(Behaviour) What has happened to gamers and our community?

[DarthMonk79]

But everyone knew it was going to happen, and said so. The benefits of these tools did not outweigh the complete deterioration of all social aspects in an mmo. LFG is fine and a pretty nice QoL change, but it should have been kept either server specific or in very small battlegroups.

I agree, it should have been same server/battlegroup. but regardless why would people act like jerks, etc just because they can now press a button to join a dungeon/raid. Just because it made things easier doesn't mean it should have made the community worse. That blame lays on the community and no one else

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I think this is a bit of a faulty rose-tinted assumption at the core of the OP. People were just as clueless in Vanilla as they've ever been, and they did indeed struggle, flounder, and fail to understand important aspects of the game for lengthy periods of time. This was a large part of what made many activities much more challenging back then for the average player. I had friends who got lost while questing all the time despite me telling them that they needed to read the quest text over and over again. Heck, I didn't even understand how the concept of this thing called "DPS" was important until near the end of TBC. Players lacking core class abilities without even realising it (thanks to the way certain skills were rewarded via skippable quests, or because they just didn't buy new ranks) were a dime a dozen, people didn't understand how stats worked or which ones were good for their spec, and plenty of people complained about the game being too hard.

The attitudes described in the OP aren't new at all. People have behaved in this way since the game's inception. What's far more likely is that insular, nostalgia-based perceptions of "the playerbase" (which likely consisted of little more than our individual guilds or friendship groups at the time) have been challenged as we interact more with others, communication methods improve, and we just generally have a clearer, broader picture of the playerbase as a whole.

Yes there have always been trolls/jerks in the game, but that number skyrocketed after the introduction of LFG/LFR functions. I remember plenty of times in Vanilla and TBC people would communicate in the zones with others giving them directions on where to go or consistently forming up groups. I rarely solo quested in Vanilla/TBC. Yet somehow the introduction of the LFG/LFR equaled people no longer communicating, or at least not in a helpful way and being overall jackasses. As I've said in plenty of post just because Blizzard gave us access to more content with LFG/LFR doesn't mean the community had to go to hell... that was the communities fault, not blizzards. You still see some people helping, offering hints, etc in zones but more often than not if anyone asks a question now and days they get jumped on.

[Cheze]

people were lazy shits back when, they're lazy shits now

general player performance is at a much higher level than it was back then

[corebit]

Yes there have always been trolls/jerks in the game, but that number skyrocketed after the introduction of LFG/LFR functions. I remember plenty of times in Vanilla and TBC people would communicate in the zones with others giving them directions on where to go or consistently forming up groups. I rarely solo quested in Vanilla/TBC. Yet somehow the introduction of the LFG/LFR equaled people no longer communicating, or at least not in a helpful way and being overall jackasses. As I've said in plenty of post just because Blizzard gave us access to more content with LFG/LFR doesn't mean the community had to go to hell... that was the communities fault, not blizzards. You still see some people helping, offering hints, etc in zones but more often than not if anyone asks a question now and days they get jumped on.

Did that number really skyrocket, or is it just your perception of it since everyone uses LFG/LFR. I could argue that the number of trolls/jerks have stayed consistent but you have more chance to meet through queuing and PUGing.

It's like some people saying the number of murders have increased in modern times, is it really that or is it because the media makes them more visible?

[Deleted]

Did that number really skyrocket, or is it just your perception of it since everyone uses LFG/LFR. I could argue that the number of trolls/jerks have stayed consistent but you have more chance to meet through queuing and PUGing.

It's like some people saying the number of murders have increased in modern times, is it really that or is it because the media makes them more visible?

Offcourse it didn't. LFR/LFD hasn't changed people. There have always been douches, and there have always been those willing to step up to help eachother out. LFR/LFD has changed nothing about this. Some people like to attribute random nonsense negative outcome to mechanics they don't like, to justify their dislike. That's all there is to it.

