The real reason why WoW's community sucks

[Stonecloak]

I learned proper etiquette from the game guide that came with the BC battle chest. Read the whole thing. Understood less than a quarter of it, but what I made sure I remembered was dungeon etiquette. They even had proper quest behavior. Things like not making a train of enemies in a quest area. Yea people actually used to worry about that stuff. Maybe blizzard can implement something to help teach newcomers.

[Toc]

Same ratio of assholes now as there always was. It is just that we get into things faster now with queues. I can chain run dungeon after dungeon now where as back in the day you had to spam trade sometimes for extended periods of time. Now I can get more dungeons run in a shorter time which results in more people I am running with so inevitably I get more assholes. Seems to me to be simply a number game. That is just how I perceive it anyway.

[WCrispy]

No one has to work for anything (not that it was overly difficult before) anymore. They don't have to make friends or play nice or learn how to raid or do pulls. You run through a thoughtless tube strung with bosses for points literally in less than 10 minutes. The community used to back each other up, at least on my server. If a player acted like a ninja asshat their reputation eventually spread and they'd be denied from all but the noobiest of random groupings. This was before paid name changes and server changes. Ninjas lived in infamy. We had ninjas try to complain to GMs about "harassment" to no avail, until eventually they'd wrangle a name change or a server change to start over somewhere else. It was literally a huge pain in the ass to be struck down as a ninja. Servers used to care about their community. Now with CRZs people are under no obligation to give half a shit about anyone.

The way LFD / LFR is now it takes no work to get any loot unless you raid on normal or heroic modes so no one cares about jerks. They know the run will be over in five more minutes anyway, aka shorter than waiting to try to get out of combat long enough to boot a jerkoff from a PuG. The game is literally down to timesinks being time itself. There is no challenge to disuade anyone from not thinking about anything but themselves and their little item level (Gearscore) numbers. Ah, Gearscore, the mod that was eventually banned by Blizzard for violating the ToS and EULA for being "discriminatory" is now the leading reason anyone plays at all. How ironic is that.

The game has always been about gated timesinks in the ways of grinding mobs and quests for rep, loot drop percentages, and time spent in dungeons. All they've done is shuffle it around to fool people into thinking it's fresh when it isn't. Farming the old Cenarion rep in Silithus was the same awful grind now found on the Timeless Isle but all the new players eat it up, thinking it's better than doing daily quests or grinding dungeons. All Blizzard cares about now is time spent vs subscription cost, not the quality of the game or how engaging it is, and you can thank Activision's oversight for that.

With easier rewards come easier hunters of said rewards. Don't try to give us this "rose colored glasses" bullshit when it comes to the player base because the game has gone way way way downhill with the influx of mouth breathers. Players that were any good progressed skill-wise to surpass players that weren't as smart or nice (so you had no reason to play with them) but it got chucked out the window ages ago so we could all be equal and boring. Homogenized skills, less actions to cast, and AoE until you get to a boss. Now you can buy levels for real money in the store, something I said would happen with slippery slope logic two expansions ago. If the game doesn't start selling actual gear for real money while going F2P in the next expansion, while being ported to consoles, I'll be surprised.

If you like the game then that's your prerogative. As for losing 5,000,000 subs in less than 3 years of a 10 year total without any other MMO coming along to take the crown by force, that isn't something to be ignored. Activision's track record is to beat its horses to death until they're no longer economically viable and then pull the plug. Just look at CoD, Tony Hawk, Guitar Hero, and countless other titles. CEOs like Kotick run their hedge fund businesses to appease shareholders (of which he is one) milking stock money until it's cheaper to shut down and layoff everyone for even more of a last ditch profit. Slash and burn.

WoW is never going to get better.

Cancel now instead of wasting money on the slow death. I sure did.

[Eschatonin]

Almost all arguments about the reasons of sub losses;

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/false-cause

[WCrispy]

When troubleshooting an issue, say in technical support, you look for what changed and isolate the cause. If you look at peak subs in LK vs the changes made in Cata and MoP you'll have your answer. Bottom line is people don't like the game anymore vs liking it a whole helluva lot in LK. What changed? Everything mentioned in this thread. A fancy icon showcasing a logical fallacy doesn't prove anything. Go ask all the people why they quit and, like me, they'll tell you any given one of the reasons people have mentioned here.

