How does Retail fix the social issue?

[WowIsDead64]

So I have spent the last week in TBC Classic and it's so evident that game is much much more social than Retail. People "have to" do dungeons while leveling for reputation, looking for groups in chat. People "have to" group up to do 4-5 group quests in every single leveling zone. People group up for certain quests naturally. People "have to" find a guild so they can start raiding Kara.

In the dungeons, people talk and try to explain pull tactics. Just at level 62, in Slave Pens, there is more chatting strategy on how to pull and where to stand, when to put down Tremor Totem, when to AoE, giving healer Mana Pots, asking for Nature Resistance aura from Hunter on final boss and in general asking for water, asking for mana breaks and helping on quest. All this socialization happened in 1 single run of Slave Pens.

The amount of whispers I did in Shadowlands between 50-60 was 0. Yes, 0. I also am pretty sure I joined a group 0 times. The first time I whispered anything was at 60 to join an early mythic.

I remember early at 60 in Shadowlands I did a Mythic +0 dungeon on my Shaman and we wiped on 2nd boss in Spires of Ascension (on my 4th dungeon or something) and the only "socializing" that happened was that the tank left and then everyone left.

What concrete changes would Retail have to do to make people socialize again?

The thing that makes a MMORPG attractive is the social aspect, no?

Problem is - forced socialization isn't right way to do it. First of all MMORPG acronym doesn't have letter S in it and therefore MMORPG =/= social game. MMO is just "many players can be online at the same time", nothing more. Blizzard already do way too much with forced socialization on retail. You're nobody, if you don't do M+ or raids. For example your progression stops at 197, may be 200ilvl. And their content is actually designed to force "socialization". For example that WQs, where they put 5 mobs with long respawn and require you to kill 20 of them, that look like traffic jam at rush hour, with people overtaking you via roadside. You HAVE to group, not to sit there for hours. But thing, Blizzard don't understand - grouping just for the sake of grouping isn't socialization. It's just annoyance, that drives players away. It's also falls into "forced PVP" category in WM. Without WM it's just exceeding competition.

Of course it's their choice to design their game this way. But I prefer smoother, meditative and relaxing game. Things like "queues on mobs" are stressful. And I don't want to pay money to be stressed. That's why I'm unsubbed. And game design is so bad in two latest xpacks, that I'm not even sure, that flying in 9.1 will help to fix it.

Blizzard don't even understand, that such experience is NEGATIVE, because it's actually intrusion to personal space. In real life people pay money to AVOID it, because it feels like HUMILITATION. Yet Blizzard think, that they need to teach us to bear it. For money. Yeah.

[kiramon]

I love how people act like the lack of social requirements in wow is from a decision of blizzard, rather than a growth of the wow community.

[Kokolums]

I fixed it in my sig. your welcome.

[JABoyle3875]

How do they fix it?

They can't.

/thread

[Icelin]

I love how people act like the lack of social requirements in wow is from a decision of blizzard, rather than a growth of the wow community.

It was the decision of Blizzard with the current leveling system they put in place. I did not enjoy it one bit. I like deciding what areas I am going to go level in and be apart of. Maybe with all the new sharding the covenants felt empty. (Compared to class halls in Legion) Either way it felt like no choice and isolated. I'd rather not have story so intertwined with the leveling experience next time, not to the point we experienced in Shadowlands. I am playing an MMO not a single player game.

As an MMO I expect to feel apart of a larger world. With large activities. This is pretty much my expectations. If people want to do solo content there is leisure activities for that. Which they completely cut out both aspects. Torghast seemed to address some type of fun solo or group content (activity) but the rewards were so mediocre. Also it shouldn't be the only endgame activity. Raiding might be making a comeback.. they are adding unique weapon skins no word on armors yet from what I seen. I enjoyed running old raids for mog runs. A lot of people did, it only made the content replayable. I have a hard time understanding some of the choices this expansion.

