Can someone explain how the "community" is so much better than it was 14 years ago?

**Prozach** · 2019-05-21, 03:17 AM

And when people talk about the community being better back then it of course references the fact that you need to be more social to get things done in vanilla, a 15 year old in 2006 is no less douche'y than one in 2019 lol.

How do I NEED to be more social to get things done in vanilla? I keep seeing this or something similar posted but it makes zero sense. Exactly what do I need to be more social to accomplish? Grouping for dungeons? I do that now without waiting an hour in trade chat. I even group for elite world quests. I already mentioned the guild thing, which I've done since I started playing.

So how is it different?

**potis** · 2019-05-21, 03:20 AM

Originally Posted by Prozach

How do I NEED to be more social to get things done in vanilla? I keep seeing this or something similar posted but it makes zero sense. Exactly what do I need to be more social to accomplish? Grouping for dungeons? I do that now without waiting an hour in trade chat. I even group for elite world quests. I already mentioned the guild thing, which I've done since I started playing.

So how is it different?

You are not supposed to know how to play the game.

You are not supposed to know what to do and cleave stuff down.

You are gonna go and wipe 5 times to a simple tank and spank boss and the have a conversation over tea about how to defeat it while one of your members is looking for that tank that left with his toxic remark for the next 2 hours.

**Prozach** · 2019-05-21, 03:24 AM

I swear, every time I ask about why I "need to be more social" it's like I'm talking to this guy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo

Like why the hell don't you get it?! You need to be more social!!! The community is betterE!!@#!@!

**Fascinate** · 2019-05-21, 03:26 AM

Originally Posted by Prozach

How do I NEED to be more social to get things done in vanilla? I keep seeing this or something similar posted but it makes zero sense. Exactly what do I need to be more social to accomplish? Grouping for dungeons? I do that now without waiting an hour in trade chat. I even group for elite world quests. I already mentioned the guild thing, which I've done since I started playing.

So how is it different?

I suppose you don't necessarily need to be more social, but you definitely need to group more. Even small stuff like travel time/less flight paths meant mages were in high demand and befriending one meant you didn't have to pay 1-5g to some random mage lol.

Instead of getting all uppity in this thread maybe just wait for classic launch to see for yourself? It really is a whole different feel, and for the better.

**Prozach** · 2019-05-21, 03:31 AM

Originally Posted by Fascinate

I suppose you don't necessarily need to be more social, but you definitely need to group more. Even small stuff like travel time/less flight paths meant mages were in high demand and befriending one meant you didn't have to pay 1-5g to some random mage lol.

Instead of getting all uppity in this thread maybe just wait for classic launch to see for yourself? It really is a whole different feel, and for the better.

It's not about getting uppity, it's just wanting an answer that makes sense instead of reading the same rhetorical, cliche responses over and over again. First I need to be more social, but...not necessarily now. Then I need to 'group more' but to do what other than elite quests and dungeons, which I've always had to group for? I don't recall ever asking a mage/paying a mage to make me food. It wasn't horribly expensive, you needed to level cooking anyway and I don't know...the only time I got mage food was in a raid. Everyone did.

I want to know what is so different now than 14 years ago, specifically as it pertains to the community. I haven't read one thing that that's indicative of any difference whatsoever.

**Ekis** · 2019-05-21, 03:32 AM

Originally Posted by MoanaLisa

Stalking players from server to server. Nice. -snip-

I mean, the only people who were "stalked" were people who, for example, ninja-looted an entire bosses's gear in a 40-man raid, left group and hearthed. I mean, it's one of the repercussions of going out of one's way to be an absolute dick (I mean there are YouTube videos still around from people doing this). Do I want people to be harassed? Not really. However, at the same time I personally like the fact that these things are policed by the community itself.

The thing is, not everybody who did dickish behavior was suddenly blacklisted either. Poaching healers/tanks/insane dps was, and to a certain extent still is, a dick move but nobody got blacklisted. Rolling need on a piece of loot someone didn't need wasn't blacklist-worthy either. Cursing someone out in trade chat or making some crude joke? Not even then (and hell I even got suspended back then for a "dead baby" joke). Like to meet the standards back then to find oneself on a blacklist was hard to fill, but obviously there were those who went out of their way to get their name on them.

Will there be dicks in Classic? Of course, nothing has really changed over the past 15 years. But at the very least, people were self-aware enough to at least be nice (when they didn't feel like doing so) or go full scorched earth and do harm knowing full well that they'll probably land on one of these blacklists.

I don't discount your experience at all, being that it probably isn't unique (we all saw it at one point in time, myself on Spinebreaker back then saw this sometimes). However, my experience after playing for this long is the WoW community today is more like the League of Legends community (i.e. people go AFK after dying once in League = leaving the group after one wipe/complaining the entire run that the tank didn't help them after they pulled extra mobs). This wasn't that way back in vanilla/BC at least in my experience, but then again I had a group of people I could depend on from having been saved/saving people back then or people who helped me and made it to my friends list.