[ImpTaimer]

1. No naming and shaming policy / Blizzard trying to cater a game to a younger audience through legal loopholes that allow under-18 to even play a subscription-based game regardless of the content rating in the first place.

2. More people with access to internet = culture clash. (ie: spoiled brats who think it's ok to take advantage of people because it's "their culture")

3. Lazy devs back-seat managing their own game. Somehow can't afford to have even 1 active GM per battlegroup to catch cheaters/spammers red-handed. Somehow can't afford multiple forum moderators and tells people to use Twitter to contact them where they filter you if they don't like what they're hearing.

Activision-Blizzard made their bed. They can lie in it until they decide to wake up to reality.

[Zyrosis]

Millennials grew up differently than older gamers, which is (to my guess) now a large part of the community.
They are used to hand-holding, unlimited lives, tutorials, hints, checkpoints, on-rails, portal around the world instead of actually walking/riding/moving towards your goal/dungeon etc etc. Plus there is general impatience and the desire for quick, short and easy games/matches/dungeons.

Sure there was thottbot back in the days, but there where no quest markers, no trails, no teleporting, not much hand holding and still the game had 12 mil players at some point. Then (to my guess) younger players started to arrive and there the growing demand for faster-faster-faster came into the game. Grinding was cut down, leveling sped up, portals, dungeon/raid queue, quest locations on the map, pointers etc all made their appearance.

(Complementary video on how millennial gamers are used to hand-holding: )
edit: typo

You know how when you were a kid and you hear about older people being all like "You darn kids! Get off my Lawn!", "Back in my day..." or "You darn kids and your 'X'" while the kids would just reply "You just don't understand old man". I hate to tell ya, but you've become that new older generation. You're complaining about the current younger generation, believing that they're ruining the world and hating how they enjoy their world while they'll just reply with the same old "you just don't understand".

[Selah]

Something to keep in mind too, not sure if it's been said or not, is that the age of the playerbase has increased a lot. I'm a perfect example of this. When I first started playing in vanilla I had one responsibility, that was school. Of course I had a few chores or the occasional function I had to go to but that was it. Now I'm married, work full time, have a kid, have other hobbies, and whatever else crazy thing that pops up in my daily life. I do not have 30 - 40 minutes to just walk to Mara again, much less the 2 hours it took to get through it. I can't spend 5 or 6 hours a day grinding materials for pots or rep for mounts. If that's going to be the standard amount of time it takes to play WoW, it's going to drive me and a lot of the players who've been around a long time away.

Lets not forget that there has been an incredible onslaught of great games released over the years too and people want to play something else too. Witcher series, Mass Effect, Doom, Fallout, Dishonored, Deus Ex, so on and so forth.

[Granyala]

for good or bad, people googled things, looked things up online, found solutions and generally took more initiative for themselves.

Actually, most people do not do this.Not just in games, but also in real life. I learned how to acquire information on my own back in school and I depended on it during my university time.
Not everyone studies though. Many, many people only have access to Information that others "spoonfeed" them. Naturally that carries over into games.

I still remember how annoying the public channels were in TBC because some lazy moron always kept asking pointless questions, then got dissed for it -> rinse repeat.
Also I had plenty of people in my TBC dungeons that got removed when we had a replacement because they played absolutely terrible.

People didn't change much, really.

The only real difference is that Blizzard took all the tools from the community used to police itself.
So rude behavior (barring bans from GMs) no longer has any consequences.

(Complementary video on how millennial gamers are used to hand-holding: )

Yeah I know old SNES games. They were pretty brutal at times and basically relied on you to repeat and repeat until you got the enemies movements memorized.
Not sth. I consider fun though.
I esp don't like getting thrown so far back, because redoing what I already did wastes too much time.

