To whom who agreed that accessibility was healthy for WoW

[Beefhammer]

unless you count gear, challenge, achievments, mounts and other collectibles as content, then no...

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if you want to do most difficult content, you have to socialise... same as in vanila...
or you had to socialise to do simple quests? not really... or leveling dungeos? well instead of button in UI you replied "inv" to someone spaming LFM in city, how the hell is that "more social" is beyond my understanding...
what game mechanic in vanila "promoted" socialisation more than today? please humor me, bcs i play since vanila and can honestly say it was not more social

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are you SERIOUSLY suggesting people in vanila were ALWAYS chi-chating in dungeons? bcs if you do... you are wrong i play since vanila and it literaly depends on group, some people want to chat some dont, it have zero to do with game, and all to do with people

No, I'm saying the socializing that people have romanticized about the old days is wrong. I've always held that point. People remember that one run where everyone talked and they had a great time over a few hours running BRD to completion plus the Ony attunement and act like that happened all the time. My point is that I pugged non LFD/LFG/LFR content and never had to say one word to anyone, despite what the person I quoted believes, I apologize if that was you.

Forcing people to socialize is never going to work and those systems/activities will suffer as a result. People will socialize if they want to. Period.

[Nerovar]

current wow doesnt FORCE socialisation as it used to in vanila

i play since vanila and can honestly say it was not more social

Which one is it?

[Advent]

I don't see how. I gave actual points and explained the reasoning behind them, while the reasoning you give to any reply boils down to "no, you're wrong because it's social to me".

How social the game is for any specific person, and how the game mechanics and features incentivize being social (and notice that incentivizing and allowing are not the same thing), are two entirely different things.

And by the way, I also was part of the Open Raid community and met many wonderful people through it, some I still play with to this day including other games. So tell me, what happened to the Open Raid community throughout WoD after the new LFG tool came out?

I want to say that oqueue put a huge dent in the website. Having an in-game tool was much less of a hassle, which is what people seem to really encourage. After Blizzard made it part of the basic UI, people didn't have much use for a website to connect with people, not to mention whatever effect discord had when that came out.

[Nobleshield]

I want to say that oqueue put a huge dent in the website. Having an in-game tool was much less of a hassle, which is what people seem to really encourage. After Blizzard made it part of the basic UI, people didn't have much use for a website to connect with people, not to mention whatever effect discord had when that came out.

I just want to say this was a shame, since I liked that OpenRaid let you schedule things in advance/sign up in advance. That was the best part in that you didn't have to hope that people were around when you wanted to do something but you could set up that okay I have Saturday evening free and I want to do XYZ raid, let me find a raid going on at that time.

[Aeula]

For all WoW's major, glaring issues I would say that accessibility is definitely not one of them.

For me WoW's biggest issues are it's story/worldbuilding. It shows a lack of care for the setting that makes the game disheartening to play to begin with.

But in terms of gameplay what actually burnt me out to the point of playing a game I'd previously written off (Final Fantasy XIV) is a combination how overly-reliant the game is on RNG with regards to EVERYTHING, the obscene amount of daily/weekly checklist content and Mythic+ and 5 masking making anything below Mythic raiding worthless.

BfA has been a right bastard for all of it. Accessibility features like LFD and LFR were made obsolete too over the years.

[Elias01]

No, I'm saying the socializing that people have romanticized about the old days is wrong. I've always held that point. People remember that one run where everyone talked and they had a great time over a few hours running BRD to completion plus the Ony attunement and act like that happened all the time. My point is that I pugged non LFD/LFG/LFR content and never had to say one word to anyone, despite what the person I quoted believes, I apologize if that was you.

Forcing people to socialize is never going to work and those systems/activities will suffer as a result. People will socialize if they want to. Period.

It clearly will work as classic is prove of that.

[Beefhammer]

It clearly will work as classic is prove of that.

What will work? I did pretty much all of Vanilla without doing much socializing outside of my Guild From AQ onward. I solo'd my way to 60, responded to groups looking for healers, didn't say much if anything other than hi, like today. Nothing is really different other than server transfers and matchmaking. No one is forced to socialize in Classic.

