For those that have been playing World of Warcraft for a while, there’s been a lot of changes. As the game developed and grew over the last fifteen years, players have experienced a great number of alterations to the game they know and love – but not all of these have been from changes Blizzard has directly made.
One of the most commonly discussed facets of the game is the community and how players interact with each other. It seems to be a general consensus that the game is significantly less social now than it was years ago, especially in the earliest few years.
There’s a good number of reasons for this slow drifting of the community, such as tools like the Dungeon Finder and Crossrealm mechanics making it less important for players to socialize and connect with each other. Additionally, the game has become significantly easier, allowing players to be much more self-reliant instead of needing to join the community to find assistance.
All Covenant Armor Sets in Shadowlands#Shadowlands #Warcraft https://t.co/VKeIa5FuBD pic.twitter.com/vZSbNHZnpS
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These aren’t bad things necessarily; making it so that players are more self-reliant means that people can play the game as they want rather than needing to base their play around others so that they can get assistance, for example. However, taking the community out of an online game is generally a bit of a bummer.
Recently, however, current Blizzard president J. Allen Brack spoke out on feeling that the community was as strong as ever. In his bold statement, Brack states that the community is just as strong as it was at launch.
“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,” Brack stated. “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.”
Brack also discusses the joining of Classic and Modern WoW, which they consider as a single community. In some ways that’s true, but considering the two completely separate games – which share very little in common – a single community might not be the most accurate viewpoint.
Brack’s statements are also a complete opposite to what other Blizzard employees have stated. Former Blizzard president Mike Morhaime, for example, has previously asserted that World of Warcraft traded its community for accessibility, making it so that the community was much weaker though more could play the game.