So I humbly disagree with the people posting that they want a single player experience. I would just go play a single player game if that was the case.

[aceperson]

I'm not sure there's anything Blizzard can do to force socialization without alienating more players than not. I know that I balk any time I feel like I'm being "forced" or manipulated into doing something I don't want to do. If there's enough things like that happening then I stop playing.

I'm a social person but I don't want to spend an hour trying to get a group together for a dungeon. That's the primary reason why I don't devote more time to classic. If tbc classic had a dungeon finder, I'd be playing it heavily. The only reason my wow sub is even active right now is because I have a bit of time left on it from a previous 6 month sub that's about to end. Once that time runs out I don't plan to resub even after 9.1 launches. I plan to just wait it out until the bug fixes and tuning passes Blizzard is inevitably going to have to do are done, and maybe even longer still since the content itself doesn't seem very compelling for me, before I resub.

Attempts at forcing me to be social will instead drive me away from the game, and I have a feeling I'm not the only one.

but they can. classic and tbcc proved that when there aren't connected realms and layering and the lfd, server communities flourish. is it going to annoy a lot of the casuals? heck yes. but that's unavoidable. they complain no matter what. they complain when they get QOL features and they complain when they don't. some examples being complaining about lfr being hard and complaining about m+ not having a que system. blizz shouldn't be trying to please the unpleasable.

blizz need to start focusing on making a good game again. if pissing off the people who don't actually care about the game and only themselves is the cost, that's a price well worth paying. wow was built and thrived on this kind of focus. it only started losing subs once things started becoming too accessible. lfr was released in cata and the lfd was released in the last patch of wrath. the idea of helping people access content they just aren't good enough for is the cause of the games massive decline. while systems like easy catch up gear, lfr, and and easier dungeons seems like a good idea on the surface, it's a fool's gold of a choice.

having such abundant catch up gear invalidates all the prior content. what used to help people get more fun out of wow has now turned into a solo grind of mind numbness. lfr isn't raiding and these people don't realize it. raiding isn't just going in and killing bosses. it's doing that with a group of people you become attached to through sharing the pains and joys of killing these bosses. easy dungeons aren't fun for anyone. it's just a loot slot machine if it's too easy which is why m+ was added in the first place.

i'm not saying everything needs to be mythic raid difficulty hard as that would cause the exact opposite problem that we have now where no one could really play or want to. wow thrived by focusing on a good game. not by making the game accessible or by making it a grindy, system ridden mess. we NEED the old school method of development back.

[exochaft]

I love how people act like the lack of social requirements in wow is from a decision of blizzard, rather than a growth of the wow community.

It's a bit of both.

The scenario the OP describes has two aspects of socialization on the surface: communicating with your fellow players to strategize/plan to get through a dungeon, and (the part that wasn't mentioned) having to manually find groups. The first half tends to disappear the longer you play the content if one assumes there's a general consensus of how to tackle the content, the second half doesn't apply to retail for much as you have group finder (which can automate or make finding people for a group less interactive). Likewise, the first half I would equate to the growth of the community... the second half is game design on Blizz.

The whole aspect of socialization is a complicated one, but it's something current and former devs have talked about in the past (and still do). The older versions of WoW, such as vanilla, TBC, etc., were intentionally designed to force interactions... and that's not just me saying it, former devs who worked on this older content flat out will tell you this. Things were left inconvenient by current day WoW standards as it caused people to actually interact with others. They will admit that things like flying and LFG and ease of server/faction transfers are regrets exactly because the convenience lead to reduced social interactions, ultimately hurting the potential of the game in the long run.

Now here's the thing: players, and even people in this thread, tend to focus only on the positive social experiences when talking about socialization. However, even neutral or negative social experiences are still experiences that are valuable to the players, all of which can ultimately lead to deeper investment in a game... or at the very least lead to more memorable and/or richer experiences. If you recall your memories of your past WoW days, a good number of them probably revolve around some social interaction, whether it was good, bad, or neutral. Such interactions are one of the building blocks (not the only ones) that establish a foundation of a player to have an investment in a game.