[Kolvarg]

I want to say that oqueue put a huge dent in the website. Having an in-game tool was much less of a hassle, which is what people seem to really encourage. After Blizzard made it part of the basic UI, people didn't have much use for a website to connect with people, not to mention whatever effect discord had when that came out.

Yeap, that was my point.

Accessibility, and overall easier and quicker access to other players makes everyone more replaceable and therefore the game less social.

[Lolites]

Which one is it?

ehm... both? if you let your brain join in the debate you might find out its not mutualy exclusive?
vanila forced socialisation on you a bit but now IF YOU WANT you can be even more social..
can you be LESS social? eh, sure, if you are fine without guild and your absolute peak of endgame being HC dungeons and LFR...
but its still about people, not about the game, just bcs you can choose if you want to be social or not its not bad, or games fault, its giving people choice what they want...

[mysticx]

Yeap, that was my point.

Accessibility, and overall easier and quicker access to other players makes everyone more replaceable and therefore the game less social.

Random people outside one’s guild were *always* replaceable to the point of being little more than NPCs anyway, it was just a huge pain in the behind to replace them (Kick them out, hearth back to the city to find a replacement, travel back, all the time praying the trash doesn’t respawn in the mean time), so you were forced to endure more of their shit, so social...

People hardly ever talked back then either, *maybe* during a “Damn, the healer left, try to find another one”-pause, but not when the run was actually progressing.

[Drusin]

That's nice .....

You can delude yourself into believing the game would be more social but it wouldn't. People would only talk as much as they needed to in order to get what they wanted and that's it. No one wants to talk, they want to get their shit done and move on.

[Advent]

Random people outside one’s guild were *always* replaceable to the point of being little more than NPCs anyway, it was just a huge pain in the behind to replace them, so you were forced to endure more of their shit, so social...

Basically, yeah.

It's a lot like being locked in a metal box with a thousand other people. Some of you don't speak the same language, others are lazy and some are outright liabilities. But instead of having all the tools you need on your own to escape, you need to rely on all of them. I suspect that in real life, most of those people would just turn on each other and get nowhere, which is basically what my gameplay experience was like before LFG/LFR came about. With its introduction I still needed them, but I didn't have to concern myself with observing any niceties or dealing with uncooperative and rude people because the system would let me simply leave and find another group very quickly instead. In the old system we'd have to either be content with dying of starvation in many cases, or start cutting throats to get what you need in order to escape the metal box.

[Eldar45]

No.

The major problem is that accessibility was propped up to the expense of other aspects of the game. In fact he directly mentions this in the video you linked.

Accessibility isn't the problem, keeping the different aspects of the game balanced is the problem. And it is an impossibility to make everything perfect. Legion was a pretty good attempt, then BFA broke a lot of that. I think the closest they ever got was in WoTLK.

[Drusin]

I mean, I don't really understand how anyone would argue that current WoW is as much of a social game as Classic WoW is. No one who has played both versions of the game can make this claim in good faith.

I can. There is no less talking in retail than there is in classic if you do an honest to goodness comparison i.e don't compare your dead guild/realm on retail to populated guild/realm on classic.

[Solero]

That proves absolutely nothing LOL.

To quote Garrosh in WoD "TIMES CHANGE". Our entire society and how we consume media has changed in the span of 16 years, who would've thunk it?

The game is still incredibly social and it's sort of proving his point. People just aren't social in the same ways they were 16 years ago. You throw in a blast to the past like classic WoW did and people aren't going to approach it the same because its 2020, not 2004. MMOs were relatively new at the time, youtube wasn't a thing really and this was a lot of peoples first step into multiplayer games in general. Fast forward to present day in classic and the same mannerisms that have been adopted over the last 16 years still apply, it's not like you can strip everything back making everybody behave like they did that many years ago.

The worst thing is people will use the argument that WoW was growing during the first few expansions so obviously these systems in place during 2004 were the best practice, and they ruined the game by changing things. Which is absolutely retarded logic. They might have made missteps along the way (whether it be big or small), but I'm sure they had data that reflected what general direction the game needed to be headed. I don't even want to imagine what the game would've looked like if they kept most classic systems in tact. There's a reason why most expansions (at least the early ones) were such a huge departure from the previous ones.

Socializing is still as present as ever, it's just not really required if you choose not too. If you want to poke around leveling characters and do the lowest form of raiding (not an insult, merely pointing towards the easier raiding difficulties) you don't really need to talk to anybody. This was true of classic and most of TBC as well, as the barrier to entry for raiding was quite high.

