Shared Topic: Relationships within Azeroth

Submitted by @Naithin of Tank ‘n’ Tree

I find that people are less and less friendly in Azeroth.

In my beginning days (months?  Year?) of playing I felt like the game was a friendly place.  If you happened to see people out while questing, you asked if you could group to complete a quest you both needed, chatted in party.  You enjoyed the chatting so much that you added them to your friends list and then would chat from time to time as you saw them on.  You grouped later for more quests.  If you needed help with something in town and had the audacity to ask in general (yes, I did this once!) you got a kind and helpful answer.  When you found someone in /trade to craft something for you, they were polite and crafted it and accepted a tip – they didn’t demand a huge fee, even if you provided mats.  In short: people were nice.

Now, it seems like everyone just keeps their head down and ignores everything on the way to 80.  By now, everyone has an 80 (or three) and they spend their time in Northrend.  The number of low levels is extremely small, so you don’t really see people leveling up and when you do, they’re more likely to race you to kill the named mob you need than to stop and ask if you need it as well.  Then once you’re actually in Northrend, everyone’s concerned with gold.

That’s a pretty bleak picture I just painted, but the way that WoW is now for me and how WoW was for me before are almost as different as black and white.  I made friends just by randomly talking to people as I was leveling up, when I was a new player.  And the friendships lasted quite a bit!  People were open and friendly and it was easy.  When I retired my rogue and Lus and I rolled on the Exodar, that’s when things changed.  I was guildless until Outlands and only once I was in my guild did I make friends.  Then, the only friends after that were friends of guildies.  It was a small social circle, but I loved my guildmates and we had a great time.

Which makes me wonder: after finding a home in a guild, do you find yourself to stay within “guild friend” boundaries, since hey! that’s where your friends are.  Or do you still see yourself consistently making friends outside your usual circle?

I don’t think it was Exodar as a server that was the problem, since I’ve played on many a server since then and it’s all been the same, wherever I went.  If I happened to know someone on a server, a friend or someone from Twitter, we would talk.  But anyone else?  Nope.

In Vanilla WoW, was it more about fun and the experience as opposed to now, where the focus for the player base is, by and large, raiding?  I know that Vanilla WoW had raids as well, but they didn’t seem to be the end all be all that raids are treated as now.  Smelling the roses and being social seems to have taken a back seat.

A perk of switching servers to Feathermoon, I’m finding out, is that I’m going to a server where the point of the server is player interaction outside of groups or raids.  This is a whole new ballgame for me and hopefully it will go well, since this is my first foray into RP.  There is a whole handful of people from twitter for me to talk to on the server and to help me learn, and that makes me happy.  But there are a whole bunch of other people I haven’t even met yet who are on that server for the same reasons I am – to interact with other players and start friendships.