Killing server community was a bad idea.

[Polybius]

Cooperation? You are smoking drugs son. What you have in WoW right now is tag and run mechanics in full fledge. I do not have issues with shared tagging. I don't really care to be honest. What I care is the state of the game and it is as I describe.

Dead servers stayed dead, and players changed realms as a result (experienced the Hydraxis-US mass exodus here). It also made it harder to play with friends you made on your original realm. Server communities have been dying long before cross-realm was introduced.

Server communities still exist unless you play from a lone wolf pov, doing nothing but pugs.

[ls-]

No server, unless it's a really REALLY small one, had ONE big united server community, each server had multiple communities, and every each and one of them thought it's THE server community, meanwhile there's communities of pvpers, rpers, solo-players, outcasts, elite (hi-end players), etc, who quite often didn't want anything to do w/ each other.

You belonged to a group of 100-200 people and you falsely assumed that you knew everyone, whereas this bunch of people you were aware of was just a snowball on the tip of the iceberg.

-- edit #1

And as other have already pointed out, it's quite easy to make friends in-game even nowadays. If you have issues w/ making friends or just buddies and the only time you can befriend someone is when said someone is forced to be "friends" w/ you by the game, you're the problem.

[RoKPaNda]

Do you realize how long ago we started leaving the whole "server community" thing behind? Almost 10 years ago. It's fine.

[Kuntantee]

Oh the crazy theories about the psychological reasons of whey we think community feel is not there, how we have social anxiety, the demographic analysis of WoW communities and how shit it was to play without CRZ.

I mean it must be a habit for you guys to produce horseshit on the spot and believe it yourself.

[RoKPaNda]

Dead servers stayed dead, and players changed realms as a result (experienced the Hydraxis-US mass exodus here). It also made it harder to play with friends you made on your original realm.

Server communities still exist unless you play from a lone wolf pov, doing nothing but pugs.

Even then communities still exist, just not server communities.

[Polybius]

Oh the crazy theories about the psychological reasons of whey we think community feel is not there, how we have social anxiety, the demographic analysis of WoW communities and how shit it was to play without CRZ.

I mean it must be a habit for you guys to produce horseshit on the spot and believe it yourself.

They're no different than your own reasons. I mean, you don't even have impartial evidence, no one can anyway.

[Sansnom]

Bullshit. In Legion, world is populated but people just ignore each other because you can solo non-instanced content.

That was the same in the past. The group quests were usually skipped if there were no players around, which was the case 6 months in of an XP.

[Kuntantee]

Yeah sure, everything was same in the past but some how you guys like current WoW, but not how things were in the past.

[mysticx]

there is alot of characters run around whenever you go, but all those are random characters that good chance you will never gonna meet again. unlike before where it was same people all the time.

So? Back in Vanilla, and continuing on to now, the people roaming around in the world are pretty much irrelevant, unless they help, or steal mobs and/or gathering nodes, they might as well be NPCs, so who ares what server they are from?

People become relevant when you group up with them, but still, what's the difference between a random player from your server and one from another server?

There never was this mythical big server community, it was always just your friendlist and guild, and beyond that a faceless mass...

[anon5123]

You can still do that though, crossrealm and phasing doesn't stop you from meeting new people, or explore with friends.

The point is that those people you play with are just random people from other realms that you will likely never see again after you're done playing with them.

On non-crossrelam servers, you see the same people very often. Even just playing on vanilla private servers, I would quest with someone around level 30, then see them again around the 40s and such. It's that sense of community that makes the world feel alive.

Like meeting someone in a dungeon at low level, then running into them again at max level...it's like meeting an old friend. That kind of thing never happens in retail because everything is cross-realm.

[Lucetia]

The only thing blizzard had to do was merging servers so you get a new influx of players but that are there on the world. If you know them by name you know that they are on that server. This is the one thing that I mis so big from wow nowadays if I lvl a new character I meet people from other servers, this doesn't give a sense of scale only temporary.

Why do people cling on to this so much? Even during Vanilla you only new a handful of people (usually those in top guilds, someone you thought looked neat, or someone you found via something). People want to cling to "community" and it is mostly just a false ideology (and feels like another people want to complain about to complain about when there's another issue at hand with what they are complaining about).

