Why the game is worse than before

[Deathsentry]

I really want to agree and I do believe the LFR/LFG has definitely given some players that anonymity they use to openly harass and be inconceivably rude. I can recall my fair share of run ins of this caliber player back when I started playing back in bc.

I remember right after my wife and I had our baby about the same time our GM and his wife had their child, We waited at a raid boss because he had to feed his child, cool no rush I was main tanking so we waited. A few minutes before he came back my wife had to fix a bottle for our daughter who had just woke up. Gm comes back and asks if we are ready, I tell him no just a couple minutes for a bottle, his irl friend out of no where throws a fit cussing us and our daughter and then the Gm gkicks us both on the spot. Gotta love karma a week later his guild splits into 3 and hes left with 4 people.

But not all was bad then after that we formed our own guild full of friends and had tons of people we knew quite well in the server some from the biggest raiding guilds on it at the time who really helped us out. Fast forward to now, we are in a guild on Area 52 just fresh from server transferring and we get an invite from a great guild and haven't ran into any real obnoxious players on our server ( one pair in Lfg but were quickly removed). So far this last month of playing after the transfer has been a blast again.

But I do think lfr/lfg did some damage to the server community togetherness. Which is why my wife and I while leveling have been searching trade/guild to find people to que for dungeons with which helps so we are not forced to just do lfr/lfg.

Now back to my rum and coke, cheers hope things look up for ya!

[Kangodo]

I am curious what server than. I will agree that you didn't know every player, but you knew a good amount of the ones who were looking for groups at the same time you were. I experienced many asshats/bad players, but never blacklisted a player for being bad unless he refused to learn and was rude about it. One player from my server got blacklisted on at least 7 servers before he finally got the picture and just quit being rude.

Twisting Nether, one of the most crowded and active EU realms and it has been like that for as long as I can remember.
It was close to impossible to know all the people and the famous ones where usually in one of the top10 guilds that did all runs with the guild anyway.

[GhostSkull]

Should just replace 95% of human players with bots that will give you gold and praise your remarkable skills.

That'd be awesome! Can I have mounts which they can't have and emote jealousy whenever I ride by?

[Sanavi]

It's been my experience with the Internet over the years that anonymity breeds douchebags. They are always around.

[Vanamman]

Twisting Nether, one of the most crowded and active EU realms and it has been like that for as long as I can remember.
It was close to impossible to know all the people and the famous ones where usually in one of the top10 guilds that did all runs with the guild anyway.

Ah that realm. That is definitely one of the most crowded realms.

I can agree that a decent amount is due to nostalgia, but i think the point about the community is very valid. Nobody cares about being nice anymore. An example for me is that me and a friend recently created new alts and decided to just slowly level them. We ran into a player who didn't know how to do a quest (the one in mulgore where you have to feed the dog). We decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and not immediately assume he is a troll just trying to annoy us. He turned out to be completely new to the game. I feel sorry for this player if he ends up needing help later on and some asshole decides to tell him off and make fun of him for not knowing how to do something. This is the kind of thing I wish we would see more and at higher levels.

TLDR: Me and my friend actually had to think about being nice as we are so used to everybody in game being either an asshole or a troll.

P.S. I am enjoying the thread you linked btw. Thanks for it.

[Vorticough]

It's been my experience with the Internet over the years that anonymity breeds douchebags. They are always around.

Pretty true in my experience.

[GhostSkull]

Yeah, there was the occasional douchebag. But LFR, LFD and CRZ gave them the massive playground they needed. I agree with OP. Game is better than before, the community just sucks.. or what's left of it.

For me, LFR and LFD was very freeing. I no longer had to worry that I could gather the necessary people to do stuff, and could find people very quickly. Is part of what bothers folks the loss of social power? The ability to decide who could do dungeons and raids and who couldn't?

[Leonard McCoy]

Blizzard has got to be the luckiest company in the universe. They make decisions that upset millions of players, lose millions of those players and then the remaining players turn on each other instead of the company. Can you imagine if coke did this? When coke changed the formula did everybody who drank coke turn on one other?

[bionics]

There will always be annoying people in-game. You are probably just seeing things through a warm and fuzzy nostalgic, rose-tinted glasses kind of way. There were bad times back then and there were good times. The bad times now are just more profound and etched in your mind because they're more recent.

Also, see my sig for a funny little list of the most annoying gamer types you come across in WoW.

[Stevegasm]

I miss the days of forming random groups with people on the server. I ended up finding quite a few random people to play with over the years during Vanilla and TBC many of which ended up joining the guild or our raids. Sure, it could take up to 10 minutes to get a group going, and you could just run into a terrible group. I would take all of the above over the reliable anonymous AOE stomp dungeons have been for a while.

[Vanamman]

There will always be annoying people in-game. You are probably just seeing things through a warm and fuzzy nostalgic, rose-tinted glasses kind of way. There were bad times back then and there were good times. The bad times now are just more profound and etched in your mind because they're more recent.

Also, see my sig for a funny little list of the most annoying gamer types you come across in WoW.

Not only more recent, but happen so much more often. Yes, its probably due to more players, but i can guarantee you that it got incredibly worse the very patch that cross realm LFD was introduced.

[felhunter]

i dont remember TBC to be that much different then now about less pleasant people.
heck even when they introduced LFD in wrath the overall attitude didnt change a lot.

sure it might have became a bit worse, but that was hardly noticeable

[Blapis]

Community killers:
LFG (Dungeon Finder)
LFR (Raid Finder)
Cross Realm Battlegrounds
Cross Realm Zones
Server Migration
Faction Change
Character Renames

Real ID was introduced too late.
There should be one unique name/surname for all your characters on account. (For example: Legolas Norris, Légôlás Norris, Łegöláz Norris ...)