[finskee]

Funny, I tend to find its more the people that scream and cry about queues or that things should be taken away from the majority of the player base that are Toxic.

I'm with this guy.

It's called progress people. You could almost always make the case that things were better in the past. But then we'd forget about all the things we have now that we didn't have back then, like convenience. Sure before 7/11 you might stop into the local store and have a chat with your neighbor, but you don't because now you just go to 7/11 and get some milk, you're in and out quickly and now you can go home and talk to your family instead.

Now I know some of you liked the old way better than the new. Guess what. You can still go do it the old way anytime, you just don't. You can still talk to your neighbor anytime, you just don't. You can still spend all day in trade chat spamming for groups if you want, you just don't.

And now in some countries, people have grown so accustomed to convenience, that the 7/11 type store makes better food than the local store, and offers a place to sit and hang out with other people. Hooray for progress.

If I'm in a bad group, or even a group with a bad player, I just leave and re-q. Try it.

(Also, only assholes make blacklists).

[Deleted]

How threads like this keep open for so long is beyond me...there isn't an "WoW community" there is the MMORPG community or maybe Gamer Community.

[Flaks]

The real reason is that it's a slowly fading fad.

[finskee]

When troubleshooting an issue, say in technical support, you look for what changed and isolate the cause. If you look at peak subs in LK vs the changes made in Cata and MoP you'll have your answer. Bottom line is people don't like the game anymore vs liking it a whole helluva lot in LK. What changed? Everything mentioned in this thread. A fancy icon showcasing a logical fallacy doesn't prove anything. Go ask all the people why they quit and, like me, they'll tell you any given one of the reasons people have mentioned here.

You seriously want me to quit playing my favorite game so you can feel better? I kind of doubt it will help you. But go on.

- - - Updated - - -

The real reason is that it's a slowly fading fad.

So what if it is? Changes nothing.

[taliey]

The real reason is that it's a slowly fading fad.

So if it is a fad, how long do fads last?

I was under the impression that fads last for a year, not at 10 years.

Please elaborate.

[finskee]

So if it is a fad, how long do fads last?

I was under the impression that fads last for a year, not at 10 years.

Please elaborate.

He's just insulting your intelligence, he thinks it helps the cause. Doesn't realize he's the cancer.

[MonsterSword]

Because WoW is usually most peoples' first online gaming experience. They don't understand that that is just generally how people are in online games, and on the internet in general, in an anonymous and not face to face setting. No, it was never better in the "old days", you just dealt with random people a lot less, so people had reputations and such. But even then, the crappy people still existed in droves. That's just kind of how online gaming is.

It's not really an excuse for crappy behavior, but when you've playing online games long enough you just sort of come to accept it and learn to ignore it and not let it get to you. From what I've noticed, there seems to be a lot of people who just haven't been into online gaming for long enough to understand this. Sure report them if they have done something terrible or whathaveyou, but if some guy is crap talking about your mom in Trade chat, you don't need to flip a table over it. I've seen people do and say crappy things all the time, in many games, not just WoW, but I've never got seriously angry over it. They are a random person on the internet, why would I?

I'm getting pretty sick of hearing all the time about how WoW's community will kill the game or something, or how it is declining because some guy ninja'd a level 50 blue item from you in a low level dungeon. Holy crap just get over it already.

Edit: And yes, obviously putting together groups yourself was better before they implemented LFR/LFD, but it still is! Seriously! I don't understand this complaint at all. "Yes before when you had to put together groups yourself it was better and not when I was somehow forced to randomly put them together when I could just as easily now put them together just like the old days". This makes zero sense.

Someone hasn't heard from the League of Legends community

[finskee]

Someone hasn't heard from the League of Legends community

What did they say?

[Canderous1]

make your own wow community. worked for me.

[ComputerNerd]

No one has to work for anything (not that it was overly difficult before) anymore. They don't have to make friends or play nice or learn how to raid or do pulls. You run through a thoughtless tube strung with bosses for points literally in less than 10 minutes. The community used to back each other up, at least on my server. If a player acted like a ninja asshat their reputation eventually spread and they'd be denied from all but the noobiest of random groupings. This was before paid name changes and server changes. Ninjas lived in infamy. We had ninjas try to complain to GMs about "harassment" to no avail, until eventually they'd wrangle a name change or a server change to start over somewhere else. It was literally a huge pain in the ass to be struck down as a ninja. Servers used to care about their community. Now with CRZs people are under no obligation to give half a shit about anyone.