The only thing that was useful back then was you could spam trade chat saying "Avoid X person because of Y reason". If anything you can build a bigger sense of community within the game. Finding people you enjoy running stuff with, adding them to b.net. You are no longer restricted to just your server/node.

[Nnyco]

this thread heavily implys that you ever had a big community goin on, which you didnt and even back in vanilla or tbc you could solo everythin and group quests you skipped

[Tome]

We're in a new era which is the "ME ME ME" era, aka see all the "social media" platforms we have where people fake their life and take pictures of themselves constantly to upload. The "ME ME ME" era can't play games with server communites, because it would clash with their ego instantly, and net Blizzard less money. IB4 "people were ego back then as well!" crowd comes in and ignores the fact that it wasn't as big of a problem back then because it would affect that player to be an ego. Servers policed themselves and it worked.

That's why we have the sad state we have at the moment.

[MoanaLisa]

With the introduction of phasing the only thing what it did was giving you a sense that you were playing with other people.

People endlessly complained about the lack of server communities before phasing/CRZ arrived. So that's completely wrong.

There's a balance that has to be met:

Smaller, ever shifting communities where access to other people is limited but where people after some time come to know others

against
allowing access to larger groups of people through widening the field of possibilities.

If you're designing an MMO you are going to design for the latter and expect people to make their own relationships with others. People leave realms even further limiting possibilities. People drop out of the game after a while. That's their right and their business. And that's why being able to group out of the largest population pool possible is important.

I agree with those that want cross-realm guilds. I also agree with anyone that believes that the rule that forces your player character to maintain a monogamous relationship with one guild at a time is wrong.

Social relationships are generally more satisfying at the level of a guild. Restricting people to just their specific realm leaves far too many people unable to access the higher difficulties of the game. Are there 20 specific people on a small realm that can group together to do mythic raiding? Are you one of them? Because if you're not, you're not going to do mythic raiding.

For those that say they should merge servers, enjoy your hours-long queue times for a few weeks at the start of an expansion. Enjoy the fact that in many cases the only time forming realm-based groups is going to be relatively easy is in the first few weeks after launch. For the 18 months or so after launch, good luck. You're on your own.

[Deleted]

this thread heavily implys that you ever had a big community goin on, which you didnt and even back in vanilla or tbc you could solo everythin and group quests you skipped

Bullshit. you grouped up with other people all the time even for non-elite quests (made many things a lot easier).

[Deleted]

Wrong. Just like killing ticks, lice and fleas, killing what you call "server community" was a good thing too.

[cparle87]

Bullshit. In Legion, world is populated but people just ignore each other because you can solo non-instanced content.

If it's tough non-soloable non-instanced combat then you want to look at 2.4.3, the last BC patch. That was the one that de-elited (is that a word?) nearly all the outdoor elite mobs, particularly the ones outside of instances like RFD, BRD, and BFD that had long extensive elite areas you had to fight through to even reach the instances.

[Deleted]

Yeah your right about this one, Blizzard as a company should provide this, we pay them montly fee's they should provide us with balanced and good servers..

Look this game has changed for the better and worst in some aspects. It's more a mobile game in my eyes than a MMO.
I'm not a guy that says vanilla was the best. However i think that MMO's should cater to a playerbase that wants to work together to achive something. This should grant prestige or some other aspect do differentiat to the masses. You want to feel special in this kind of game if you got the time for it.

I dont got the time now to play this game 24/7 and i'm fine with that. But i want to be rememberd that what i can achive if I would play 24/7. I will see a guy walking around with insane gear and mounts that I think damn, what a dedication this guy should have had to accomplish this.

[ItachiZaku]

I don't even know who is on my server anymore. A few weeks ago, I assumed the top guild on my server was still the same, but they apparently transferred off again cuz it was too easy for them to be server 1st (they were top 100 guild, the next highest was like in the 1050 range). A couple names were familiar that had faction transferred to the Alliance, so they are now dead to me.

Garrisons and now class halls... the community on my main two server clusters is pretty much dead.

[Puri]

Bullshit. In Legion, world is populated but people just ignore each other because you can solo non-instanced content.

So? In vanilla when you got an elite quest you as well might have abandoned it. Be it Stromgarde, the Princess, the hinterland trolls or whatever. Perhaps you already had an higher level friend who would pull you through it, but that there was any form of community for non-instanced content is just as bullshit.