[Deleted]

I played since Vanilla WoW (this is not a nostalgia post). In Vanilla and TBC, you had to google quests if you didn't want the challenge, and everyone frequently did. Objectives weren't shown on the map, you had to work it out. The odd addon existed to help, but Thottbot and Wowpedia were huge.
- Raiding was hard to organise, 40 man raids etc. There was no dungeon journal, and instead players had to look things up 3rd party or work it out themselves, slowly. Random perma-DCs in raids were considered more bad internet than someone giving up and walking away.
- How to play your class properly? There were tons of "bad" players, suboptimal w/e. But even they were trying, to some extent. Mobs could kill you fairly easily for many classes even with raiding gear, so you had to work out or look up what to do. No matter the solution source, the "what do I need to do to overcome this?" was instinctual, right?
I'm not saying how good/bad these things were, my point is the behaviour of the player in reaction to it.

Not. What. You. Thought. About. It. But what you did, or knew you had to do, to get around it and continue.

It really wasn't any different. It just feels like that now when you think back to it. If anything it was worse. My guild recruited a bunch of "raiders" - who at lvl60 had not spent a single talent point. Because they didn't know talents existed. When prompted to look up the appropriate builds, they didn't because "they'd done just fine without them so far". Plenty of people would spend days and days in the same spot grinding mobs for XP because they didn't know what to do about those Elites that would oneshot them. And they never went and looked stuff up. People don't look up things - it goes for the game and even outside the game. Just look at all the blatant lies White House gets away with. People just don't care enough.

The playerbase demographic in vanilla was different - maybe you remember those people who came from EQ and MUDs - the people who actually knew what to do in MMOs. The MMO-nerds, the niche core group that is MMO-players. And maybe you're ignoring the people who had never played MMO, had no idea and definitely no intention to go read some silly website with 'stats'

Now, I see many people complaining, generally, about many aspects of the game that make these old ones seem rocket science - and they're not willing to find the solutions.

Are you seriously trying to argue that people didn't complain about silly shit back in the days? Because if you are, then lolz.
Maybe you remember Tseric? One of the early forum mods who epicly ragequit his job because of forum trolls and complainers? Read his goodbye post again to refresh your memory about our community back in the days. That post is 10 years old now. Not much has changed in the community.

I see players in group content not knowing the tactics, not understanding what to do to survive and/or kill the boss. Even if it's an attitude, that has to come from somewhere, a first impression and a starting point.
> Look in the dungeon journal - IN GAME, no less. It even has bullet point quick reads for what to do for your role. Why don't people even do this tiny infinitesimal-effort action?

Same reasons they didn't back in vanilla. It's just a game. They really can't be bothered to read a bunch of text in hard-to-read font. Just like they didn't feel like going to external web page too find out what talents they should use. They just want the game to entertain them for a while. They're not really that interested in 'numbers and stuff'

Or, of course, is this all bulls**t, and I'm wrong on my premise?

Yes, that's pretty much it.

Ps. Also, back in the day plaintext was enough. Why did you feel like you had to color/bold every other sentence? Such a pain to clean up for quoting. It used to be enough to just write normal plaintext. Vanilla Internet forums before rich text were so much better. At least people took the initiative and wrote proper texts instead of coloring and bolding everything.

[MonsieuRoberts]

Handholding in many other genres recently & a much larger sense of anonymity brings about the shamelessly bad. Easily accessible rewards keeps them bad.

[Deleted]

Every game gets the community it deserves.

[DarthMonk79]

Did that number really skyrocket, or is it just your perception of it since everyone uses LFG/LFR. I could argue that the number of trolls/jerks have stayed consistent but you have more chance to meet through queuing and PUGing.

It's like some people saying the number of murders have increased in modern times, is it really that or is it because the media makes them more visible?

Oh believe me, it skyrocketed. I'm talking more about the jerks you see in trade/zone chat. I'll be in a zone leveling, see someone ask a question and have multiple rude comments or stuff leading the person in the wrong direction, etc. They always existed there's just a lot more of them. I'd have to say there's more in dungeons and raids too. I didn't always do dungeons with just friends and guild members, there were plenty were I threw out a LFG for certain dungeon while in that zone and had 4 people that I didn't know all group up, there was rarely anything bad/rude said, not none, just rare.

[Pull My Finger]

I understand why people don't want to communicate. When you do, you realize how much people are shit, especially online. They are not wrong about that.

