WoW feels like a single-player game now

[Theoris]

Then just play Classic.

[agentsi]

I barely see ANY interaction happening in the game, so it's not just me.

It's 100% you, I've played for all of BFA. Every single day I see folks and interact with them socially. Either via warmode, general chat, or a WQ, or whatever.

The game is how you wish to play it. You're playing BFA, and being anti-social, so you can come to Classic be social, then throw it its face like its a game design issue. Then act like a child on MMO-C forums, pretending you found the huge flaw in BFA.

It's not, you're the issue.

[Brewhan]

I barely see ANY interaction happening in the game, so it's not just me.

You're not alone it is happening. Those who refuse to see it are those people who are in long term gaming friendships /cliques which is fine. For those who their own friends quit wow a long time ago its very hard to make new wow gaming friends. All the discord cliques have already formed and are usually standoffish are really immature trollish behavior.

I was unsubbed for 7 months, came back for 1 month to unlock flying. It's been 12 days resubbed, got flying 3 days ago . The BEST chat interaction i've had is when someone needed some lock picks in trade chat and I gave them some and wished them happy holidays. Outside of that most of it consisted of automated addons or people typing in mechagon chat " rustfeather up" .... sad state of affairs when this game is only left to whale addicts who want to collect xmog/mounts for that FOMO factor... GG blizz.

I uninstalled yesterday even though I have 18 days left on sub not worth the time. Cya in shadowlands or never...

[tmamass]

I have been playing for three months now and have not had a SINGLE social experience. Meanwhile I played Classic for a month and can't count how many people I met.

then its a YOU problem. NOT a game problem

[Jtbrig7390]

Funny cause I meet new players daily in BFA and it doesn't feel like a SP game...

[Frolo Bobbins]

I barely see ANY interaction happening in the game, so it's not just me.

I've had plenty of interaction in the game. But I joined a guild and a M+ team.

[PaladinBash]

In Classic all you see leveling up is mages aoe farming every place you go to do quests and stuff. It's annoying and makes me hate seeing anyone anywhere. I don't know what kind of interactions you're having with Classic now, several months in.

I wish Classic WAS more single-player.

Retail though? Yeah nah you talk to as many people as you want. You are wrong.

[keelr]

Since September i had way more social interractions and met way more ppl on retail than on classic. Its your choice if u wanna go solo or not. Stop blaming the game and think about yourself.

[matrix123mko]

In single player game NPCs don't call you a retard after they wipe.

[Zantos]

I have been playing for three months now and have not had a SINGLE social experience. Meanwhile I played Classic for a month and can't count how many people I met.

There's clearly something wrong with the design in retail and I think it all has to do with CRZ, sharding, and cross-realm everything. Why do I see random players from 20 different servers every time I log into Boralus? .

Its you. 100% you. This isn't a CRZ, shard or cross-realm issue. Its a you issue. Anyone who says "i haven't had any social experinces!!!!11!@" is the problem. You want social experiences? Make them. Talk to someone. Say something in /general or in that group you just got placed in.

You can't count how many people you have met in classic? How many people have you met in retail? Each raid is 24 people. Do 3 wings in LFR for a single raid and you've probably just met 60 individual, new people. Do classic av and you have probably met 100+ new people while leveling an alt from 110-120, easily. You just didn't talk to any of them or say anything.

I've had entire conversations with people in random dungeons or bgs. Conversations with people I would not have met other wise.

Point is, Blizzard made a tool that creates more social experience opportunities then ever before. You can literally meet anyone on any realm now as opposed to the few hundred on your own realm. Just talk to someone

[8bithamster]

I played classic for a couple weeks. 90% of the "social encounters" I had were just completely mute invites to a group to kill mobs together for a q, without as much as "hi" or bye" exchanged. The remaining 10% were situations where people just bitched at me for various reasons, like "stealing" their mobs etc. Yeah a lot of fun.

Meanwhile, in 8.2 in the live game:

a) I had countless interactions in mechagon while farming rares, the rig and doing other activities, back when 8.2 was still fresh
b) I became part of the EU soundless farming community, an organic community of people who just came together to help each other with soundless to overcome the (up to) 8 hour respawn timer, I believe the in-game community reached the max members possible, outside of rare camping people were just chatting 24/7
c) I interact with people who farm MOP mounts and MOP bonus rolls on daily basis. We just happen to be in the same area, so might as well have some chat to kill some time while killing the frogs for the 10000th time, or waiting for nalak to appear.
d) At the same time, I'm in a guild that casually raids heroic, there's not a day that passes without interactions on discord and guild chat

Social interactions occur if you want them to occur. No one can force people to talk to you, and the idea that wow classic does that is a myth that crumbled in front of our very eyes. Yes, some things require a group, but that doesn't mean there will be any meaningful relationship formed out of this. Most people just party up, do the thing, leave, never talk to each other again. Sure, you can play BfA without interacting with people if you want to which is good, because you aren't forced to artificially socialize only to never communicate with people after the group breaks apart.