This can be further extrapolated outside of WoW into just life in general. A person will have many experiences in their life, some good and some bad, that come of a result of voluntary and involuntary socialization. There's no magic axiom where voluntary socialization always yields more positive social experiences, as there is no axiom where involuntary socialization always yields more negative social experiences. There's only the idea that any type of socialization will tend to yield a social experience, simple as that. As humans, we need and crave socialization on some level, as it gives us perspective in our world and connections that everyone desires (even the most introvert people require social connections deep down, even if they try to avoid it). In essence, the only way to live a fuller life and try to connect with others is to engage in some form of socialization. Yes, I've heavily simplified this, but I don't want to take five posts to give it more detail than this.

How does this translate to current WoW? The convenience and aspects of the game that are void of socialization hurt the long-term investment of players in a game. Again, it's not the only aspect that yields player investment, but it's a major one (especially in an MMO). In fact, having the ability to create situations of socialization is one of the advantages an MMO has over other genres in terms of keeping long-term engagement. Whether the socialization is voluntary or forced doesn't matter in the long term, as both can yield the exact same results. However, when you factor in human nature and the tendencies of the WoW/gaming population as a whole, you probably need to force the interactions in order to get socialization to occur. Another trendy way to say this is if you make it so WoW is basically a single-player game, players will tend to avoid each other and ultimately avoid one of the major parts of the game that would increase their investment and develop a richer experience in said game.

Ultimately, you'd have to alter WoW in major ways that the players would probably push back on if you want a more social game. In the short term, you'll probably lose players who probably have little investment in the game. In the long term, you'll probably gain players, with a large portion of the WoW population having a greater investment in the game. The unfortunate reality is that Blizz development is too short-sighted at this time to make the such changes that are good for the long-term health of the game. Part of the problem is likely revenue, as you'd see a drop in the short term. The other problem is that the game itself is already lack in other areas, such as the content itself. While having a solid base game is very important in an MMO, having a social playerbase is what keeps it alive.

[Kyriani]

but they can. classic and tbcc proved that when there aren't connected realms and layering and the lfd, server communities flourish. is it going to annoy a lot of the casuals? heck yes. but that's unavoidable. they complain no matter what. they complain when they get QOL features and they complain when they don't. some examples being complaining about lfr being hard and complaining about m+ not having a que system. blizz shouldn't be trying to please the unpleasable.

I suppose I should have qualified that with "they can't without losing players". Does it work in classic and tbc classic? Sure... in the sense that the people who play classic are willing to do it. But we have no metrics to tell us how many people are playing classic vs retail. I'm willing to bet that more people are playing retail than classic and that if Blizzard tried to turn back the clock on retail and announced the removal of LFD/LFR and connected realms (as an example), that it would drive away so many players that they'd quickly do an about face on that decision.

blizz need to start focusing on making a good game again. if pissing off the people who don't actually care about the game and only themselves is the cost, that's a price well worth paying. wow was built and thrived on this kind of focus. it only started losing subs once things started becoming too accessible. lfr was released in cata and the lfd was released in the last patch of wrath. the idea of helping people access content they just aren't good enough for is the cause of the games massive decline. while systems like easy catch up gear, lfr, and and easier dungeons seems like a good idea on the surface, it's a fool's gold of a choice.

I agree that Blizzard needs to focus on making a good game again, but I don't agree that forcing socialization in the manner of classic would be doing that. You're quick to throw away those people who use LFD/LFR and "aren't good enough", but have you considered the impact that would have on WoW's revenue? If you believe more people would return/start playing wow than stop playing if they did that, then I'd say you're smoking some good shit.

having such abundant catch up gear invalidates all the prior content. what used to help people get more fun out of wow has now turned into a solo grind of mind numbness. lfr isn't raiding and these people don't realize it. raiding isn't just going in and killing bosses. it's doing that with a group of people you become attached to through sharing the pains and joys of killing these bosses. easy dungeons aren't fun for anyone. it's just a loot slot machine if it's too easy which is why m+ was added in the first place.

