Is this a singleplayer game?

[Wuusah]

WoW is the perfect example that shows that the "community" and "communication" in MMOs happens because players have to do it, not because they want to do it. In early WoW it was pretty much the only way to progress through the game. Without communication you couldn't do anything, so people communicated. In retail WoW you still have that to some extent in higher difficulty endgame content. For everything else you don't have to talk to anyone ever. You could hide your chat window and still get to max level, see all dungeons and the raid.

And the times of people just wandering around and talking to each other are long gone. For the vast majority of players MMOs aren't a novelty anymore.

[Al Gorefiend]

I know it's the playerbase and it's making me sad. It's just not how it used to be. I remember playing on a private server a year before classic launched and it was totally different. The chat was full people invited you causually into a group to do quests and later you would add them to your friendslist. There was always someone to play with.
I haven't bought Shadowlands yet but this leaves a sour taste in my mounth and I don't feel it will get any better.

Just like real life if you go grocery shopping and walk through the store odds are the only people who are going to talk to you are the ones doing their job.
Unless you have some serious main character energy and every aisle someone is asking you for your opinion on bread.
People are indifferent to strangers and it extends to WoW, sorry.

[Super Kami Dende]

I'm currently leveling a new character after I quit mid Legion and just reached level 40 the other day. In these 40 levels I had zero interactions with other players and saw maybe one other player in the zone I was in. The world chat is dead and all you see in trade chat is people spaming their boost adverts. This can hardly be called an MMO anymore. Now you could say: "Just play Classic then". And I tried that and it's even worse. Good luck finding people that are willing to do quests or run a dungeon normally. What has happend that the game became so asocial?

The Community realised dealing with other people was inconvenient so kept asking Blizzard to add more and more grouping options.

TBF you are leveling as well, in a game where most People that have played for a decent amount of time are already at max level. So not seeing People isn't an odd thing. Pretty much like any point past Vanilla, when people move on to new expansions the older content becomes useless.

Get a Guild. You won't find many people in the wild looking to talk. I basically ignore 99% of People these days because its not worth my effort to care.

[Wildpantz]

Flying is the main problem as soon as Pathfinder is available va zones die

[Zmagoslav]

Who would have guessed;
Forcing asocial people to be social for rewards only works till they have limited information.
Once everything is clear and datamined people will go back to being asocial.

[klogaroth]

The game is 16 years old. Of course people are at the end game. If levelling required grouping, it'd be a pain to get done at this stage. Really at any stage after the initial levelling period.

Many players have levelled a lot of characters at this point. Anyone levelling is likely not there to smell the roses. They don't want to chat. They want to get the character to max level quickly, so they can play with the people they already know.

[Moose184]

Wow is no longer about the journey to max level. Max level endgame is the goal. Once you are max level there will be more interactions with people. You could also try to find some guilds or community's to join.

[erifwodahs]

When I put my nostalgia glasses on, I do miss the old days were you randomly walked upon someone and started chatting. Or grouping up for quests while getting to know the people behind the characters. But we gotta remember when wow came out 16+ years ago, it was a very different time. We didnt have Facebook, instagram and all these other social media platforms.

Yeah, can't imagine myself having those silly conversations now on WoW. For that I use discord where I sit with my buddies all the time. All m+ are over with Hi, brief key points of the dungeon and "gg, see you around" most of the time. Some jokes here and there but it's same way as my business relationship, small chitchat before we get on with what we are doing. I don't have enough "socialness" to catch up with all my friends, not even talking about some random players in my dungeon. If someone is really cool I add them and that's about it.

[crusadernero]

Yeah, can't imagine myself having those silly conversations now on WoW. For that I use discord where I sit with my buddies all the time. All m+ are over with Hi, brief key points of the dungeon and "gg, see you around" most of the time. Some jokes here and there but it's same way as my business relationship, small chitchat before we get on with what we are doing. I don't have enough "socialness" to catch up with all my friends, not even talking about some random players in my dungeon. If someone is really cool I add them and that's about it.

and the chat experience havent really gone away from wow. Its just in a different shape. Your group/guild might be dead silent most of the time, but each of those might very well be active talking in other places.

[Akibaboy]

I'm currently leveling a new character after I quit mid Legion and just reached level 40 the other day. In these 40 levels I had zero interactions with other players and saw maybe one other player in the zone I was in. The world chat is dead and all you see in trade chat is people spaming their boost adverts. This can hardly be called an MMO anymore. Now you could say: "Just play Classic then". And I tried that and it's even worse. Good luck finding people that are willing to do quests or run a dungeon normally. What has happend that the game became so asocial?

I play with a dedicated guild and a few acquired online friends. That gives me all the group content vibes I enjoy from the game. I don't get anything I enjoy from suffering through interactions with randos in the group finder.

Back in Classic through sometime in Cata, the game had a much stronger focus on group play for me because it was a time where everyone I knew was playing WoW. I'd go to my college classes in the morning, and then around noon 4-5 of us would gather in person in the lounge to play WoW for 3 or so hours. My friends back home played. A couple coworkers at my job played. It was easy to find people you knew in real life that played the game.

Today, absolutely zero of those people play the game. 100% of the people I play with I don't know in real life. So it turns out that those spaces where there was typically someone I knew who was interested in just chilling in person and doing things like leveling, leveling dungeons, random BGs... those aren't the interests of my guild friends. Gone are the days of sitting down with my roommate and he sees I'm on my 38 Priest, and responds "Oh, I've got a Rogue that level, lets go do Scarlet Monastery." Guild friends are usually running some high key, going for achievements, or some other end-game only activity that has a tangible reward, which is fine but results in the overwhelming focus of the game being on the end-game skinner box.