[Kangodo]

Ah that realm. That is definitely one of the most crowded realms.

I can agree that a decent amount is due to nostalgia, but i think the point about the community is very valid. Nobody cares about being nice anymore. An example for me is that me and a friend recently created new alts and decided to just slowly level them. We ran into a player who didn't know how to do a quest (the one in mulgore where you have to feed the dog). We decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and not immediately assume he is a troll just trying to annoy us. He turned out to be completely new to the game. I feel sorry for this player if he ends up needing help later on and some asshole decides to tell him off and make fun of him for not knowing how to do something. This is the kind of thing I wish we would see more and at higher levels.

TLDR: Me and my friend actually had to think about being nice as we are so used to everybody in game being either an asshole or a troll.

P.S. I am enjoying the thread you linked btw. Thanks for it.

I understand that people are nostalgic, that's a good thing.
But the problem is not just the community in my opinion, I always ask people the same question: "What are you doing against it?"
Complaining on a forum is really easy, but if oh so many people agree than how come I hardly ever see people chat during LFR?

Last week I had a new experience: Humour and laughter in LFR!
It might have been (fairly sure of it) that half the group was either drunk or working hard on it, but we had fun.
We had near-wipes, random pulls and other nonsense, but it was still fun and I learned enough new dirty jokes.
But do we really need alcohol before players start laughing?

[Vanamman]

I understand that people are nostalgic, that's a good thing.
But the problem is not just the community in my opinion, I always ask people the same question: "What are you doing against it?"
Complaining on a forum is really easy, but if oh so many people agree than how come I hardly ever see people chat during LFR?

Last week I had a new experience: Humour and laughter in LFR!
It might have been (fairly sure of it) that half the group was either drunk or working hard on it, but we had fun.
We had near-wipes, random pulls and other nonsense, but it was still fun and I learned enough new dirty jokes.
But do we really need alcohol before players start laughing?

If we do than it is a sad time indeed.

[Bliq]

I feel that the content itself isn't what makes the game bad, it's just the complete lack of community. Having pondered about the old times one too many times I came to the realization that I missed the players, not the content.

Thats just me though.

[voidspark]

You ran BRC with the group from trade chat. You're level 53 and playing your first character and so are they. You have been in here for 2 hours and not even half way done. You might wipe a couple times, people make mistakes.

If Blizzard only allowed people who had at least 5 hours to commit to the game to play it, you'd see a pretty big drop in playerbase. Especially today (I think free time is at more of a premium now than in 2007).

And with a game that is over 5 years old, pretty sure "first level 53" is pretty rare to come by now.

People appologize in chat and no one is getting kicked and people just laugh it off. An item drops, 3 people can use it. 1 person wins and the other two does not suddenly get the massive feel of entitlement over it and kick the winner.

I don't see most pug groups go mad over 1-2 wipes... And most loot drama is caused by loot distribution that isn't random rolls, or obvious loot ninja/whoring...

Everyone on the server knew eachother, everyone had a rep for something they have done in the past and everyone knows how good of a person/player that guy standing afk in ironforge is.

Is this necessarily a good thing?

Nobody gave a fuck if you did low damage, nobody cared if you sat in AV all day or raided naxx 7 days a week.
Nobody gave a fuck if you got carried through Karazhan to free epix by some guild that needed a last dps.

So this is a good thing when it happens. What about this culture of players expecting a carry, versus contributing? Maybe back then more players had the mentality that they should contribute, even if of course not everyone did identical DPS in the end. You can blame additional difficulty in encounters, a lot of mechanics get harder nowadays with low DPS (not just hard enrage timers). Fights are more of a sprint, less of a marathon (even the "battle for survival" fights are often tight DPS checks).

I sit now in my chair sipping on some rum'ncoke

And as most people will say, staring through those rose-colored glasses.

[kukulcan13]

its too easy to disappear after being a dick, what we need is some way to hold people accountable, perhaps if the persons battle tag appeared by their name then they couldnt just switch to an alt or whatever.
one thing we know from the internet is that anonymity can turn even good people into complete jackasses, in vanilla you had to group with people on your server, people you would more than likely run into them again, so you wouldnt be a jerk.
the only real problem with cross realm and dungeon finder is that you probably wont run into these people again, so courtesy isnt very important. instead of helping a new player improve, you just kick him and get a better player. he's from a different server, you probably wont see him again and you wont get the satisfaction of seeing him improve.
me personally, i always try help crappy players in dungeons, i've played pretty much every class so i can generally give tips on most classes. i dont bother if they're being a dick about it though. i gotta say that there isnt as much satisfaction in helping someone you will never see again.

another thing, i remember using my friend list a lot when i first started, not so much anymore, i think they need to make cross server chat available, and let people add other people though their battle tags.

[Horseface]

There is obviously two major reasons lfd and that the game is already 8 years old.

[panterarules]

It's more so the PuG additions to the game are being consistently lowered in difficulty. Communication was required back in the day where PuGs would be marking pulls in Deadmines. Now threat, mana and burst mechanics no longer exist in your average casual players content. No need to talk strategy, each pull is the same... aoe, aoe, aoe...

Community will only flourish when it is needed for communication. Best bet is join a guild and give in to some lame raiding roster which you'll attend for the first 2 weeks and then decide that video games should be played when you want to not when you have to.