Is WoW more of a Social network than a game?

[Roghatku]

Hey guys,
I've been playing WoW since classic and I was curious how many people primarily use WoW as a social hub to keep in touch with people or if they are focused more on the gameplay and lore of the actual game. Why?

Note- For me I started out focusing on the gameplay and lore, but after meeting people and joining a guild I am more prone to socialize than worry about the lore.

Thanks guys,
Roghatku

[Vorecien]

I've been here since The Burning Crusade, and my extent of lore is tied to watching nobbel videos. I've never focused on lore, but gameplay for sure. I think I've always tied a "social hub" behavior into my playstyle, but I would think it's more prominent (for me) today than it ever has before. I wonder where I'll be in a year?

[Kokolums]

Ideally, an MMO is about the social aspect and the in-game community. The actual game is kinda in the background. The most memorable moments are the fun times you have interacting with regulars. Blizzard just supplies the forum in which the moments occur. The current WoW model in Legion is extremely toxic instead, with a total lack of community and people just chasing numbers.

[Lochton]

Hey guys,
I've been playing WoW since classic and I was curious how many people primarily use WoW as a social hub to keep in touch with people or if they are focused more on the gameplay and lore of the actual game. Why?

Note- For me I started out focusing on the gameplay and lore, but after meeting people and joining a guild I am more prone to socialize than worry about the lore.

Thanks guys,
Roghatku

I use it for a bit of everything, social part is done by the app more, but then there's RP social too. Though, I don't only do so, also use it for other things - cheapest hobby.

[Deleted]

I don't know about the others, but for me it was more of a social network in vanilla and TBC where i somewhat knew the majority of the server; all the guilds and so on.
Over the time this aspect got somewhat lost to me somewhen around WotLK.

Nowadays it is more a game to me and i tend to stick to grouping/playing with my guild.

[Deleted]

Im not social in the game, typing just doesnt seem a natural way to socialise. I play with others but thats about it.

[ceall]

To me, it's only social network, when I'm raiding or doing m+ with my guild. For the rest of my playtime, it's all solo.
Also, while raiding, it's more emphasis on progression than socializing.

[Extremity]

A3, a browser-game I played when I was growing up (the "Alien Adoption Agency"; yeah, yeah, laugh it up! :c), was more of a social network than a game. WoW? Absolutely not. I mean, 90% of the social features of WoW aren't even integrated into the game, they're all third-party to it (not third-party by ownership, by location). The difference between the two is that many people signed up and stayed on the former just for the community features. It's like people who still use the MMO Champion forums but don't play WoW; I'm sure there are plenty of users here that *never* played and/or liked WoW. On that note, I highly doubt anybody is logging in to World of Warcraft for the trade chat community, totally exclusive of the gameplay

[TheVaryag]

Hey guys,
I've been playing WoW since classic and I was curious how many people primarily use WoW as a social hub to keep in touch with people or if they are focused more on the gameplay and lore of the actual game. Why?

Note- For me I started out focusing on the gameplay and lore, but after meeting people and joining a guild I am more prone to socialize than worry about the lore.

Thanks guys,
Roghatku

It -was- more of a social network, alongside good gameplay that you could do with your buddies and really flesh out a server community, guilds and such. But since Cataclysm the game's gone downhill In social aspects I'd say no. The game doesn't encourage you to do things together, no group quests, dungeons are speedrunners where nobody even says hi. LFRaid Is the same, barely anyone talking and If someone does It's complaining you're not mythic geared. World Quests encourage none of that and with the obsurd amount of phasing and "Shards" we have, we barely see one another and we're now mostly Regions rather than Servers.

I've been playing since Vanilla WoW, and I feel WoW's community, social network aspects of any kind have gone out the window since cataclysm and only good friendships and guilds have kept certain people from leaving since cataclysm onward and many have anyway. It's still no coincidence everything's been slowly going downhill since Cataclysm, If It's sub numbers, quality of content or encouragement of group content. In Legion especially, It's basically a singleplayer game at this point with optional group content. You don't even need to talk to anyone, or do anything with anyone and you can get Mythic geared just by running mythic + with random pubbies or even boosting yourself with gold or real money (The latter being Illegal on WoW but hey, people are weird). Legion makes me feel the M In MMO which stands for Multiplayer has vanished.

[Lightbull]

I actually play on my own most of the time. I've been a solo player since I started playing back in Wrath.

But in my experience, the social aspect is still there, you just gotta go looking for it.

[Deleted]

I have yet to try WoW! Rate it and please give a quick real small review of it?

Thanks

[ItachiZaku]

Since BC, I've gained like a dozen facebook friends. Of those, only 2 still play the game. Each "cycle" of my playing and not ends up seeing my friends/Bnet list go from 20 up to 100 for PVP and then I'm off for a month and it drops back down to like 50, longer than that and back near that original 20.

[Cæli]

the real treasure in wow is the game itself, the music, the zones, the video game, not the community

[Tome]

It was a social game, with a social network going on around the server, with people offering their crafts and other tools for people who needed them. People built their reputation and were known by many for this or that. That's pretty much gone now though.

https://eu.battle.net/forums/en/wow/...3773942?page=1

We have cancerous threads like these being supported a lot, so the game is far down the drain in the social regard.

[Saucerian]

I'd call it more casino than game at this point. (**** you, Kotick.) Brainlessly easy content and RNG almost everywhere.

[Sencha]

I liked the game when guilds mattered. Game was harder and there was this feeling of overcoming challenges together, strengthening the bonds between us and it was fun.

Now you can literally play 99% of the game without joining a guild. It feels like playing a single player game with 4 bots when you enter a dungeon or with 29 bots when you go raiding.

[Kokolums]

Here is an example of the in-game social community from Vanilla WoW.

Blizzard had put in the battleground system. It had some simple rules, but it was about the competing forces on either side trying to carve out a name for themselves in the community. I ran a "guild" called ABpro. It wasn't an official guild in the wow sense, we were all in different guilds. But we need a team for BGs and so we had a roster of maybe 20-25 players that got on ventrilo and ran Arathi Basin lots. There were other guilds on the Alliance side like <War for Profit> or <Eternal> that we would run into every once in a while and tried to beat. We all got familiar with each other over the months and recognized each others playstyles. We'd see them a few times per day if we played a lot. We'd discuss in vent the strategies we'd use to defeat the other teams. I'm also recruiting fresh talent on the side to try to boost the team and replace people who leave.

And that was just PvP battlegrounds. There was an entirely different ecosystem of guilds running PvE. All of the PvE guilds new each other and worked to clear raids first. I wasn't involved with that really but it was going on there too. All of the interaction WAS the appeal. The actual game was almost in the background, just a forum that allowed MMO enthusiasts to interact with each other.

The modern game feels meaningless. Everyone can clear an easymode raid using LFR, but you don't know anyone, you don't really have rival guilds, you don't run into rival guilds regularly. Its just not interesting. I can join a battleground but I don't know these people and it takes away a lot of the appeal. The rated battleground system doesn't fix this problem at all.