Did WoW become less social or is it just me?

[Mouni]

When i first started wow in 2005 i loved the social aspects loved having a big community with the same goals. I loved going on vents and teamspeaks. i loved grouping with people and doing things ure meant to do in mmos. Well that was at 60 and 70. Ever since then i just cant seem to stand people anymore ingame. I cant stand going on voice chats and i have most chat channels turned off because there is a crazy amount of douchebags.

Im not saying there was never anyone like this back in early wow but there was surely a ton less douche bags out there. I remember always thinking how amazing wow was community wise because thete was barely any douchebags. Seriously a few years ago id say 90% of ppl i met were all nice and friendly...nowdays it feels like theres only very few remaining friendly ppl like that. Its like wow use to be a friendly town where everyone knew each other and respected each other and now it feels like a crowded city where no one says anything unless its negative and no one respects each other.

Just me?

[Snow White]

A few years ago you needed to be in a guild to see real content. Your reputation on your server meant the different between full epics and spamming chat with 'lfg'. If you were a douche bag, your whole server knew it and you didn't get anything done, whereas now you can queue up with random people, reap all the rewards of raiding and never have to be polite.

[bbr]

Is to be expected really - or rather, a natural thing when:

* Dungeon groups are obtained through the random dungeon LFG finder thing.
* You no longer need to socialize with people of your own server to get loot.
* Reputation matters less.
* Anyone can tank, dps and hybrids do about equal damage. "specific roles" are no longer a reality. Just "dps / tank / healer". Rather than we NEED a rogue to sap, or a mage to sheep, or a lock to banish, or a priest to shield, or a druid to tank / cc, etc.
* The solo player does very well, by doing daily quests.
* New players are spit upon by most of the established "elite" and either leave, or hang out with other new players.

[Deleted]

Hopefully future MMO's will learn from Blizzard's mistakes. It's too late for WoW.

[Nevintsha]

When i first started wow in 2005 i loved the social aspects loved having a big community with the same goals. I loved going on vents and teamspeaks. i loved grouping with people and doing things ure meant to do in mmos. Well that was at 60 and 70. Ever since then i just cant seem to stand people anymore ingame. I cant stand going on voice chats and i have most chat channels turned off because there is a crazy amount of douchebags.

Im not saying there was never anyone like this back in early wow but there was surely a ton less douche bags out there. I remember always thinking how amazing wow was community wise because thete was barely any douchebags. Seriously a few years ago id say 90% of ppl i met were all nice and friendly...nowdays it feels like theres only very few remaining friendly ppl like that. Its like wow use to be a friendly town where everyone knew each other and respected each other and now it feels like a crowded city where no one says anything unless its negative and no one respects each other.

Just me?

Not just you, I've noticed the same thing. I've recently taken a break from WoW and have been playing EvE Online and was surprised at how kind the community was. Even the GM's hangout in the chats for fun and to help others while at it. Mineing ore is boring but fun when there are other people around doing the same job because we'll make a chat group and talk about EvE and other random things to pass the time.
WoW has a much larger playerbase then it did 2 expansions ago, and has an atraction to alot of people. Many of those people are the kinds you have described in your post, so its more common now to find the rude people with silvertoungs in arguments then the kind people (as the kind tend to stay to themselves)

[halmotors]

You don't even play WoW any more. How are you even remotely qualified to make a thread like this?

[Agoonga]

* New players are spit upon by most of the established "elite" and either leave, or hang out with other new players.

That's what pisses me off.

[Snow White]

You don't even play WoW any more. How are you even remotely qualified to make a thread like this?

Why do you think people like the OP quit?

[alba007]

Is to be expected really - or rather, a natural thing when:

* Dungeon groups are obtained through the random dungeon LFG finder thing.
* You no longer need to socialize with people of your own server to get loot.
* Reputation matters less.
* Anyone can tank, dps and hybrids do about equal damage. "specific roles" are no longer a reality. Just "dps / tank / healer". Rather than we NEED a rogue to sap, or a mage to sheep, or a lock to banish, or a priest to shield, or a druid to tank / cc, etc.
* The solo player does very well, by doing daily quests.
* New players are spit upon by most of the established "elite" and either leave, or hang out with other new players.

This^

I was going to write a long comment but then I noticed this pretty much tells what I would write in my comment.

[halmotors]

Why do you think people like the OP quit?

Judging by his post history, the OP quit because of basically everything ever added to the game.

[Deleted]

I found the community equally dreadful when I started in mid-TBC. People pestering my DPS characters to heal them for fivehundredmillion different dungeons despite being told no. "Go respec, plix, plix, plix, come on, dude, don't be so selfish!" ARGH!
I tried to be nice and friendly and people would just ditch me by the meeting stones when they went for lunch/dinner and never returned.
So I'd rather take a random jerk where I can get teleported to instead of teleporting said jerks rear to the entrance to have them ditch the group on the first wipe. Now I can just replace them with another jerk.

On the occasion that I do meet a really rude person, I just add them to my ignore list for a while, then take them off a month later and see if they changed.