Simple as that.

[Granyala]

Something to keep in mind too, not sure if it's been said or not, is that the age of the playerbase has increased a lot. I'm a perfect example of this. When I first started playing in vanilla I had one responsibility, that was school. Of course I had a few chores or the occasional function I had to go to but that was it. Now I'm married, work full time, have a kid, have other hobbies, and whatever else crazy thing that pops up in my daily life. I do not have 30 - 40 minutes to just walk to Mara again, much less the 2 hours it took to get through it. I can't spend 5 or 6 hours a day grinding materials for pots or rep for mounts. If that's going to be the standard amount of time it takes to play WoW, it's going to drive me and a lot of the players who've been around a long time away.

Pretty much, yes.
I love visiting 3D worlds and experiencing nice stories etc., but I am not interested in putting that much effort into gaming any more. Like raiding on a schedule and planning my life around the raid times as best I can, just to get a few more violet pixels that will be irrelevant come next patch anyway. I also am not interested in the pressure to perform in video games. Sure, I don't want to be a dud in group content, so I know how to play my class and how stuff works but other than that:
If I feel the need to "work" or "put in effort" I do that in RL, where there are tangible and lasting benefits for doing so.
If I feel the need to challenge myself I look to my flute. B/c when I improve there, these improvements will not be negated by some arbitrary program "reset" released by a software company.

TL/DR: As an adult, I consider it a waste of time to dump effort into essentially boring and repetitive gameplay to get fleeting improvements.

[Rotted]

Wild exaggeration.

The most legendary dicks, ninjas and morons on any given server would suffer consequences.

The other 99% of dicks, ninjas and morons would get away with it because who can remember the names of everyone who does something dickish, or share those names with people who are yet to be dicked over by them?

Well can believe it or not frankly I'm not overly fussed, I don't bother to post BS or exaggerate anything as it doesn't serve a purpose,

I can give you one specific example, one pug I was in with a friend, in HC some BoE Epic leather legs dropped, our druid healer was ecstatic and this warrior types "Lol, thanks for the 5000g (or 500, I can't quite remember)" 2 seconds later he won it and immediately dropped group. Needless to say each time I saw that guy in trade looking for more or anything he was getting abuse / ignored,

But maybe that's because I was on a low population server.

Yes, but just because battle groups were removed and LFG/LFR came out doesn't mean people have to act like twits/trolls, etc. That was their choice. Blizzard decided to give us something to make the game easier for group content and the "community" decided to screw it up by becoming complete jackasses with it.

It was their choices and the community did screw it up, it started off small then massively increased in terms of breaking communities. It's kind of like saying to a kid heres a chocolate bar, you are not to eat it. They are going to eat it. Yes, everyone has the potential to be a dick, I'd happily wager that every person on this forum myself included at some point, atleast once has been a complete and utter dick to someone since LFG systems were introduced. And not having these features did force us to be civilized (more so for some than others), kind, helpful to one and another; but we also saw a benefit to that, some of us made life long friends, hell some people found their husbands / wife's on it, it brought us togeather.

Blizzard put those tools there for us to use, enjoy and make life easier but at the time if they knew the social damage that was going to be done by these tools, I honestly think they might have thought twice about introducing them.

I mean ask yourself, when was the last point you can honestly say you took 30 minutes out of your schedule to help or explain something to a new player that you didn't know personally? (Bonus points for me, I helped a friend do Maw hc last night for her alch quest, we had a new player in there and I stopped at each mob to explain what you had to do )

[Selah]

Pretty much, yes.
I love visiting 3D worlds and experiencing nice stories etc., but I am not interested in putting that much effort into gaming any more. Like raiding on a schedule and planning my life around the raid times as best I can, just to get a few more violet pixels that will be irrelevant come next patch anyway. I also am not interested in the pressure to perform in video games. Sure, I don't want to be a dud in group content, so I know how to play my class and how stuff works but other than that:
If I feel the need to "work" or "put in effort" I do that in RL, where there are tangible and lasting benefits for doing so.
If I feel the need to challenge myself I look to my flute. B/c when I improve there, these improvements will not be negated by some arbitrary program "reset" released by a software company.

