
i dont know about friends but back in the day internet chatrooms were absolute blast regarding picking up chicks on internets especialy ythose chatrooms with kinky themes.
I don’t know, I had a great guild during vanilla with a wide range when it comes to age. People in their 20’s like me, people in their 30’s and up, a few ‘old’ people over 50, and some teens. The latter regularly got told to go do their homework
Dungeon runs, usually mixed with a few guildies and a few pugs, were very social with the obligatory ‘walking the dog’ and smoke breaks while the rest of us chatted some more and had a few laughs. We regularly had people joining our guild that way, because they had had a good time.
In EverQuest I had the same experience some years before. For me personally it does seem like it was a different era, with a different attitude generally speaking towards gaming and strangers being potential new friends. I miss that atmosphere, but it is what it is.
It also depends on how you phrase it. A lot of people seem to lack any kind of social skills that would be needed in the real world and start hurling insults mixed with maybe 1 or 2 words of how to improve. That’s not how you would give feedback to someone IRL, why would it be okay in a game?
Today’s generation are so less social than ours, it’s really sad. If you go to a nightclub none of them dance because they are all too scared and self-conscious of being filmed on tiktok. This imo is a huge reason nightclubs are shutting down. It is like they are constantly on display and constantly aware of it, tied into them giving each other labels constantly ‘‘i’m this/that’’. Rather than just being. Dating is all done through apps so none of them really approach each other anymore. Reddit is full of clueless teenagers giving hysterical advice like ''if your boyfriend asked you to turn the TV down because it was hurting his ears that is a RED FLAG and you should leave him immediatly before he murders you with an axe. ‘’
I also went backpacking recently. Backpacking hostels used to be the most social places on the planet, strangers all talking to each other. Now you go in the common rooms and everyone is just glued to their phones, it feels impossible to talk to anyone.
I used to play on the dragonblight server and there was a good community back in tbc/wrath/cata.
Now it just feels more splintered due to all the matchmaking tools.
But if you go out into the world and just do random stuff you will run into people.
You can group up and try socializing.
Not everyone will participate but I’m sure you can find some chill people still.
Servers back then are basically the same as Communities today. They do roughly the same things.
Force players to work together and you won’t get positive social interactions, you’ll get toxicity.
There is still one area of the game that requires players to work together - M+. Is this a bastion of co-operation and social benevolence? No.
The playerbase has changed, the internet has changed.
MMOs were populated by geeks who used to play D&D with paper and 20 sided dice. Now it’s bruhs that grew up on Call of Duty, Fornite and GTA is too tame.
The US president is an internet Troll now, this is the world we live in.
The biggest issue I see right now is the seasons.
Right now my guild is dead because everyone is waiting for season 2 to happen. Done the raid on heroic, geared up alts etc. People are fed up with waiting for new content to arrive.
In my opinion seasons are the worst thing they can do to a game. It creates only fomo, and when people got what they want, they wont bother with playing or being social anymore.
And the worst part is: every damn online game is doing it or is planning to. Just like the lootboxes…
This sentence implies the notion that people don’t care about a massive video game world as a form of social media.
This is fundamentally a flawed take. Classic proves it and continues to prove it all the time.
The truth is that WoW drifted away from being an MMORPG into being a co-op action game. Some people minded it less than others - some liked it, some hated it, some didn’t mind.
That doesn’t mean MMORPG’s don’t have a place in the modern world. Some of the oldest games around are still incredibly popular and nobody calls them into question. Why is this one different in some people’s eyes?
Strikes me as the same as people saying “computer games killed board games because it’s more convenient.”
We need more sand in the box that can be continually enjoyed once you are geared and completed the usual content (raids/dungeons/arena), where you actually enjoy the fruits of your labour. It’s like we enjoy the journey to getting the BiS gear more then the destination of what to do when we have it all. Which is totally counter productive I feel, because if we don’t enjoy the end point, what is the point grinding too it?
I played WoW when it released, Classic is so irrelevant to me and I don’t think it can be fundamentally considered as a good metric as to what and X & Y could be.
Simply because the game version existed for so long, people have meta gamed and know it inside and out, that it no longer has the same raw unknown authenticity that original vanilla had.
You’re absolutely right about that, which is why I want Classic+ (which isn’t SoD, SoD is very strange) and yet somehow still it’s keeping a healthy audience.
And it’s not the only one.
WoW is not WoW without a constant stream of content. It is one of the core and essential design pillars along with community, world, and combat.
So right now people are feeling stuck between retail WoW that isn’t really WoW because it forgot about world and community, and classic WoW which isn’t WoW because it forgot about a constant stream of content.
Blizzard simply does not offer the full World of Warcraft experience. At all. I don’t even think they know how, but it’s actually very easy. Just make more vanilla without changing the core gameplay.
I’m solo and casual player in WoW since TBC.
I dont like join guild. Since social anxiety as poor english if they try talk me. Plus bad time for raids.
Years later blizz put finder queue dungeon and raid. Made me happy, since I can do it when I have good time.
If who want more high ilevel than LFR. Like for normal, heroic and Mystic. I dont care it.
Only myself farm something “easy and chill”
I never use mystic plus. I dont like “speed run” with time down. Only I hoped "normal mystic " get finder
Most other franchises would of been a 2.0 version by now. I know each expansion the games improved in many aspects some graphical tweaks / UI etc.
But overall the game has become stale.
A fresh new look at WoW with a whole new story, improved engine and even gameplay is required.
Issue is WoW has made people invest so much more money into the game they’ve put themself in a corner to keep this gravy train going for as long as possible without reviewing the quality of the product.
Due to the increased ingame store cash shop purchases players have been and years of subscription players have devouted to the game.
To tell them, that all there money and hard work would be irrelevant is why they don’t make a 2.0 (whole new game) and keep rinsing and fleecing us with these sub par expansions.
The last expansion they seemed to put effort in was Legion. That to me was the end of the WoW 1.0 cycle. Ever since then it’s been a con job.
especialy ythose chatrooms with kinky themes.