That same mentality was carried into Classic - everything is a min/max congregation of end game, with entire economies revolving around boosting people so they don't have to play the game. It was nice for about 3 weeks, where there were legit people running every dungeon, looking to finish every quest, and generally just play the game.

There's a non-insignificant portion of the playerbase on this forum who think that dungeons should have NPCs instead of players so they can continue living out their single player MMORPG fantasy.

In Classic's case, the majority of the players deem 80% of the content insignificant and you cannot find a human being to assist you in doing it if you want to play the game. In live, I'd love to hop into a Blood Furnace run when I get the quest for it but there's a) no one looking for it locally, and b) the dungeon finder is a 45 minute wait. I'd be happy to do it in a group of players, but ultimately when it comes to enjoying the game I'd value doing something first, and doing it with people second. That's why the NPC-dungeon feature of XIV works so well... it takes longer and is not the actual efficient way of doing it, but you don't need to wait an hour if you're playing DPS and you can actually learn what's going on instead of the gogogogoggogogo people pulling everything.

[Kokolums]

"Times change" - Garrosh Hellscream

In 2004 people were amazed by the fact that you were playing with millions of people around the world in this fantasy world (yes there were mmorpgs before WoW but WoW was the first to hit mainstream) so just chilling and socializing with players was part of the fun. Nowadays we're all used to online games and the charm of playing with actual people has worn out. This is why classic was not that much different from retail.

They changed classic is a huge way with sharding. If too many people group up and are doing the same content, they force split everyone up onto different shards. Sharding acts as a damper on any future potential social activity. You know going in not to EVER create a new social activity because, if it got popular, sharding would ruin it. The very threat of sharding enforces solo play.

[Afrospinach]

My "personal opinion" is how the game is played today.
I pug more than enough to know.

I can guarantee you are one of the '10 y old sticker' people who don't even play the game.
Your contribution to anything here is null.

So basically what you are saying is you have absolutely nothing other than the fact that you think your own experience is somehow very important and significant?

[oldgeezer]

I'll add that it's important to distinguish between solo play, and asocial play. It's perfectly possible to play the game solo but in a social manner. How? I belong to a small RP guild that's been in operation since vanilla. We don't run current group content (only very rarely normal dungeons for quest purposes) as there are rarely more than 2 or 3 people online.

But we chat a lot in GC as we go about our business in the world. Occasionally we'll meet up for an RP event, or coordinate with other people for the same. But we don't raid, we don't pvp and we certainly don't do mythic content.

[Viikkis]

They changed classic is a huge way with sharding. If too many people group up and are doing the same content, they force split everyone up onto different shards. Sharding acts as a damper on any future potential social activity. You know going in not to EVER create a new social activity because, if it got popular, sharding would ruin it. The very threat of sharding enforces solo play.

I don't think layering made that big of a difference because in the end people were still playing on the same realm and after a while layering was removed. Layering was worse on most populated realms to be fair yes, but even they got it removed later.

The world was full of players leveling during launch months but after the dust settled and the masses were max lvl and only alts and new players were leveling things turned for the worse and suddenly it got really hard to find groups for dungeons and quests because of the dungeon boost meta.

Peoples mentality has changed and there is only so much the game can do to force socializing. I still think that classic community is a bit nicer than retail due to lack of crossrealm features.

[Zenfoldor]

I quit, but up until then I played mostly single player this xpak.

- - - Updated - - -

Seems like the only ones who think the game lost its social side are the ones who don't even bother to look for it.

I wish there was a better pathway to make in game friends, in the game, instead of having to use Discord which inevitably leads to the necessity of a mic to play.

A question, should WoW require a mic to play multiplayer?

[MoanaLisa]

A question, should WoW require a mic to play multiplayer?

Social requirements from the community are what they are. You could ask other questions: Why require gear levels that guarantee an easy run in pick-up groups. There are perfectly good answers to that but they arise out of the community. This entire thread is a veritable encyclopedia of stuff that shows why a lot of people would rather not bother with others. For good and bad reasons.

[Elodeon]

wtf are you talking about?

I'm talking about casual comments from people who watch the news and believe what they are shown is fact. People who adopt all of the fears that the news wants you to have, all of the prejudice that the news wants you to have, and who pass all the judgment that the news wants you to pass. Those kinds of people.

[Kokolums]

most people want to be social but blizzard ripped that out of the game. thats why subs fell from 14 million to 3 million.

look how DIFFERENT WoW classic is to vanilla. in WoW classic, if too many people are in one place, they game is automated to separate everyone via sharding. that absolutely murders classic, i wont touch it. i want a wow classic with no changes. sharding is everything against the notion of vanilla. you cant put sharding in the game and then say people want to play solo. they are FORCING solo play.

[Tyrannica]

could be a better singleplayer game then, i rather only need people for trade and pvp and doing raids/mythic+, wouldn't mind doing all pve content solo, though, make raids soloque and mythic+ with some npc characters in group to assist my char.

[fathom81]

I'm currently leveling a new character after I quit mid Legion and just reached level 40 the other day. In these 40 levels I had zero interactions with other players and saw maybe one other player in the zone I was in. The world chat is dead and all you see in trade chat is people spaming their boost adverts. This can hardly be called an MMO anymore. Now you could say: "Just play Classic then". And I tried that and it's even worse. Good luck finding people that are willing to do quests or run a dungeon normally. What has happend that the game became so asocial?

Join a guild
Leveling to max level helps, or at least lvl 50, that's where the majority of player base will be