wow WoW as Social as the Day It Launched, Q4 Shadowlands Release, According to J. Allen Brack

[Starym 3,801]

 

PC Gamer noticed that yesterday's quarterly earnings call saw Blizzard CEO J. Allen Brack respond to former CEO Mike Morhaime's recent comments on how the social aspect of WoW has decreased as the game aged and accessibility increased. Brack talked about both retail and Classic, their successes, and how they're both one single community, getting to the social aspect of the game:

Quote

World of Warcraft has been fortunate to be engineered as a very social experience, and that's as true today as the day we launched. Over time, we've listened to feedback from the community, and the game has evolved to what we now call the 'modern game,' which has really expanded the breadth and the depth of gameplay, as well as making it easier to kind of find friends, group up, make progress, or play alone, all within the social environment.
- J. Allen Brack

We also found out a more specific launch window for Shadowlands, as it's going to be coming in the fourth quarter of 2020:

Quote

Our teams have done a really good job in shifting to work from home. We were able to welcome select players into the closed alpha for Shadowlands last month, and thanks to the hard work of the team, Shadowlands is on track to launch for Q4 of this year.
- J. Allen Brack

Source 1, 2.

[Whiterhino 31]

I feel like right before Halloween would be a good time

 

[durdyenglish 298]

I agree - just because we aren't using trade chat for LFG doesn't mean the game isn't social.

[Frogspoison 63]

2 hours ago, Whiterhino said:

I feel like right before Halloween would be a good time

 

Possible, but not probable. Likely looking at a late-November or early December launcher, like Cata.

[GBeast 33]

22 minutes ago, durdyenglish said:

I agree - just because we aren't using trade chat for LFG doesn't mean the game isn't social.

pressing a button to automatically go in to a dungeon that requires no interaction or communication isn't social

[durdyenglish 298]

11 minutes ago, GBeast said:

pressing a button to automatically go in to a dungeon that requires no interaction or communication isn't social

That's for low difficulty queues to provide an approachable method to play the game. High level content still requires you to communicate to at least some degree (no one had "real" conversations before, it was always about gear, experience, etc).

All the random dialogue I have with players about content, lore, whatever - usually still happens in trade, general, guild, and instance chat. 

For the life of me, I cannot figure out why classic/vanilla is deemed so much more social. It's probably because everything, including forming groups for 5m content, took a million years so we just filled the time with idle banter. Personally, I'd rather have quickly accessible content (I'm not 15 anymore, I have a life and I can't wait hours just to START doing something) with plenty of newly refined options for social interaction at my disposal.

[Calysia 229]

I think WoW has progressed socially to where those that want to socialize are totally capable of doing so. Those that aren't so inclined don't have to...which is the way it should be imo.

Everquest might be considered the pinnacle of sociability in an MMO. Standing around all night talking while waiting in-line for your chance at the quest objective...and many nights not getting it...left you no choice but I can pretty much guarantee you that 95% of the people there just wanted to get their quest done and move on to the next one.

Same thing in WoW...hanging in trade trying to get a group together for the dungeon you needed. Most people were there because they HAD to be there not because they WANTED to be there.

[elmurufdd 45]

2 hours ago, GBeast said:

pressing a button to automatically go in to a dungeon that requires no interaction or communication isn't social

i agree that and  summon stones took away alot of the social aspect . back in the day when u had to run to a dungeon u chatted .

[FalleStar 1]

4 hours ago, durdyenglish said:

For the life of me, I cannot figure out why classic/vanilla is deemed so much more social.

Certainly retail is just as social as Classic for the high-end content, but it's the little interactions in the world that make Classic inherently more social. I'll just use my own experience from last night as an example.

I logged in for about an hour last night on a hunter alt I was leveling in Loch Modan.

Within seconds of logging in outside of Ironband's Excavation Camp a paladin comes up to me and asks me to help him kill a nearby rare mob that he wasn't able to solo. I help him out and then we proceed to do a few of the nearby quests together before parting ways.

My next quests were at the ogre mounds in the Eastern part of the zone, so in heading that direction I saw another hunter running in the opposite direction that had a name and pet name that let me know that they were a fan of a certain D&D web series that I have also been a fan of for years. So in passing I sent them a message with a reference to the show, they responded back and we have a brief discussion before heading back to our respective questing.

When I get to the ogre mounds, there's a warlock and warrior that are a bit under-leveled for some of the quests out there, so we team up. In talking with them while killing some ogres I find out that the warrior is very new to the game and doesn't yet understand things like crowd control or threat management which leads to some unnecessary deaths. Neither the warlock nor I dropped from the group even after several mistakes were made, instead we explained to the warrior why you don't do things like hit mobs that are in freezing traps and the importance of attacking the same target that the tank (my bear in this case) is hitting. Despite a few deaths, we finished up all of the quests in the area and went our separate ways.

While turning in the quests, I bumped into the other hunter and paladin I'd seen earlier and we exchanged /waves.

This is by no means the most social time I've ever had on Classic, it was literally just my experience from last night. During leveling in retail it's almost never required to group up unless you want to, and almost certainly not a reason to ask a random passerby-er for help. Furthermore, due to the sharding on retail, there's very little chance of actually seeing anybody else in the zones you're in, and if you do it's usually someone from another server and it's only for a few seconds before they get moved off into another shard, never to be seen again. This last point may be a bit subjective, but from my experiences on retail if you die with randoms, more often than not, the party just silently splits whether it be on a quest or even Mythic+.

I'm not hating on retail, I've played every expansion except for WotLK and I'll be in Shadowlands as well, but I've probably had more social interaction in the last year of Classic than the previous 10 of retail combined.

TLDR; The lack of sharding and the need to join up more often for quests in the leveling process make Classic more social than retail, most of the time. YMMV

[Whiterhino 31]

I think they need to make mobs a lot more difficult in SL and not worry so much about the AoE thing. If they're more difficult people won't want to pull a million of them, and people will need to interact on some mobs to get them killed. Maybe thats what they're trying to go for with the Maw.