How does Retail fix the social issue?

[MiiiMiii]

So I have spent the last week in TBC Classic and it's so evident that game is much much more social than Retail. People "have to" do dungeons while leveling for reputation, looking for groups in chat. People "have to" group up to do 4-5 group quests in every single leveling zone. People group up for certain quests naturally. People "have to" find a guild so they can start raiding Kara.

In the dungeons, people talk and try to explain pull tactics. Just at level 62, in Slave Pens, there is more chatting strategy on how to pull and where to stand, when to put down Tremor Totem, when to AoE, giving healer Mana Pots, asking for Nature Resistance aura from Hunter on final boss and in general asking for water, asking for mana breaks and helping on quest. All this socialization happened in 1 single run of Slave Pens.

The amount of whispers I did in Shadowlands between 50-60 was 0. Yes, 0. I also am pretty sure I joined a group 0 times. The first time I whispered anything was at 60 to join an early mythic.

I remember early at 60 in Shadowlands I did a Mythic +0 dungeon on my Shaman and we wiped on 2nd boss in Spires of Ascension (on my 4th dungeon or something) and the only "socializing" that happened was that the tank left and then everyone left.

What concrete changes would Retail have to do to make people socialize again?

The thing that makes a MMORPG attractive is the social aspect, no?

[glowpipe]

Stop playing alone (pugging) and find communities to play with and retail is as social as any other game

[Kyriani]

I'm not sure there's anything Blizzard can do to force socialization without alienating more players than not. I know that I balk any time I feel like I'm being "forced" or manipulated into doing something I don't want to do. If there's enough things like that happening then I stop playing.

I'm a social person but I don't want to spend an hour trying to get a group together for a dungeon. That's the primary reason why I don't devote more time to classic. If tbc classic had a dungeon finder, I'd be playing it heavily. The only reason my wow sub is even active right now is because I have a bit of time left on it from a previous 6 month sub that's about to end. Once that time runs out I don't plan to resub even after 9.1 launches. I plan to just wait it out until the bug fixes and tuning passes Blizzard is inevitably going to have to do are done, and maybe even longer still since the content itself doesn't seem very compelling for me, before I resub.

Attempts at forcing me to be social will instead drive me away from the game, and I have a feeling I'm not the only one.

[GreenJesus]

Try doing mythic plus. You will get this experience. People discuss which route to take, which mobs to cc/stun or kill first, when to invis pot, when pride will spawn, etc. If you only do heroic dungeon queue in retail then no shit people won't be talking.

I've noticed that its always super mega casuals that say there is no socialization in retail. "I did a +0 once".

[Elbob]

Thats weird cause ive run tbc dungeons without a word being said and run retail dungeons with thorough explanations on bosses and trash cc/mechanics before. So your evidence that retail has some social issue to fix is purely an anecdote. I also leveled all of classic with minimal whispers or communication in dungeons and i did most 5 mans on the leveling path.

[Queen of Hamsters]

Find a guild, join Discord channels for various types of content, even the Discord channels of certain streamers with grown-up fanbases are a great way to meet players.

The only one's keeping people from social interactions are people themselves.

[Couchpotato2013]

So I have spent the last week in TBC Classic and it's so evident that game is much much more social than Retail. People "have to" do dungeons while leveling for reputation, looking for groups in chat. People "have to" group up to do 4-5 group quests in every single leveling zone. People group up for certain quests naturally. People "have to" find a guild so they can start raiding Kara.

In the dungeons, people talk and try to explain pull tactics. Just at level 62, in Slave Pens, there is more chatting strategy on how to pull and where to stand, when to put down Tremor Totem, when to AoE, giving healer Mana Pots, asking for Nature Resistance aura from Hunter on final boss and in general asking for water, asking for mana breaks and helping on quest. All this socialization happened in 1 single run of Slave Pens.

The amount of whispers I did in Shadowlands between 50-60 was 0. Yes, 0. I also am pretty sure I joined a group 0 times. The first time I whispered anything was at 60 to join an early mythic.

I remember early at 60 in Shadowlands I did a Mythic +0 dungeon on my Shaman and we wiped on 2nd boss in Spires of Ascension (on my 4th dungeon or something) and the only "socializing" that happened was that the tank left and then everyone left.

What concrete changes would Retail have to do to make people socialize again?

The thing that makes a MMORPG attractive is the social aspect, no?

Take your experience in tbcc right now with a grain of salt, people these days are way more goal oriented than players back even 5 years ago.

Also it’s the honeymoon phase. Everything seems wonderful now, because it is a new thing and blizzard for the longest of time actually has been great at making the first forays into new things be riveting content (hence why protests against blizzard for w/e reason will never hold a candle against a new cinematic, expansion, or patch reveal/drop).

So like an example when classic launched, people were jovial, giving out free bags, apt to join random groups. But the moment they got into a stable guild and were close to cap or 60, they fell into the typical social habits of retail.