LFR exists to justify the time and resources that get devoted to the creation and maintenance of raid content. Full Stop. Removing LFR would result in the cutting back of raid content both in frequency and quality. FFXIV manages to handle "abundant catch up" and having an LFD/LFR just fine and the game is thriving.

i'm not saying everything needs to be mythic raid difficulty hard as that would cause the exact opposite problem that we have now where no one could really play or want to. wow thrived by focusing on a good game. not by making the game accessible or by making it a grindy, system ridden mess. we NEED the old school method of development back.

WoW's height was WotLK in my opinion. It was the best balance of accessibility and difficulty as far as I'm concerned. The only thing it would need is LFR, because, if the primary story of the game/expansion requires raiding to see the conclusion, then even those dirty casuals should have an easy and accessible way to see that conclusion. That's not even getting into the fact that it's those dirty casual LFR players that are the reason that Mythic Raiders get to do what they do and have such challenging content. Accessibility is important to a certain degree. And to some degree grinds are also just a fact of life in MMO's. It's all in how those grinds are packaged though that determines how willing players are to engage with them.

Is there stuff the dev team can learn from older iterations of WoW? Absolutely. But I believe that just trying to "do it the old way" will drive away far too many players to be worth it. I know I'd walk away from WoW for good if they removed LFD/LFR because those are the only ways I'd ever get to do dungeons or raids in WoW.

[Surfacin9]

Everyone wants to go about their business, do stuff and move on. You wouldn't be happy in retail when someone explained strat for every single pack. In m+, yiou get into groups based on your experience, so you should know already what to do. The amount of communication I have in pugs in M+ is pretty much greetings and discussing, when we want BL. The rest of the time everyone just does their job, liek intended. After all retail is much more fast paced. And it was developed based on pitfalls of previous expansions.

Like say group quests. Obviously right now, you can easily find you 4-5 groups for elite quests in every zone. Come back and level in a month or 2. There will be much less people doing them, apart from Ring of Blood, and you'd be: "damn, why can't I just solo those group quests" (and you will try, and succeed/fail based on your class and having other people aroun). To avoid that, blizzard made group quests on retail more or less soloable, the ones you can't solo you can usally find people for in Group Finder (worked for me at different stages of the expansion).

Same with dungeons, first week if you were pugging, you'd be discussing bosses and packs. After that you're expected to know the basics and what every mob or boss do. Right now people are either unaware of TBC dungeon mechanics, or did them while levelling on retail where you just overpower everything and don't pay any attention to what things do. Also remember in TBC there were more situational abilities (like hunter nature resist aura and etc.), so they needed to be communicated. In a couple of weeks this type of communication will cease. Slave Pens is a nasty dungeon, I don't think you'd have the same coordination experience in many others.

[BraveNewWorld]

Wait 4-5 months, and try looking for a group for these 5man group quests. Good luck and have fun.

[Cæli]

fomo marketing, time limited rewards in abundance, overload of collectibles, achievements, of activities, basically killed retail to a point of non return
in classic/tbc you had quests, gold, gear, the rest was filled with interaction and pure fun
now it's more of a solo game, because they tried to make addicted people stay with hamster wheel content, it ramped up in wotlk, worked because the game was actually good, then with cataclysm everything just blew up, and then they kept persisting in that direction, the result everyone knows it
sad, but now we have classic/classic era at least

[Ragnarohk]

People "have to" group up to do 4-5 group quests in every single leveling zone. People group up for certain quests naturally.

I switched from retail to BC recently. And this is misleading.

People group up for the quests just like how the group finder works in retail. You invite people to the group, they don't even talk, just complete the quest objective and the group disbands.

