MoP a return to community?

#1 - March 12, 2012, 7:23 a.m.

One serious question I have for the future of WoW, and have had since Wrath and the creation of personal acheivements, is where has the community feel gone?

Vanilla WoW and BC were fantastic; hardfought instances, beautifully designed fights, and fastpaced PVP. players knew that new kids on the block needed guidance through Kara, Gruuls, Mags etc, and they'd take time in Vent to describe the encounters, steps in CC, slowpoints for dps etc...
Nowadays, a PuG is an anomaly. people are judged by the gear and the Acheivement so fast that if you're new, good luck doing anything EXCEPT the LFG and LFR fights. if you need help to truly understand a boss, there is no additional info anyone gives except "LF youtube nub." Players have become so intoxicated with their 10k AP and their singular DPS that they will literally wipe an entire raid for the sake of solo-targetting a boss...

Will MoP, an expansion that thus far seems family oriented over challenge oriented, bring back the passion for the game and it's players that Wrath all but managed to destroy? or is this going to be yet another "do it for yourself, if you aren't good enough Alt+F4 nub" situation? this question is fairly important for me as it's probably something that I'm going to use to determine whether or not I even stay for the expansion...

Nethaera

Community Manager

#7 - March 13, 2012, 3:43 p.m.

This isn't the first nor the last time we will see a discussion about community and the sense of community, I'm sure, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's important though that we keep these discussions constructive however.I'm going to channel some Ghostcrawler for you this morning and see if we can open up the discussion a bit.

/puts on her hat and robe

Keeping a sense of community while still meeting the needs of the community as a whole is a huge challenge for us. We fundamentally believe that having a sense of community is an important thing for the long-term health of the game. However, we don’t think the way to foster that community is to force players to spam global channels trying to find groups. Dungeon Finder and Raid Finder have enabled a lot more players to run dungeons and raids regularly and we’d be very reluctant to ever go back to a world without them.

The trick for us is trying to grow a stronger sense of community despite having global queuing features that will likely pair you with strangers you may never play with again. We believe players generally have more fun and stick with the game longer when they play with friends. The queue systems are a substitute for when you don’t have enough friends (or even enough friends online at the moment) to participate in that content. We aren’t trying to, and wouldn’t want to, turn WoW into a solo game. These systems are merely to facilitate a need to connect more easily with players interested in tackling this content.