At the end of the day the game is old and the need to socialize doesn't necessarily need to be done in game. Guild/clan websites don't even need to exist as of late because almost everything can be done on discord. As such you have plenty of social media platforms or programs to find communities if you choose, meaning that you don't necessarily have to jump into general chat or find people randomly in game.

Retail wow = no socialize = getting fully epic solo = bad game

[Omedon]

"Play with players from across the world" said today as a sales pitch is like saying "this car has power windows!"

It's not a novelty or a selling point any more. It's part of every day life, it's the internet and it's part of modern society. Hell if we didn't have it, COVID would have been a near extinction level event! You're never going to get that novelty back, and anything building for the future will not waste time trying to recapture it, it will just take what we have and build on it. There are things classic can recapture, but the wonder of "holy crap that's another person behind that character" isn't one of them. It's power windows.

Ghostcrawler is in the right on this debate, 1000%.

[Nerovar]

ehm... both? if you let your brain join in the debate you might find out its not mutualy exclusive?
vanila forced socialisation on you a bit but now IF YOU WANT you can be even more social..
can you be LESS social? eh, sure, if you are fine without guild and your absolute peak of endgame being HC dungeons and LFR...
but its still about people, not about the game, just bcs you can choose if you want to be social or not its not bad, or games fault, its giving people choice what they want...

This is completely insane. Your point is inherently contradictory. If two games are roughly the same but one ""forces"" you to interact with other players whereas the other one doesn't, the former is always going to be the more social game.

I played classic for one month and had more social interactions, more people added to my friends list, more notable player encounters than in 3 years of playing retail.

[Elias01]

Random people outside one’s guild were *always* replaceable to the point of being little more than NPCs anyway, it was just a huge pain in the behind to replace them (Kick them out, hearth back to the city to find a replacement, travel back, all the time praying the trash doesn’t respawn in the mean time), so you were forced to endure more of their shit, so social...

People hardly ever talked back then either, *maybe* during a “Damn, the healer left, try to find another one”-pause, but not when the run was actually progressing.

Than you clearly never played classic.

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What will work? I did pretty much all of Vanilla without doing much socializing outside of my Guild From AQ onward. I solo'd my way to 60, responded to groups looking for healers, didn't say much if anything other than hi, like today. Nothing is really different other than server transfers and matchmaking. No one is forced to socialize in Classic.

So you did interact with players. I doubth you never asked for consumables, or cc, mana break, where is dungeon entrance, when you will be there, if someone need item, etc.. And if you didnt well you simply lie at this point.

[Beefhammer]

Than you clearly never played classic.

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So you did interact with players. I doubth you never asked for consumables, or cc, mana break, where is dungeon entrance, when you will be there, if someone need item, etc.. And if you didnt well you simply lie at this point.

I'm sorry that shit happens today and is ot what is meant by socializing from this who want to claim people were more social back then. People act as if family gatherings were happening each dungeon run. People act as if Vanilla was EQ where you needed help levelling by grouping up often. People act as if the moment LFD happened everyone stopped talking altogether and WoW became a solo game.

When none of that is true. Most dungeon runs had minimal talking, typically hellos, possibly a CC request, and sometimes an I'm on this quest and need this boss/item mention. That still happens, not really the CC anymore.

But what you are trying to pin on me happens today still. My whole point is the game was never really that social.

[Elias01]

I'm sorry that shit happens today and is ot what is meant by socializing from this who want to claim people were more social back then. People act as if family gatherings were happening each dungeon run. People act as if Vanilla was EQ where you needed help levelling by grouping up often. People act as if the moment LFD happened everyone stopped talking altogether and WoW became a solo game.

When none of that is true. Most dungeon runs had minimal talking, typically hellos, possibly a CC request, and sometimes an I'm on this quest and need this boss/item mention. That still happens, not really the CC anymore.

But what you are trying to pin on me happens today still. My whole point is the game was never really that social.

No it doesnt happend today. You dont have to do any of that stuff in lfr, lfg and world content.

Not its you who act lile socializing = having fun party with friends thats not what people want back. They just want back feel that they play with real players and not just bots tp fill your party.