[Deleted]

Just pray this problem , does not spread out

[halmotors]

False assumptions such as these are also a part of why the community is in the state it is.

There's no false assumption, there's observation of the threads the OP has made in the past. He stopped playing a few months into Cata, if I believe, never accomplished anything in the game, and is now seemingly on a crusade to do nothing but create threads attempting to sway the opinions of people when he doesn't even play the game any more.

If you don't play, then you don't have the right to gripe on a public forum. I don't drive a BMW, and that doesn't make me any more qualified to complain about how they make their cars.

[Olianda]

Less social? No. People in trade chat socialize, that's pretty much all that happens.

Is that socializing obnoxious to some, and detrimental to the rest of the community? Very much so. It seems more that the community is becoming less mature, but just as, if not more social, due to LFD and such.

[deviantcultist]

A few years ago you needed to be in a guild to see real content. Your reputation on your server meant the different between full epics and spamming chat with 'lfg'. If you were a douche bag, your whole server knew it and you didn't get anything done, whereas now you can queue up with random people, reap all the rewards of raiding and never have to be polite.

Thats what I really like about the new lfr system. I play the game with a couple of friend and wish to be in a social guild. I dislike having to be part of a large guild with elitistic rules and have to be polite in order to get things working. Now I get the opportunity to be polite with the ones I want to be and progress content in my own pacing without having to compulsory depend on a grp of ppl. In case you are wondering, I am not casual, but I wish to be one.

[Deleted]

It got less social, no doubt about it.

It isn't just you. You can experience all of Cataclysm without communicating with another person at any point ever.

[OldHordeGlory]

I don't think so. Not in any valuable way, at any rate.

Did people talk more, out of necessity, in the past? Sure. But the same social structures of friends lists and guilds that existed in the ancient WoW times exist today. They thrive now, even, as tools have improved to allow even more socializing than before (Real-ID and the like).

What's gone are the forced interactions with players in the game world that you would otherwise be okay ignoring. This primarily pertains to finding groups, but can pretty much reference anything that can be said in /say.

Before I'd have to talk with people to find groups for dungeons, then talk with them about how to get to the dungeon, then let them know where I was ganked outside the instance, etc etc. Now? Queue in dungeon finder, never say a damn word to anyone. No debate over who tanks and who heals, no debate over a given item that drops (need/greed/pass take care o' dat), none of that.

If that makes the game less 'social', then I like it better that way; now you only have to talk to someone you WANT to talk to.

But then, apart from a short stint as a raiding rogue in the original game, I've always played WoW as more of a single player or co-op game (with like 3 friends) than an MMO, so it may just be me.

[Vladimeir]

I think the game has become far less social since the addition of paid realm transfers and the subsequent change to only a 30 day waiting period (where it used to be 3-6months.) After this, people would realm transfer all the time and suddenly, half a server's population changed. Granted there is an influx of people as well. This is probably a minor change, but it is annoying when there are no reliable sources of information on people because they are transfers or players or name changed etc...

Then came LFD. Good feature but rarely do people use trade channel to form groups at the rate in which they did in TBC (and coincidentally, meeting less people that you might want to play with.) To further complicate things, people ninja and leave groups or /kick for poor reasons and generally be anti-social while doing their Valor Grinds.

I personally make an effort to talk with people in LFD, "hello" "hows life" etc... Sometimes people talk and we can have conversations. Sometimes people ignore me. Sometimes people talk and it makes me wonder why I said hello in the first place.

The only true social aspect of the game currently is your guild/friends and trade chat trolls. But even those are on the decline due to reasons mentioned above, people quitting, people guild hopping, people getting banned, trade channel chat limitations, etc...

[Saladbar]

It seems that way to me. It annoys me when people blame the game (lfg, etc) for these things. It's the player base, not the game. The game has no real roadblocks to socializing; a large portion of the players just choose not too, or choose to act like dumbasses. I think there is a much higher percentage of immature players than there used to be.

I was moderately social in vanilla and tbc. Eventually it go to the point, where the first thing I did with a new alt was to turn off trade chat. I pretty much stopped socializing completely during wotlk because I found that I didn't like the vast majority of players I ran into. Of course it could just be me.

[Darsithis]

Stop worrying about whether or not the OP still plays the game.

As for my $.2, I haven't noticed a decline at all. There have always been trolls in World of Warcraft (which is where server reputation used to come in) that would do their best to destroy groups and other player's experiences. While anonymity makes this task easier, it's not any more prevalent now than it was 3 or 4 or 5 years ago. I've encountered some truly generous people in this game, and I've met up with some serious jerks, even ones on my own server. Yeah, you heard me, my own server. I saw someone roll against the tank for tanking gear, so he rolled against he DPS at the end for DPS gear, berated the DPS with "that's what you get", and dropped.

You get them everywhere, but you have to look past them and to the really nice people you'll meet. Take time to say hello to your groups. Be friendly. Offer things for free from time to time...I won't forget that rogue that cried when I gave him a landslide enchant for 0g.