I quit WOW at about that time, I played from release, the golden days were TBC && WoTLK, but the rot set in when 40 mans were retired. Doing a 40 man and getting the gear from a 40 man was a defining ambition of guilds, not many guilds managed to set themselves up to do regular 40 man runs and you had to ladder up the 40 man content when you did - molten core and on and up. This pressure and ambition drove really strong social behaviour; act up and you'd be kicked, and that's your chance of the end game gone. Tolerate idiots in the guild and risk a split or a leak of defectors. The problem was that the spreadsheets at Blizzard showed that only about 5% of the players were getting to experience the end game. So... they went to 25 man, then they opened 25 man to pickup queues and the drivers for pve guilds faded.

I readily agree that old school WoW was much more social and fun, but personally, most of the enjoyment of the game for me was only possible because I was a 20-something with no spouse, no kids, and no real responsibilities outside of showing up to work during the day.

Now that I'm a practicing Adult®, I still kinda dream of WoW Classic being what we all remember the original game being, but I also know that if I got that involved in planning and running raids now, people who rely on me to be responsible would suffer. I'm content with being part of the 95% that don't have that kind of free time to commit to planning before actually playing a game.

Yes - there's no going back, life changes! It's like Rugby.

I used to enjoy Rugby, but I was 17, if I played Rugby now I would enjoy it. But I am glad it's available for 17 year olds who want a go.

One thought though, my guild has actually re-awoken in the last few months. I'm still on the mail list - as apparently was everyone else, and now people are talking about doing instances and so on. I couldn't have done it until recently, because I had small children - so as everybody knows, fugetaboutit. But, if WOW was in TBC state with some interesting new content I'm pretty sure I would jump in.

Part of this is the access to engagement within the game. As games rely more and more on multiplayer (think LoL/DotA, Overwatch, WoW Raids requiring a group), to get to the actual content you want you need to assemble a team, either programmatically via matchmaking or by existing friends.

And the waits can be very long in competitive scopes to have a good match. I can only speak from LoL as an example, but our group like most had people bounding around all levels of play, so matchmaking could take a long time. The team's MMR undoubtedly was an accurate representation, but this also probably meant there was a very narrow set of ready to go teams that were reasonably fair matches. Prior to Riot's heavy handed overhaul of the Matchmaking, this sometimes would result in some absolutely uneven matches (a bunch of Diamonds getting piled onto a group with 1 Diamond and several bronzes/unranked.

Pre-overhaul, it often mean a 20 minute stomp. Post-overhaul, it means waiting, sometimes 20 minutes+ to get a simple game, when most of us only have an hour or two spare.

It's a difficult balance for designers, and I don't envy what they have, but the nature of a lot of games has changed to require the participation. The logistical challenges of providing fair/balanced as well as fast matchmaking while still letting players play with their friends (however many they have) is a real hellish problem to solve, as the solutions are often at odds with one another.

“Convenience” or getting the player to get the next dopa hit, is not the way the real world is built.

The real world has slow periods and other issues which are usually where the various other aspects of humanity play out.

By definition, games and social media optimize for whatever measurables are measurable AND accretive to the bottom line.

On top of it, most of this current tech world is built on American sensibilities in terms of optimization and business models.

The rest of the human part of existence is.... not optimized for in this universe.

Also do note, people still figure out a way to make friends.

People end up recognizing each other even through random match making, or due to local lobbies.

It’s not all doom and gloom.

Yeah I was talking with some people about this a few days ago actually. The change is not entirely bad, though. For example, in my own case, I actually like the change. I'm not 22 years old anymore (as I was when Burning Crusade came out and I was at the height of my 'raiding career'). I don't have the time to join a raiding guild to see end-game content, and I don't have the time to sit in Stormwind spamming Trade to form groups for things. I like how the group finder makes it easier to just do the content and get some gear and experience the game without time commitment.

Of course nothing is free and as you've rightly pointed out it has come at the expense of the cohesion of individual server communities. The WoW Forums, back in the old days, were full of inter-server rivalries for raiders and when they brought in cross-realm matchmaking in the patch prior to BC there was some nice rivalry for PvP within server groups -- you could still only group with people from your own server but you would be matched against other servers. That's all gone now. It seems like it's impossible to know if you're even on your "own" server because of the way the phasing works now.

Anyway not sure where I'm going with this. tl;dr I agree with you but the change isn't entirely bad.