Maybe I'm just seeing things in rose-tinted glasses as well, but then again seeing my friends list full of people who haven't been on in months/years right now sort of reinforces my anecdotal experience that the game isn't really socially-oriented like it was back in the day (amongst other things but I could go on).

**Hitei** · 2019-05-21, 03:40 AM

Originally Posted by LedZeppelin

So you call BS, then agree with me? Just because some players wont know who you are doesnt invalidate my point.

Not "some". Most.

Zorkuus is entirely correct. If you were an asshole to someone, they might ignore you. If they were really close to their guild members, maybe those guild members would ignore (or harass) you. To the other 2000+ people on your faction, you were a literal no one, and no one gave a shit about some random whining about how some other random in a chat channel. Just like right now, the community was entirely guild based, not server based.

If anything, all Vanilla did was breed shitty, negative community practices. People didn't get blacklisted (by a guild or couple guilds, because again, 99% of your server was made up complete strangers not micromanagers keeping notepads of ""bad people"") because "muh bad server behavior", they got blacklisted because of bullshit drama where they upset a guild because they ganked an officer of GM or some other irrelevant nonsense, and now that guild was mad at them.

And it didn't matter, because no one outside that guild, except maybe a closely associated second guild, gave a shit that so-and-so wasn't liked by a guild.
And then even when you had the rare, rare person who was really well known for doing something shitty, they often did not suffer repercussions for it. There was a player well known on my small RP server (read: about as community based as you can possibly get) for ninjaing stuff from MC. What happened to him? He went and joined a different group that didn't like the people he ninja'd from and who thought his ninjaing was funny and continued to do content.

High end guilds (generally the only ones widely known, because just like individual players, the other several hundred guilds on your server were mostly complete strangers) were often full of assholes bitchmoaning back and forth with other high end guilds about how this person was poached and that person was meeting up for handjobs with officers to get loot and other highschool shit that had nothing to do with people being rude or not "bad community members".

I don't know where people's magical rainbow tearparty vision of Vanilla comes from (private servers?), because people rarely talked much in PuG dungeons unless something was going poorly, everyone was a fucking asshole when it came to tag-stealing mobs, stealing gathering nodes, or stealing farming spots (Jesus, the number of times I saw people drag a bunch of mobs onto someone killing a handful in order to kill someone of the same faction using a spot they wanted). People doing scummy shit with chests or rolls in 5-mans was not uncommon, there was a shit ton of people gaming mechanics to fuck over their own faction (infernals/doomguards/kited elites in low-level zones, asking for heals and then flagging so that people would flag themselves for a friend on the enemy faction to kill them, etc.).

Vanilla had awful communities. I'd say modern wow is the better community game if for no other reason than shared mob tagging. The number of times I've impromptu started fighting alongside someone else in a world quest or quest area in Legion/BfA is unbelievable. In every previous expansion (including Vanilla) I, and the vast majority of the playerbase, would just compete for tags because why join a group and split EXP when you are decent at your class and can out-tag someone? It doesn't matter that you don't speak, there's just far more working together with the modern systems than Vanilla, where being solo is OFTEN the most productive and efficient method of getting whatever you want done, done. Couple that with:

Originally Posted by MoanaLisa

Stalking players from server to server. Nice.

Perhaps my experience was unique but my server during Burning Crusade was a melee in chat between about three decent guilds who were competing with one another mostly by calling out members of the other guilds as ninjas and trying to get them off the server. This went on for months. Then it sort of spread to everyone else. It was really unpleasant. I turned off Trade and other channels then and there and have never turned them back on. I'm not really under illusions about what a server community is and how few players it really takes to ruin the experience and intimidate other players for their own amusement.

In truth: I imagine that Classic will be generally pretty great once the sightseer crowd dissipates a bit and servers return to small town status. 40-man raids are going to be hard to fill. People will get a few extra chances to show that some stupid thing was more of a mistake instead of something like a theft.

Things like this, and it is not hard to see how vanilla's community system did far, far more harm than it ever did good.

**Itisamuh** · 2019-05-21, 03:43 AM

Originally Posted by Trend

You didn't play vanilla so I think it is easy for you to miss the point. The point is that 15 years there was a predominance of dickish behavior in WoW. And it is unlikely that will be any different this time around. So the OP's question is how does this reality support the idea that community is going to be a great selling point? And I think that is a good question.

I think the average behavior of people was way better back then, so really have no idea how anyone can think now will be better.

**Ekis** · 2019-05-21, 03:48 AM

Originally Posted by Prozach

It's not about getting uppity, it's just wanting an answer that makes sense instead of reading the same rhetorical, cliche responses over and over again. First I need to be more social, but...not necessarily now. Then I need to 'group more' but to do what other than elite quests and dungeons, which I've always had to group for? I don't recall ever asking a mage/paying a mage to make me food. It wasn't horribly expensive, you needed to level cooking anyway and I don't know...the only time I got mage food was in a raid. Everyone did.

