I’m curious to see – when Classic is released – if this is the result of modern WoW or modern gaming.
I’m inclined to believe that the WoW community isn’t more unfriendly or unconnected than other gaming communities today are. It feels as if gaming in general has just evolved to be less social and more anonymous in nature.
It’ll be interesting to see when Classic WoW is released if the player community will be like it was in the old days. I suspect not, but we’ll see.
People in general are saturated with online social enterprise. The last ten years were marked by the necessity of sharing and comunicate throught social networks.
Back in 2004/2005 young people had some contact with the online social aspect, but the online gaming experience, the interaction with real people, not for necessity as nowadays, but to have fun achieving goals, was something new and fresh. Today most of people spend a ton of hours per day showing/watching their/other achievements in real life and that is exhaustive, not leaving much space for fun, to do the same while gaming.
The toxicity, while we speak in online gaming in general and the not so expected actual phenomenon of returning to single player games, in the last years, imo is related to those factors and in top of that the new trend of stream that makes a lot of people in need to be like the average joe that streams and reach thousands/millions of followers. It is a bit like the trend in early 2000’s where the reality shows, specially the ones related with music, made almost half of the young population to think that one day they would be the new eminem or Alicia Keys.