This game used to be social and about working together. They should have pulled the plug years ago.
That’s the part I always hated. It was hostile towards people who liked the lore but didn’t want to group up with some guy named LaserButt4000 who didn’t want to go to the same dungeon as you, but was happy to get your rare loot in a bad roll of the dice.
Private servers with scaling for dungeon soloing were a godsend. WoW is actually awesome as a single player game. It’s unfortunate the devs never realized that.
I disagree. The social aspect was amazing and actually helped me to be more social irl as well. WoW was never meant as a solo game. Sure, sometimes people stole loot and were annoying as fuck, but that’s part of it, just like irl.
This content is the lowest common denominator. It is the easiest baby mode raid. You do not get end game gear (except for weird kinda quest rewards you get for beating the last boss on any difficulty). This is literally only there so someone who doesn’t interact with people or cannot physically do the raid for disability or skill can expirance it and see the cutscenes. This is inclusion not erosion.
There is still a large community around the harder contents and if you want real gear you have to still group.
I almost always played solo because I liked exploring and crafting and doing things at my pace. Whenever I had a group, I felt like I was pressured to move move move and finish as much as possible without absorbing the environments or reading the matching story lines.
I was able to finish a few of the low level instances, but was rarely able to find a group to run with and thus usually just skipped over any quests that required them. Sure, picking up some legendary gear would be nice, but I would have just loved the option to stroll through these quests on my own.
It’s still pretty social, the article title is extremely misleading. They can’t do raids solo, they can only do the final fight, with an AI controlled group, for the purpose of non-raiders seeing the end of the story line. There are no loot rewards for it either, it’s just story.
This is great for me. While I enjoyed raiding with a guild back in Wrath all those folks moved on and I find it harder to make those connections as I get older. Plus the toxicity which has always lurked in dungeon finder and LFR. This lets me play the game solo.
Somebody tell FFXIV, I’d go back in a heartbeat.
You can actually. FF14 let’s you run “trusts” which are just dungeons where your party is a bunch of NPC bots drawn from the story’s roster.
The only thing you can’t do it for iirc is the end game raids, but those are generally not connected to the main story very directly.
I don’t think Blizzard understands how to make a social game, and I’m beginning to realize they never did. The game used to be more social, but it seems like that was by accident instead of by design.
Like, you used to have to use the chat channels to find a group for a dungeon run. That forced you to chat. When they added dungeon finder, you didn’t need to chat anymore, making it less social. When they made cross-realm things happen, zones felt less lonely which was good for being social, but then it meant that you no longer ran into all the same names over and over, so you stopped knowing people. That was really bad for social things because it meant that people who behaved badly didn’t get a bad reputation and people who behaved well didn’t get a good reputation.
This is a great feature given the current state of the game. But, I wonder if it will have the unintended side effect of making the community even more toxic.
That reminds me, I haven’t experienced a MMO that was successful at fostering a community since asheron’s call for the reason you describe.
The game didn’t have any of the “quality of life” features you can find in modern games, no fast travel, no markets, no difficulty indicator, if you wanted to travel to another region, it was a quest in itself or you’d have to beg top levels players to escort you there or open a portal for you, and since you could only hold a single portal to a location if you were a high enough level mage (I think) it wasn’t that easy to find.
Death was punishing, you’d lose most of your gear and you’d have people begging for help to retrieve it on every village square and because that actually mattered, it’s something you could do out of good will or for a fee.
The only way to get good gear was to get it from player who could craft, and since crafting was bitch to level up, guilds were the only one who could afford it.
Oh and that’s not really a part of the game, but internet was young and games didn’t yet have hords of people dissecting game and dumping every possible details on wikis or at least not as fast. So actually discussing quest, place and strategy with people mattered.
PVP was rough, no level limit, barely any zoning, a level 60 could camp your noob spawn and grief you forever, until you asked your guild for help and it turned into a week long manhunt to punish the griefer.
To be honest I don’t remember if the game has quests, a few I guess, mostly forgettable, most of the good memory I have from the game were from player induced adventures.
The game did eventually end up having all the tools you’d expect a community to build including XP allocation optimiser for cookie cutter built and a large database, which fucked it up, people would race their glass canon to level 60, kill a couple of the highest level monsters and get bored.
I wonder how you could build a game like that nowadays without the community ruining it with a wiki.
The sad thing is, I think those days are 100% over. With data mining, wikis, etc. I think there will never be a game that’s played mostly in-game with in-game tools, with people chatting in-game about how to do overcome various challenges the game throws at you. The world has just moved on. I never played something as hardcore as Ashron’s Call in the early days, but I do miss the early days of WoW when so much more of the fun was player-driven, and there was so much more interaction with other players.
I think that’s one reason why D&D is seeing an increase in popularity. It’s a game where you can optimize things to some extent, but because it’s human-driven, a DM can mitigate that somewhat. It’s also inherently social, and it’s impossible to data-mine, and difficult to min-max because each campaign is different and many DMs have slight variations on the set rules.
Well, the opposite might be possible as well. An AI and genetic algorithms could keep a world ever evolving making information obsolete over time and since we know data mining will happen, I’d look at making it a game mechanic somehow.
This could be the End of the World
of Warcraft.
