#1 - March 16, 2016, 9:03 a.m.
Traveling and Leveling
Leveling was an absolute grind. If you could level from 1 to 60 in a week, two weeks even, you played way too much. Quests weren't centralized, you had to walk ever where to pick up flight paths (which there were few of), graveyards were usually a long walk back (also very few, usually 1 per faction/zone depending on size), and you didn't even get your first mount until level 40 which costed 110g at revered with that faction. Absolute hell, right? Going back to something like this now would be a complete disaster.
There was one positive thing that came out of this though: /1: General Channel. Walks were often long and boring and leveling was tedious, so you needed to talk with other people in the zone and/or guild to stay sane. Because quests were rather difficult, grouping up was common. Anyone remember Barrens chat? Of course you do. Even if you weren't around then, surely you've heard the stories. You could be grinding out quests in Barrens for days: level 10-25 without stepping foot in another zone if you so chose. So for better or worse, you got to know people. Your ignore list might have made some new friends, but that was okay because you probably did to.
Because of all the expansions, obviously Blizzard needed to do some overhauls and make leveling faster. Players were no longer in zones that long, if at all (thanks LFG).
Dungeons and Questing
With the addition of LFG in WotLK, people no longer had to group with people on their server or make their way to the dungeon. This was seen as a huge quality of life improvement, yet this was also our first real taste of the toxic hive mind that has taken over the game. There is one truth I've learned in mmorpgs and that is this: give someone the opportunity to be a douche bag, they more often than not will be a douche bag. These people aren't on my server! /need, /pull without tank, /be general tard. Blizzard did a lot of prevent this and the system is working as intended now (mostly), but it doesn't change the fact that you aren't making many friends along the way.
I assume the reasoning was Blizzard wanted to create a better quality of life while uniting the entire WoW community instead of server cliques cropping up everywhere. I'm probably wrong, but regardless the major issue with this is interactions went from genuine to artificial. Before, I was never forced to group with anyone. I advertised LFG. I was PSTed. I invited them to the group or didn't depending on our needs. The simple fact that I could do this made my interactions with other players more meaningful. I got to know people along the way to the dungeon and would be more friendly with them in the future, regardless of whether they made mistakes or not. We're all humans behind the keyboard, but it's easy to forget that with LFG.
Group questing was the same way. When the need to find players to quest with throughout most of the game was vanquished with Cataclysm, players were less inclined to meet people and interact in guild chat. No friends were made, therefore no reason to really stay subscribed to the game or create your own fun.
Cross Realm Zones
I hate to dig up the dead horse and beat it again, but it's hard to make a thread about community without mentioning this. Instead of being friendly with realm transfers and shutting down dying servers, we're now thrown in with players from different realms whom we'll probably never see again. More often than not, we lose track of who's from a different server and who's on our server, Not to mention, on PvP servers it's very easy to get away with being a complete douche bag. Graveyards are so close together now, the opposite faction will have no problem camping the area and knocking you down every time you try to resurrect.
Before CRZ, there were consequences for doing generally crappy things to other players whether that was camping or ninjaing gear. More often than not, ninjas wouldn't get banned because of how loot rules were set up and other controversies, but the community could deal with this by exiling that player. Have fun buying a server transfer and name change! Even then, it was pretty easy to track that player (favorite their armory page and report when he does something). This is still feasible, but loot is so easy to obtain no one really cares.
Conclusion
Overall, our quality of life has drastically increased and I'm not suggesting we go back to the old days. All I'm point out is the cost for quality of life. Most of these changes has unintentionally destroyed the community. Most realm forums are ghost towns compared to what they once were. Even on a low pop servers you could find 100s of new posts each day regarding events in game. After these changes to the game, Blizzard never implemented anything new to encourage communities to grow and flourish.
This is the reason Legion is still in trouble. It doesn't matter how many cool features it's going to add to the current game because if we can't share them with players we've never met, then there is very little reason to stay subscribed. If all they care about is my initial purchase and first month or two of play, congratulations! They'll probably get it. But don't expect me to stay for too long or resubscribe for new content for that matter.
Sorry for rambling. It just bothers me because WoW used to be more than it is today. It doesn't matter if you're a retired raider or PvPer who just hops on to have a little fun, or if you choose to take things very seriously and want challenging content and balanced PvP. When you hear the infamous saying, "Make Warcraft Great Again," no one is looking for a return to the old ways. Even the people who claim they do don't really want that (people would be begging for quality of life improvements left and right if it ever happened). They just want a community. Community is the "MMO" in MMORPG. Without it, you just have an RPG that might be fun for a bit, but you aren't going to stay for long and may or may not revisit at a later date.