The way LFD / LFR is now it takes no work to get any loot unless you raid on normal or heroic modes so no one cares about jerks. They know the run will be over in five more minutes anyway, aka shorter than waiting to try to get out of combat long enough to boot a jerkoff from a PuG. The game is literally down to timesinks being time itself. There is no challenge to disuade anyone from not thinking about anything but themselves and their little item level (Gearscore) numbers. Ah, Gearscore, the mod that was eventually banned by Blizzard for violating the ToS and EULA for being "discriminatory" is now the leading reason anyone plays at all. How ironic is that.

The game has always been about gated timesinks in the ways of grinding mobs and quests for rep, loot drop percentages, and time spent in dungeons. All they've done is shuffle it around to fool people into thinking it's fresh when it isn't. Farming the old Cenarion rep in Silithus was the same awful grind now found on the Timeless Isle but all the new players eat it up, thinking it's better than doing daily quests or grinding dungeons. All Blizzard cares about now is time spent vs subscription cost, not the quality of the game or how engaging it is, and you can thank Activision's oversight for that.

With easier rewards come easier hunters of said rewards. Don't try to give us this "rose colored glasses" bullshit when it comes to the player base because the game has gone way way way downhill with the influx of mouth breathers. Players that were any good progressed skill-wise to surpass players that weren't as smart or nice (so you had no reason to play with them) but it got chucked out the window ages ago so we could all be equal and boring. Homogenized skills, less actions to cast, and AoE until you get to a boss. Now you can buy levels for real money in the store, something I said would happen with slippery slope logic two expansions ago. If the game doesn't start selling actual gear for real money while going F2P in the next expansion, while being ported to consoles, I'll be surprised.

If you like the game then that's your prerogative. As for losing 5,000,000 subs in less than 3 years of a 10 year total without any other MMO coming along to take the crown by force, that isn't something to be ignored. Activision's track record is to beat its horses to death until they're no longer economically viable and then pull the plug. Just look at CoD, Tony Hawk, Guitar Hero, and countless other titles. CEOs like Kotick run their hedge fund businesses to appease shareholders (of which he is one) milking stock money until it's cheaper to shut down and layoff everyone for even more of a last ditch profit. Slash and burn.

WoW is never going to get better.

Cancel now instead of wasting money on the slow death. I sure did.

Goodbye and good riddance.
The players CHOOSE not to talk to each other.
Blizzard did not make that happen.
The elitist jerks CHOOSE to bash LFR while using it as another lockout for loot, yet then afk through it because they don't deem it worthy of their effort.
Many of those not contributing in LFR only do that because they don't care about the result, since it isn't their only chance at raiding.

You call it BS but provide no good arguments as to why, only spewing out overused arguments which are disproved each and every time.

Servers declined long before there were the options to migrate, hence why they were introduced in the first place.
Some realms thrive, others failed.
Blizzard did not make different rules on each of them, only the players dictated what the experience was like.
Players made a realm die, not blizzard.

[Karnige]

LoL is 100x worse the WoW. WoW used to be brutal in the hardcore days. now its not as bad

[billielecter]

I think Blizzard ignores its community too much and later on the community goes wild. I want Blizzard to think about retrieving some classic designs because they really endures the time and fun. People unsubbed long ago still post here because they still care something about this game. Sometimes Blizzard over-do the change thus the game is totally different in each expansion and that's not so good. Is' not really this community getting toxic, it's Blizzard which gets this community out of control because they don't keep vanilla settings, they always remove them. People will complain as long as what entertains them has been eliminated.

[finskee]

I think Blizzard ignores its community too much and later on the community goes wild.

Community goes wild Cancun! Spring Break Bikini Contest! Free T-shirts and Water balloons! Afterwards we'll complain about class nerfs! BE THERE.

[Stonecloak]

Why wouldn't they? Their stuck in a cycle of rng and grinding. After a while that's extremely frustrating to anyone.

[Durandro]

The real reason is LFR/LFD/BGs. Everything can be queued nowdays, so people dont NEED to behave.

It was bad before then, don't kid yourself. Every online community attracts the worst aspects. I mean look at MMO Champion, despite the fact bans are handed out regularly people still behave like naughty children on a regular basis.