Anti-social features wiped out the playerbase

[Foj]

Blanket nerfs (ICC) are bad for the game. It shouldn't exist really. If difficult content becomes nerfed to easy, it stops being difficult. and you don't really need 4 settings of easy.

But, that was nowhere in anything that I said.

What I said was, there should be an easy pugging difficulty. An EASY pugging difficulty. But if we are going to have three non-LFR difficulties, there is no point AT ALL in making the first one anything harder than beer league / sister + grandma / friends + family difficulty. It is a waste of a difficulty. And you can see that -- WoD has had TWO entirely wasted raid difficulties.

[therealbowser]

"Anti-social" features did not wipe out the playerbase. They actually breathed life into the game since people that would have gotten tired of putting together groups (I'm sure lots of you wearing rose-tinted glasses forgot how tedious it was to manually put together groups). That's not to say they didn't hurt server communities; obviously cross-realm anything will take away from that, but it didn't 'kill the community'.

The problem is that nothing was added to help enhance server communities in its place, and instead of adding more content that would help remedy that, Blizzard opted instead to put in unnecessary content such as 'cross-realm zones' which served no purpose at all except adding competition to zones that previously didn't have any, and giving the very fake illusion of a game being played when it wasn't. This was especially bad for small realms, which in the past had the benefit of a weak economy but no competition looking for resources, now have a weak economy and lots of competition for resources.

Also, I want to emphasize this:

Dungeon Finder isn't killing other MMOs and isn't making their player bases as toxic as wow is. 98% of the people I meet in the FFXIV Duty Roulette are sweet as hell, and people explain fights constantly for new players.

It's not inherent in the design and can be done right.

The playerbase of World of Warcraft has become spoiled and entitled (not in a small, insignificant way, such as "I'm entitled to see raid content, or I'm entitled to get that loot" but in a bad way -- like, they feel entitled to act like a little shit when they don't get their way because they can do it with zero consequences), and Blizzard has done absolutely nothing to moderate the community. Really, it literally feels like Blizzard has given up on the community and just doesn't give a shit about letting it turn worse by the day. Likewise, being the biggest MMORPG means it will attract the worst people, this is inevitable.

Other games, such as FFXIV, have a great community that's very friendly, and while there's any number of reasons why this may be the case. That said, I think Vulena is giving FFXIV too much credit; while it doesn't have many trolls, it has a massive amount of elitists which really drag down the game in their own way. 98% seems like a big exaggeration, unless you are referring only to leveling content.

[Foj]

Other games, such as FFXIV, have a great community that's very friendly, and while there's any number of reasons why this may be the case. That said, I think Vulena is giving FFXIV too much credit; while it doesn't have many trolls, it has a massive amount of elitists which really drag down the game in their own way. 98% seems like a big exaggeration, unless you are referring only to leveling content.

EVE, the most uncompromising PvP game in existence, has a genuinely civilized community.

I don't know why WoW is such a cesspit. It really is the worst community in the universe of online gaming, and there's no obvious reason it should be that way.