This isn’t me being a blackpilled debbie downer with self-fulling prophecy but just something I have seen happen with people since about MoP/WoD and then as well in classic for the first month’s launch.

[Kyriani]

I also leveled all of classic with minimal whispers or communication in dungeons and i did most 5 mans on the leveling path.

This was me as well. I joined a guild and was social with them, but for the most part my leveling was done solo and dungeon communication with my pug groups was minimal. I think that times have just changed. I know I have since 2004.

There's more social interaction in classic and tbc classic to be sure, but that's primarily out of necessity. I don't think that trying to push that kind of necessity into retail would work out well. It would certainly make me quit wow for good. I'm barely invested in wow as it is now since I don't raid anymore and my friends who did mythic+ kinda went off to do other things. I'm not interested in pugging mythic+ so I'm basically focused on FFXIV now.

[Diaphin]

Try doing mythic plus. You will get this experience. People discuss which route to take, which mobs to cc/stun or kill first, when to invis pot, when pride will spawn, etc. If you only do heroic dungeon queue in retail then no shit people won't be talking.

I've noticed that its always super mega casuals that say there is no socialization in retail. "I did a +0 once".

Yeah, I feel like the only people who complain are people who never do any content higher than heroic, which at this point is the new level 70 normal dungeon in terms of difficulty.

[Mysterymask]

Yeah definitely find a good guild and community right now classic practically is its own community (a huge group of like-minded folks) and you can likely find it in retail it just won't come to you like in the olden days

[Imurbandaid]

So I have spent the last week in TBC Classic and it's so evident that game is much much more social than Retail. People "have to" do dungeons while leveling for reputation, looking for groups in chat. People "have to" group up to do 4-5 group quests in every single leveling zone. People group up for certain quests naturally. People "have to" find a guild so they can start raiding Kara.

In the dungeons, people talk and try to explain pull tactics. Just at level 62, in Slave Pens, there is more chatting strategy on how to pull and where to stand, when to put down Tremor Totem, when to AoE, giving healer Mana Pots, asking for Nature Resistance aura from Hunter on final boss and in general asking for water, asking for mana breaks and helping on quest. All this socialization happened in 1 single run of Slave Pens.

The amount of whispers I did in Shadowlands between 50-60 was 0. Yes, 0. I also am pretty sure I joined a group 0 times. The first time I whispered anything was at 60 to join an early mythic.

I remember early at 60 in Shadowlands I did a Mythic +0 dungeon on my Shaman and we wiped on 2nd boss in Spires of Ascension (on my 4th dungeon or something) and the only "socializing" that happened was that the tank left and then everyone left.

What concrete changes would Retail have to do to make people socialize again?

The thing that makes a MMORPG attractive is the social aspect, no?

A lot of things would have to change for it to happen. For example this made me think about how I never group in retail, even for elite quests; but in TBC this past week I have grouped even for non-elite quests. The respawn rates for mobs have a big part to play in this, I don't want to fight for 12 kills of some mob that respawns every 5 mins with other players I so I will invite them. For kill quests where one mob is the target with a long respawn I will invite other players. So many things, even little changes that may slip your mind like mob spawn time and density, all come into play.

[Echo of Soul]

You can't really force retail players to start explaining strategies if their current expectation is that everybody should already know all the strategies, routes, optimal builds etc.

[Clozer]

So you decided to play Shadowlands full solo mode and say afterwards Retail has "social issues". Pretty strange. You could have done exactly the same in TBCC.

Shadowlands dungeon in the first few weeks were also the same. People discussed strats and everything as well. But rn after months and months everyone is expected to know what to do. Same will happen with TBCC.

[SunspotAnims]

On a larger level, the most constructive socialization will come from outside the game, not from within. Give players more ways to express themselves in-game and they'll share it outside of the game.

In the Classic times, social media was not nearly as pervasive as it is now and so people used MMOs like WoW as a form of social media. Now social media is more commonplace and WoW no longer needs to serve that function. Naturally, group content then and now has the capacity of bringing people together to achieve goals and that should be encouraged in as many ways as possible, but bringing a new "social experience" to the game requires working with the social media avenues that are already commonplace. WoW needs to give people more ways or reasons to form communities around the game—the elaborate secret hunts are a good example of this, but they aren't that approachable. Really, the game just needs to give more avenues for creativity and cooperation that steers away from the highly cynical progression-focused environment that currently dominates the game.

[Razion]

Socializing isn't always fun. People can be toxic. A lot of the gaming community consists of anti-social loners.

If people wanted to socialize in these same situations, they would. People don't socialize for a lot of reasons - it can be painful, maybe they just prefer to play instead, and in layman's terms in the old way it was a lot of faffing about and not really getting anything done and a lot of wasted time covering tactics that you may already know already. To people who already know what to do, this "socializing" is a waste of time -- fights should be intuitive, you shouldn't have to reexplain them EVERY time you go to do the content. That just shows the content is convoluted and messy and not approachable.

