Have you tried this?

[MisterBigglez]

I've made friends this way, though I was rewarded for my help. Used to boost a guy through the first cata dungeons to get him gear as he would twink lvl 79 pvp. He would pay me 5k per item and if an item didn't drop, he would start increasing the reward based on my time spent helping him. Thats how I made most of my gold in cata. Eventually he would ding 80 on his character if the queues didn't exist and then make a new hunter, get to 78, then ask for my help again.

[hynx]

Everytime you login in WoW (or when you feel like it) ask in guild chat if someone needs help with something.
It just requires to be a big guild with a lot of low levels.
If you dont have a big Guild just ask in Trade Chat on a major city or something.

You will have random adventures everytime.

At the end of helping the other guy you can have a conversation about life or simply talk to one another.

You wont get any "reward" BUT you will go through an adventure everytime.

Question:
Have you tried playing WoW as a mini social adventure? Instead of playing it just for rewards?

you quite literally describe what wow used to be, before the huge world quest nerfs and world mobs nerfs where 2 pulls sometimes meant death and before LFG/LFR. sometimes, just getting a carry run in SFK for a better chance at the loot you needed meant a lot, to speed your leveling time, by getting a blue belt of Aragul for your squishy mage/lock/priest. and you remembered people. you also remembered assholes, who spammed chat. the server had actual reputations of players for being good/bad/nice/toxic shitbags. i miss those days.

[Big Thanks]

You can't know what someone else is thinking, so there is no point to be taken.

I haven't met a single person throughout my whole WoW experience that would pester me with calls for help, i'd say that you exaggerate, lie or got unlucky with some creeper and extrapolate this experience on everything else.

But anyways, asking a question this way (do you play socially? Or you play only for rewards?) is unfair, because there is two wrong implications:
if you play socially - you don't play for rewards
if you play for rewards - you don't play socially

And putting a question the way OP does (Have you tried playing WoW as a mini social adventure? Instead of playing it just for rewards?) is even worse, because it implies, that people who are about to answer it don't play socially and play only for rewards


Probably everyone had bad experience with other players, recent one from me:
Me and my wife met one healer paladin girl in the middle of gurubashi arena, we killed her to get our last trinket for quest, she started complaining.

After talking to her, she said that it's her last trinket, we agreed to help her with next chest, delivered that, and told her that we're doing DMF chest now.

Some time later she added us as friends, we casually chatted a bit about our progress with DMF chest.

Next day we've got pwned by some alliance PvP guild.

Next DMF we continued and there was that paladin girl standing on top of a chest spawn, i chatted her "hello"s, but she ignored me.

Naturally, we killed her since it's arena and we wanted last 2 or 3 trinkets.

She psyched into /w swearing and spilling bile all over the chat, saying something along the "didn't my boys gave you enough problems? you want more?" implying that well-known alliance pvp guild are in fact "her boys"

one chest later (we had to take our final trinket) this alliance guild arrives, but we were prepared and rallied everyone from our friendlists to our help (even 115 level druid came to help us), there was a massive fight and we simply overpowered them with bodies

that paladin-girl psyched even more, dropping "i'll pay them more and they'll make your life miserable and you'll quit wow", implying that these players weren't "her boys", but she just paid them ridiculous amount of gold (500k each) to help her secure chest (after talking to those "boys" i've figured out that the deal was about chest, but she wanted them to follow us everywhere and kill in the world, which they didn't agreed to, because it's stupid)

She still sits in our friendlist with a "crazy" tag, but after that joke of an event we never actually talked to each other, and she quit a pug raid as soon as we've joined it.

Bottom line is, we wanted to help out this girl, but she turned out to be crazy, i still feel that this story and experience is a reward for my actions

What an incredible story.
Im sad it turned out that way

An adventure filled with hate and revenge thats bad

I hope you find better adventures in the future :S more.......happy ending ones.

[Charge me Doctor]

What an incredible story.
Im sad it turned out that way

An adventure filled with hate and revenge thats bad

I hope you find better adventures in the future :S more.......happy ending ones.

It doesn't matter how it ends as long as you have fun

[Big Thanks]

It doesn't matter how it ends as long as you have fun

Did you have fun?