I want to know what is so different now than 14 years ago, specifically as it pertains to the community. I haven't read one that that's indicative of any difference whatsoever.

If I may answer, the difference is that the game back then required social interaction to enjoy things at the level at which a quest/dungeon was meant to be enjoyed. Sure, one could not be social and end up missing out on a quest that required 3 people to down like the Panther one in Thousand Needles for the green ring (which was stacked). The same non-social person could even go back and then do the quest themselves as well. But the game was certainly more fun when you did be even somewhat social.

You eventually made friends with people who in some ways would have your back, even if you weren't guilded with them. I can't tell you how much fun I had in STV when I got ganked and proceeded to ask the guy who I knew had a beefy level 60 come in and kick some tail, proceeding to start an all-out Horde vs. Alliance war. I wasted SO much time, but in reality all that time wasted was heavily enjoyed simply because well, the community made it that way. It was more group-oriented and fun-with-people-without-needing-to-be-in-their-guild-focused then than compared to now, where people are pushed to solo content and/or enjoy all the content with zero interaction much (or not do things with people who aren't guilded with you with a certain ilvl).

I'm not the type to tell people to be more social; however there are benefits to doing so in my honest opinion. Don't want to deal with people? You really don't have to. But by the same choice, you only gimp yourself. It's your choice to make, no doubt. But without the conveniences of Raid/Dungeon Finder and the instant teleportation to a dungeon or area without at least some semblance of camaraderie made the leveling experience and the overall game, much more dull when one chose to not interact with others.

EDIT: For example, when I didn't want to be social and playing on my alt back in the day, I only got to watch content I saw others do from videos. I missed out on a lot. There was no Dungeon Finder where I selected my role and got into a dungeon. I still had fun, but not on the same level as I did when I participated with other like-minded people. Sure, you could do that now, but who's going to wait and actively look for people to take on difficult content outside of their guild (who won't leave after the first few wipes, especially in new content) when people can just queue up and settle for LFR raids or queue up and do heroics/mythics? Remember when people would play WoD from their Garrison? Compare that to how you had to actively get out there in Classic and you begin to see a difference.

**Nootz** · 2019-05-21, 03:53 AM

Originally Posted by Prozach

How do I NEED to be more social to get things done in vanilla? I keep seeing this or something similar posted but it makes zero sense. Exactly what do I need to be more social to accomplish? Grouping for dungeons? I do that now without waiting an hour in trade chat. I even group for elite world quests. I already mentioned the guild thing, which I've done since I started playing.

So how is it different?

It's more that you were forced to interact with players instead of using a group finder. You can be social in "modern" WoW, but not a lot of people really do it. A lot of these players that complain about the lack of social interaction in modern WoW are probably not in guilds, only do world quests, or run LFR and LFD then bolt after it's all done without saying anything.

You can do almost all of the questing in Vanilla solo, but it was harder/more annoying to do. When you're forced to interact with players for convenience instead of having tools for it, communities build up. You're going to remember that guy that helped you on a long ass class quest chain or that healer/tank that always was available when you were for dungeon runs. That's what people are talking about with "community". You CAN do all of that now if you wanted to. But with all the added conveniences in the game now a lot of players just don't bother anymore. You can just queue up and find people whenever you want and you will probably never see them again.

**calanos** · 2019-05-21, 05:14 AM

So I am still pretty firmly in the "nostalgia will wear off quickly for 95+% of people" camp, especially after leveling for 8 or so hours on the beta so far. However:

I have been pleasantly surprised at the general community so far. I remembered how much Vanilla made you be safe and careful with pulls, but I had forgotten how many generic quests involved killing stuff in semi-dense camps where you can't multi-tag which leads to competition and danger. And so far there has been a lot of "hey want to group up to finish this real quick" interactions that have been really friendly and social in a way that really I can't remember WoW being since....Cata? LK? Maybe earlier?

Even just running past people out in the world I am getting Fort and Int or a pally blessing on the regular. Or a higher level toon in the area who groups up to help you kill Hogger because they were in the area farming cloth. One person I grouped with even randomly gave me 3 bags for free unprompted when I didn't have any.

The caveat there for me is that it appears most if not all of the people in beta have had accounts since Vanilla (I started playing in Closed Beta when they added the horde the first time). I dunno that this will continue into the masses joining up when it goes live or the beta gets bigger. The internet was a much different place in 2004, so my assumption all along has been that the community won't be anything like what people are hoping for, or what they saw on dedicated private servers with players with very similar styles and interests. But so far it has been pleasantly surprising to play with 1-2 randos like the old days instead of a silent group-finder world quest.

Doesn't stop the game from feeling 835 years old though. Good lord I had forgotten how slow things were back in the day. But that's a whole 'nother story.

**Flutterguy** · 2019-05-21, 05:40 AM

The vanilla community drove a CM to break down on the forums. Several times.

**tmamass** · 2019-05-21, 05:49 AM