In my journey through WoW and social games in general,
mostly I tried to play solo whenever possible, and only grudgingly joined a
group when there was something I wanted badly and couldn't be done by myself.
Sometimes such behavior led to a good deal of wasted time, but it was also
gratifying when successful. For example, killing the keepers in the Altar of
Zul. Good times...
Eventually I realized that killing undead by the
hundreds in Andorhal and hoping for a world drop wasn't really the right way to
play the game. Aiming at greater achievements, I mustered enough willpower to
leave my little shell and search for a raiding guild. And even though I never
really managed to reach the loftier heights of WoW endgame, it was still pretty
rewarding to meet people and learn to work with them.
By contrast, it's implicit in WoW's modern design
that players are supposed to play with their friends from outside the game, if
they want to play with friends at all. Other gameplay options have been
steadily transformed into an anonymous, streamlined experience - first
dungeons, then raiding, and now even group quests.
Like I pointed out before, Blizzard likes to say that
such things actually improve the
social aspect of the game by making it easier for more people to meet and play
together. I don't know if they actually believe it, or if it's just the CM
party line, but a bit of digging shows that's really not how it works.
At least part of what drove players to meet each
other was necessity - there were obviously many things in-game that couldn't be
accomplished without teaming up. Because there were transaction costs involved
in such teaming up, people tended to band together with guilds and friends
lists. And even those people who were not in your close-contact group wouldn't
always be complete strangers. You'd cross them leveling up, in the city, in
trade chat. This generated the elusive "feeling of community".
To nobody's very great surprise, except apparently
Blizzard's CMs, reducing the need for interaction didn't have much of a
positive effect on WoW's community. People can play without the hassle of
having to deal with other people, and so they don't. In that respect, the only recent
counter trends are real-ID friends lists and Challenge Modes, which actually
require teaming up. That and normal/heroic raiding are the only remaining
bastions of voluntary interaction amongst players. And again, as Blizzard likes
to point out, relatively few people do these things.
In my view, whatever socializing still exists is
nowhere near enough to make up for the lost server communities. Those were an
integral part of the "sense of belonging", which is now in shambles. The
game no longer feels like a self-contained parallel world, which was, for me at
least, a major reason for sticking around. Nowadays WoW is more like Diablo:
get in, find a random group, kill things, get loot, brag, get out. All very
efficient. And boring.
Once upon a time, the game won me over as a
"prosthesis" of sorts for my sorely deficient social life. Now it's
just another game. An old one at that.
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