You made an enemy though, and enemies are never good.
That person wasnt well. I hope she can find peace with what happened.

Plz make her happy...if you can.

She may not see it you are being good and think you are making fun of her...

So tell her she can kill you in the arena if she want...and that you are trully sorry she got hurt over you guys.

I dont see a better way...a way of this having a happy ending.
Figure it out yourself man. Whatever you think is right.

Im not telling you to do it. Is just an idea...

And again, i tell you this was an incredible story. I will remember it for how awesome it was. Its just sad it had an unhappy ending.

[CritFromAfar]

I've done this numerous times and I think it led to my fallout with WoW. What I came to realize is that the average player is SHIT. I'm not claiming to be a god or some know it all, but I try at everything I do. If I want to do something and am passionate about it, I put the effort in and make sure I do it right. When I play a new class for the first time, I make sure I read up on what the meta talents are, what the stat priority is and what the rotation is. The guild I was in during Legion had some fallouts and we were struggling to have a decent size raid (20+) of competent players. I took it upon myself as a recently anointed officer to help gear up new recruits and see what skill level people were on. I'd either wait to see if someone needed help with keys or I'd just post in guild chat.

After months of helping various people with keys/pug raids, almost every single one performed like shit. How do I know? I used details and would parse the dungeons/pug bosses I did with them. After I'd finish the dungeon/raid w/ them, I'd tell them about various websites they could use to help them w/ talent choices, stats and what their rotation should be. Most appreciated the advice whereas some outright refused it because they wanted to play the game "their" way, to which I stopped helping them. The people that supposedly did take my advice would ask me for help because I helped them before. What I realized is that they performed the same if not worse even after carrying them through 10+ keys.

TL;DR: I don't go out of my way to help people anymore because the average player doesn't care enough to perform at a certain level for me to waste my time playing with them. I enjoy playing with competent players who know they have to actively learn their class in order to perform well.

As much as I understand the feeling, when I was new to WoW there were so many times I was honest in a dungeon about not knowing the mechanics of the dungeon and some friendly person would explain to me how to do things. I used to see people say in groups that it's better to just be honest if you don't know how to do something, because it was always an easier run if people knew you didn't know how to do the dungeon properly (CC, target priority, which floor fire to avoid..) so that they could explain how so that not only does that run go more smoothly, but the person also walks away knowing a little better how to do future runs. In the last few years, with all the guides available, several times if I went to ask in a guild or public chat channel a question I'd either get outright ignored or get told to google it. As much as googling it might be more practical, it still puts a bad taste in my mouth when someone does that.

To back up what I mean, I created one of my first M+ groups and completely turned away from M+ because the group spent most of the time berating me for not knowing how to do everything effectively. It made the overall experience fairly unenjoyable for me.

It just makes it an overall bad experience when people don't know how to deal with new players, or returning players that haven't been keeping up on features of new expansions, and I gotta say that I was completely grateful to the people that took the time to explain things to me and it made the overall experience more positive for me, as opposed to when I was just criticized for not knowing.

What I have learned, though, is that if you do the work for others, they're definitely going to half-ass and take you for granted.

- - - Updated - - -

to the OP: I used to help people all the time in my guilds. When boosting without paying real money was still popular people would constantly ask for help from higher levels to boost them, and I usually told them I would help. I made a lot of friends that way, but I haven't done it in years. Since then I'm fairly certain Blizz made changes to dungeons so that you don't get XP - or as much XP, don't remember - from someone that outlevels you/the dungeon. They also limited the amount of times you can complete a dungeon in an hour, and on top of that, I'm not sure if people know where the entrances are or if they'd even be willing to run through higher level zones just to get where the dungeon entrance is (to be fair, though, the quests might still give xp, it's just that not all of the dungeons have quests). Some of the boss drops used to be better than heirloom pieces and were good for twinks, but I think that's been changed too, not sure. I'm fairly certain Blizz removed a lot of twinking gear years ago.

Regardless, I used to be way more social. I used to say hi to everyone that came online in whatever guild I was in, but last time I played I kept to myself and didn't bother.