TL/DR: As an adult, I consider it a waste of time to dump effort into essentially boring and repetitive gameplay to get fleeting improvements.

Very much agreed. I know fight mechanics, I know the optimal build setup and rotation for my class and spec, and I have decent gear. That's about as much time as you're going to to get from me, there's already a metric ton of content to do just in that realm alone. Everything else that we're going to outgear or outlevel and be able to solo in 20 minutes in an expansion to or two isn't worth my time. It's why things like LFR/LFD became so popular.

[oplawlz]

I agree, it should have been same server/battlegroup. but regardless why would people act like jerks, etc just because they can now press a button to join a dungeon/raid. Just because it made things easier doesn't mean it should have made the community worse. That blame lays on the community and no one else

Blame isn't really the point though. You can't point at a group of X million disparate people who seldom interact with each other and say "fix your community!". Blizzard is the central point of that community, and the only entity which has any power to fix the issue. Therefore we look to them for the solution, and they've pretty firmly refused to present one - for THAT they can be blamed.

[Orby]

It's not just WoW but gamers in general. They have become a parody of themselves.

As a long time gamer since the Spectrum ZX days, the community has indeed changed for the worst, and its mostly thanks to the internet. Sexism and racism are very rampant.But on the other side of the coin there's a lot of self entitlement too, It's like I been transported to the 50's or something.

There's this Gamergate thing (Which I still have no idea whats its about I have ignored it for a long time) and then there's all this outrage at companies and companies been exposed for shoddy practices... its so weird.

I remember as a kid when I played on my NES it was all about the games and enjoying them, playing games we love. We didn't care what scores they got,or whatt he personal lives of the developer were. We just loved playing games. And to some extent I am still in that crowd now. I am not apart of this reddit generation, I am not on any forms of social media outside of Twitter and these forums (if you can call forums social media) I keep me and my gaming close, I don't get bogged up in this "drama culture" in the games industry either.

The worst things we had back then was the so called console wars between Sega and Nintendo which was a laugh more than anything.

Now days its about what goers on behind gaming too much "(x) company is doing this, or this developer is sexist or a misogynist nor companies being called out for being SJW (I still don't know what that means either, got getting old sucks)

I just wanna play games I don't give a shit about what 's happening outside. So I think its probably a generation thing, partly encouraged by social media. I don't remember much crazy drama when I played my N64 other than will they or wont they release the 64DD.

As for WoW alone its always had quite an outspoken fan base, even since vanilla people have been moaning and crying about Blizzards practices, I cannot think of a single expansion where people have been 100% satisfied. Once again that's just the internet, too many voices and you can never please them all especially when you have means to be expressive and outspoken through social media and the internet. :P

[Daffan]

Because they know Blizzard will cater to them with welfare gear and some other changes if they complain enough

No more starting from the bottom and working through the content, progressing, failing, keep trying, progressing... instead... GIVE ME GEAR RIGHT NOW FOR THE NEW RAID! and hey, it works so why bother learning initiative.

[MoanaLisa]

The only practical way to approach the topic is to be responsible for how you behave in game. That's the right thing to do and that's what non-assholes do.

Complaining about others doesn't change anything.

For what it's worth: justified or not, realm blacklisting was and is ugly behavior as well. Just as all blacklisting is.

You certainly don't have to interact with someone you don't trust or want to be around but advocating for it in public channels is tantamount to lynching. As always with behavior like this, people who have done nothing except perhaps to accidentally roll need on something, made a mistake, got disconnected (or nothing at all for that matter) get caught up in it. It's stupid and contributes to the atmosphere we have today which is mostly about fear of being social and has very little to do with the idea that people should be offered a hand up in some cases.

You get the community you deserve and if that's a community that is largely ambivalent about co-operating with strangers then so be it.