It forces cooperation, by necessity, but that doesn't make the socializing GOOD. GOOD socializing is actually forming friendships, sharing stories, joking around -- you know, being FRIENDLY. Friendly is what you encounter in the open world when someone comes around and decides to help you when they didn't need to. By showering a stranger with a buff. These are positive experiences, not this "explain some strat for the 100th time". Just because you're drowning in a sea of no socializing, I understand that ANY socializing at that point can seem magical, but in reality there were reasons why the community moved away from all this - it wasn't "optimal," it wasn't "efficient". Players of WoW care more about solving the game and beating it than they do being entertained by other people. If people in WoW were looking for that, they'd be playing VR Chat or something.

[Garymorilix]

Oh look, X Classic expansion has like literally all the people in one zone doing things so they are forced to interact with each other within 1 week of release.
Therefore, X Classic expansion is infinitely more social, period.

Yea, I'm sure. What did Classic look like before TBC was released, eh? Either ghost town or boost town.

Stop confusing casuals being less than mediocre at the game with socalizing.
I can guarantee you that a semi-competent pug group can do Karazhan (or insert random raid) any time, any day with zero talking.
Like literally every Classic raid, mind you.

Nobody cares.
Every single thing you could ever bring up as an argument about how "social" Classic WoW is has been debunked during Classic.
And debunked hard.

Stop this bullshit. Get with the times.

[tru]

So I have spent the last week in TBC Classic and it's so evident that game is much much more social than Retail. People "have to" do dungeons while leveling for reputation, looking for groups in chat. People "have to" group up to do 4-5 group quests in every single leveling zone. People group up for certain quests naturally. People "have to" find a guild so they can start raiding Kara.

In the dungeons, people talk and try to explain pull tactics. Just at level 62, in Slave Pens, there is more chatting strategy on how to pull and where to stand, when to put down Tremor Totem, when to AoE, giving healer Mana Pots, asking for Nature Resistance aura from Hunter on final boss and in general asking for water, asking for mana breaks and helping on quest. All this socialization happened in 1 single run of Slave Pens.

The amount of whispers I did in Shadowlands between 50-60 was 0. Yes, 0. I also am pretty sure I joined a group 0 times. The first time I whispered anything was at 60 to join an early mythic.

I remember early at 60 in Shadowlands I did a Mythic +0 dungeon on my Shaman and we wiped on 2nd boss in Spires of Ascension (on my 4th dungeon or something) and the only "socializing" that happened was that the tank left and then everyone left.

What concrete changes would Retail have to do to make people socialize again?

The thing that makes a MMORPG attractive is the socia0l aspect, no?

It started going downhill with the introduction of the green eye. You had no need to use chat if you didn't want to. Dungeons, Raids, Pvp, and Questing/Custom areas for group.

Click a button to get to see most of what content you want.

[LDancer]

IMO the only way I could see blizzard fixing the lack or toxicity of the social state of current content would be to remove X-realm grouping… this is when I noticed the social aspect of the game die.

Once upon a time people would protect their standing and reputation on a server to get into groups and raids , by being courteous, helpful, and strive to be good at their toon.

Sure trolls and scrubs would appear from time to time but would be shunned by their servers and ostracised, eventually being blacklisted from joining or pugging into any group.

But once accountability for your behaviour and attitude was removed by just joining another random cross server group, the toxic trolls and terrible carry-me players were able to flourish and just hide behind the the fact they’d just spread their trash to another random group after random group.

[kaminaris]

IMO the only way I could see blizzard fixing the lack or toxicity of the social state of current content would be to remove X-realm grouping… this is when I noticed the social aspect of the game die.

Once upon a time people would protect their standing and reputation on a server to get into groups and raids , by being courteous, helpful, and strive to be good at their toon.

Sure trolls and scrubs would appear from time to time but would be shunned by their servers and ostracised, eventually being blacklisted from joining or pugging into any group.

But once accountability for your behaviour and attitude was removed by just joining another random cross server group, the toxic trolls and terrible carry-me players were able to flourish and just hide behind the the fact they’d just spread their trash to another random group after random group.

Or you will get "shunned and ostracised" just because someone didnt like your nick so he told buddies to "spread the word". People sometimes really have no clue and absolutely no insight whatsoever.

Reality is, social aspects were never the issue on retail, never. If you chose to not socialize you could do so, but in the end it provided lots of opportunities like finding guilds and now communities.


Imagine if bus driver suddenly stood up and told passengers they have to start socializing and talking with each other or he won't be driving. This is what you want.

[MoanaLisa]

Guilds and communities—things that already exist—encourage socializing. That's not working. I don't think there's much else that can be done. Forced socialization is not what's needed and will likely make things worse.

TBC Classic will be social for a while. Check back in eight weeks and tell me how it's doing. Classic was very social at the start but it didn't take all that long for it to revert to something much like retail.

People have to want to be social. If they're not then there's very little that can be done to make that happen.