You have the same in retail. It's just done automatically instead of having to manually invite people

[Kokolums]

I love how people act like the lack of social requirements in wow is from a decision of blizzard, rather than a growth of the wow community.

Blizzard explicitly attacked social. At one point, they destroyed global lfg and swore it would never return. At one point, blizz was never even going to include text chat channels in d3 or sc2.

[Kithelle]

Thats weird cause ive run tbc dungeons without a word being said and run retail dungeons with thorough explanations on bosses and trash cc/mechanics before. So your evidence that retail has some social issue to fix is purely an anecdote. I also leveled all of classic with minimal whispers or communication in dungeons and i did most 5 mans on the leveling path.

The lies people will tell to make classic sound so great compared to live, sure it fools a few people but eventually everyone sees through them. Just because the game is over 10 years old doesn't mean the community is...it's the exact same as live, and all the lies in the world wont change that.

[aceperson]

i'm going to number each section so this isn't an unreasonably long post.

1. wow has been losing players since cata when all this accessibility started. while we don't have official metrics to compare the population of each server type, we'll have to agree to disagree as i believe more people are playing classic than retail at this point. if we were still in bfa, i would be on your side as bfa wasn't THAT bad but SL is absolutely awful. as the recent $70 "deluxe" edition of tbcc has proved, people are so attached (or addicted, either or) that they are willing to stay around in spite of obviously bad changes. these people are the important people, not the super casual who can't be bothered to learn what an interrupt is. i get this argument comes across as elitist but other people have stated it as well that these super casuals have always been around. lfr and lfd only made their presence extremely common where it was a lot more uncommon prior. even if the current super casuals leave, the former crowd of super casuals will return as wow gets its reputation back.

2. don't get me wrong. community and socialization isn't a fix all solution. it will also take content and gameplay overhauls. but i want to share a story that will help explain my point. when i started in wrath, i had no idea how important a guild was to enjoying raiding to the fullest. this was partly because my parents decided to use the parental controls blizzard had at the time and i couldn't commit to a guild. but that changed in cata. before lfr was implemented in 4.3, i found a guild called zugg zugg. i found this guild because a friend of mine had me join an alt raid with them. zugg zugg ended up dying in 4.3 due to guild drama but more than half of the guild moved to another that is still living. it has survived because everyone in the guild has known each other for years. part of the reason the roster doesn't increase is because we can't vet people like we used to be able to. we don't get to see the people on our server talk, we don't get to see them in pug raids and dungeons, we don't have any connection with our server at all. that's because of server connections and layering. we rarely get a good person who wants to join us for raids when we pug someone but it used to be a lot more common. by forcing people to talk to each other, people will form friendships they normally wouldn't. and when you have friends playing during a drought, the drought is a heck of a lot more tolerable. while allowing server communities being a thing again won't fix wow right away, it will certainly start the healing.

3. i have to say that this is a bs excuse that is pushed by blizzard. i want to point out that wrath launched with 3 raids and cata launched with 3 raids. that was pre-lfr. mop came out with 3 raids (lfr was 4.3 so it didn't realistically affect this expac). then wod launched with 2, legion launched with ONE with another being released much later even though it was on beta, uldir only had one raid without any other raid in sight, and SL did the same as bfa. ever since lfr was put it, the amount of raids has been getting smaller and smaller. if anything, lfr causes raids to be less valuable. people no longer look at them in awe. there aren't ragnaros' and c'thuns that have the casuals looking on with jealousy and passion. i used to use my free time in school to read wow lore on the internet. i haven't had any kind of passion even close to that since lfr was added and i'd bet money that other people feel the same.