Same here, but you're on mmo champ where Blizzard is literally satan and can never do anything right.

[Djaye]

Ever think nobody WANTS to talk to you? Love the game have tons of "interactions", daily. Bye.

OP has the issue of being surrounded by asshat, cockbag players (like yourself) who have ruined the game for millions of people.
attacking a complete stranger because what appeals to him differs than you. you are a disease...

[barackohmama]

Dude this has been going on since CRZ/LFG was introduced. Community has been dead forever. I can count social interactions the past years on my hands.

[Dracullus]

I'm tired of people like OP. It's ALL on him. He talks with people in Classic, because he chose to. He doesn't talk with people in BfA, because he chose to.

In game social stuff only happen when you're waiting for spawn or sit AFK in capital. Classic has a LOT of both. We don't talk (or rather type) during world quests, because there is no downtime. But for sure we talk during camping rares in Mechagon.

Most social interations are done through Discord, because you know, you can talk and play at the same time.

[vsb]

Social interactions happen in a guild. Finding a proper guild is not easy, but it's possible. I got drunk with my guildies every now and then and we talk things.

[MoanaLisa]

Because they like being able to tell shareholders about the 400 or so servers they have, even if most of them are dead. I think they would rather create even more servers instead of merging them.

I've read most of the shareholder reports from ATVI and quantity of servers isn't mentioned in any of them. Unfortunate for you I suppose. As well, most of the "shareholders" for ATVI (not Blizzard and certainly not exclusively World of Warcraft) are institutional investors like pension funds. So what you said here is all wrong.

It's worth mentioning that if Blizzard were really being predatory about not merging servers which would cause more people to have to do transfers they wouldn't have made so much of the game cross-realm and connected a bunch of servers together a few years ago. You can yell at me all you want about Blizzard Defense Force or other such bullshit but the above is simply factual and I'm not making a value judgement on any of it.

As for social vs. single player: A lot of people prefer single-player content. I guess that's a shame but in fact I don't play with random strangers. I have a guild, some friends and acquaintances I've made through the community groups. If I don't know you, guess what? I won't play with you. The only advice I have to give you is that you cannot wait for a social game to come to you; you have to put in a little work to have it. Pretty much like real life. You make friends by putting yourself in social situations where friendships can happen. If you're in a random group say something, play nice, be complimentary, don't be an asshole.

Trust me, you don't want to play with people who don't want to play with you. Your game is better off without them.

- - - Updated - - -

Guilds are the social units in WoW.

Complete and total truth.

[Frolo Bobbins]

shareholders.

Heh, that meme. Seriously?

And honestly whichever genius at Blizzard came up with CRZ needs to be fired immediately and blacklisted from the entire industry. What an idiot.

Actually it's the other way around. I wish they would pick up their efforts of implementing CRZ and connecting the realms again. They never finished it.
They need to - urgently! - iterate on the recently added community feature and keep adding functionality to it. They need to re-vamp the group finder, the current functionality is very bare bones.

They need to do A LOT to connect and remove old server boundaries. Their change windows are so few and far between, lot of the community improvements made in x.0 major releases end up being stale before the next x.0 major is pushed out.

Guilds are and have always been the social units - they really need to focus on enabling guild recruitment, being able to find groups, communities and give people reasons to put in the effort of finding birds of feather instead of just auto queuing and being toxic with randoms.

[Charge me Doctor]

Sounds like "you" problem to me, if you want social interaction you'll get it, classic simply gives you more forced social interaction in form of grouping up to do quests or do dungeons, but most people do that to get things done, instead of interacting with other players, early on in classic there was a lot of "chat dungeon runs" as i called them, where people were focused at chatting and sitting around, while i sit in front of a dungeon for an hour and wondering why the fuck i even bother.

On retail i have a evergrowing friendlist from M+ runs and various discords from half-pugged raids, this kind of social interaction is way better than, i don't know, doing quests in a group then pretending that it's some sort of social interaction.

[Charge me Doctor]

Day to day interactions in game don't promote a social environment anymore. World Quests are easy enough to do without looking at the screen, much less needing multiple players.

Like player requirement ever was a good way to promote social interaction

- - - Updated - - -

just think about what happens when ppl get a half or 1 day desserteur debuff when leaving raid before killed lets say 3 or 4 bosses ? ppl instantly stop grp hopping, so grps kill 1 boss, 1 wipe at boss2, mass leave, rinse and repeat. instead friendships will be formed

more likely people will quit the game to play something else or intentionally wipe group until they are kicked. The fuck are you smoking if you think that people who spill bile at each other for taking a 2k unavoidable damage that apparently lead to a wipe will all of the sudden start "forming friendship" because of some sort of a leaving penalty

[Atharaxie]

Vinzora as in "I only do World PVP in warmode, flying ruined WPVP, my shard is empty, I can't gank players doing quest at flypoints" ?

The answers are the same they were in the previous rant : Wow is mostly PVE, groups of friends agregate around Raid and Dungeon. Spontaneous burst on friendship during world quest or corpse camping are marginal.