4. i would agree, though i also started in wrath so i don't have any tbc or classic experience to possibly give me a different thought. i would say adding lfr would go as far as ruining wrath. when i remember lich king and yogg-saron, even the mere thought of being able to que for a faceroll mode of either breaks my heart. these characters are meant to be menacing and feared. part of how that is achieved by having the properly made boss fight. lfr would undermine that massively. the casual friendly method of experiencing the end of the story (like i was way back then due to being a lowly high school student with parental controls on) was videos made by the passionate community as is made today. there was and is a story mode of the game on youtube. nobbel does a wonderful job of going over each new raid tiers story and boss lore. i understand that grinds are inherent to most games as well. the main difference is the nature of the grind. i want to use two reputations as an example. the first being the netherdrake reputation from tbc and the second is any reputation from 5.0 mop. let's think about what each offers. toys, mounts, maybe a tabard, etc. there is one key difference between something as well liked as the netherdrake reputation and the mop reps. that being player power. the mop reps had epic gear that was good enough to make people feel forced to grind rep to get that power. people didn't want to but felt forced to because of the reward. no one felt forced to grind netherdrake rep. the only thing you missed out on was a mount which was almost entirely cosmetic at the time. there were mounts that could only go so fast regardless of flight training but there were easier mounts to get for that result.

one last note, i don't understand why people think the game can only cater to hardcore or casual players. let's keep in mind that vanilla and tbc had hardcore elements like the attunements as well as casual features like flight points. the ideal audience isn't one or the other, it's actually neither. it's the decently good players that connect both sides and drive a games popularity. these are the people who have a decently busy life but still think the game respects their time. the people who aren't the best at the game but can still overcome challenges. the people who share stories of how awesome their adventures were and drive their friends into trying the game. and this base is attracted by making a good, solid base game. THAT'S why classic, tbc, and wrath had such an explosive growth. it was a fun and fair game. lfd/lfr skews the game too much to the super casuals and things like conduit energy is simply made to screw over the hardcore.

everyone is so focused on the extremes, no one stops to consider what a compromise is. that's my point. it's not about making wow less accessible, it's not about making it require more or less grinding, it's about figuring out what the reasonable people want and meet them. THOSE are the people that will drive the possible climb of success wow could have.

[Zantera]

Honestly I think the problem is with you and not the game. If you choose to play the game as a lone wolf then that option exists, even on TBC classic.

[Lochton]

Find a guild, join Discord channels for various types of content, even the Discord channels of certain streamers with grown-up fanbases are a great way to meet players.

The only one's keeping people from social interactions are people themselves.

Cannot be said any better, really.

[Lolites]

theres nothing to solve, retail have more oportunities and systems to be social IF YOU WANT TO, people just dont want to, and they dont have to, neither they have to in TBC, you can perfectly fine clear HC dungeons without anyone in group uttering a single word...

[Calfredd]

I fixed it in my sig. your welcome.

So fixing it by not actually fixing it. Got it.

[Echo of Soul]

Guilds and communities—things that already exist—encourage socializing. That's not working. I don't think there's much else that can be done. Forced socialization is not what's needed and will likely make things worse.

TBC Classic will be social for a while. Check back in eight weeks and tell me how it's doing. Classic was very social at the start but it didn't take all that long for it to revert to something much like retail.

People have to want to be social. If they're not then there's very little that can be done to make that happen.

I believe that has to do with "common knowledge" of whatever content you're doing combined with the difficulty of that content. As time passes players will get less tolerant of people who don't know how things work, "how have you not learned this by now? It's been out for a month." and things of that nature.

One thing WoW could lift from FFXIV is how they tackle it. You get a notification at the start of a dungeon that someone is new to the content and you get a bonus reward for that. The WoW community is very different from the FFXIV community but it could possibly work, instead of kicking those who fail it could lead to helping them understand the encounter instead which leads to increased socialization.

Another thing could be pacing. If things took longer both in instances and out in the world (where grouping up would make things easier) it could increase socialization. The whole get in/get out type of gameplay makes socializing an obstacle more than anything. But you would need to have some artificial downtime for that to occur, mana regen surved this purpose in Classic at the start (before gear levels got too high) when you had to take small breaks after combat to regen health and mana and you may as well spend that time talking.