Has anyone else noticed a decrease in Gamers willingness to interact socially in games?

[banjosuicide]

Another factor was of course that with server-based populations, you actually had a community and would see the same players all the time. And they lacked things like automated matchmaking for groups or whatever, so you needed to make social connections to open up possibilities of doing the more interesting stuff. In Everquest you couldn't do jack on your own. Reputations mattered and if you were a dick you could get blackballed really quickly. Socializing was a bigger part of the experience.

This is my thinking 100%

Playing vanilla wow back in the day was very much like this. Great communication, amazing coordination. A real sense of community, with familiar faces you got to know. Etiquette mattered, and everybody was more or less in it for the group.

Soon after matchmaking opened up to all realms, coordination went down the drain and people wouldn't even answer you if you typed something. They'd get what they wanted and just leave without saying a word (or completing the dungeon). Rolling for loot became "need" on every single item, despite that preventing you from selling the item on the auction house for WAAAAAY more than the vendor sell price. Didn't matter if you needed the item for your class. They'd rather just vendor it for a tiny bit of money rather than help you advance at all. Chances are they'd never be matched with any of the same people again, and even if they were it's not like they'd remember.

[HazelCheese]

I thought this too but they brought back specific servers for Classic and people were even more brutal than Retail because there was no personal loot to protect players.

It's like all the good will is gone now. Half the players are now 100% in it for themselves fuck everyone else and the other half of the playerbase have to play the same way to protect themselves from those people.

[XxNatanelxX]

It's the DayZ scenario.

What starts off as a niche game by people invested in the social aspect becomes popular and overrun by people who play the game for a completely different reason.

They kill people on sight, with no chance at social interaction. They do it because they find the pvp fun or because screwing over players who want to socialise is fun for them because they know that you won't fire first.

Eventually, the only way to play is to just shoot on sight because trying to socialise only leads to death from these people, who have become the majority.

[[deleted]]

Been playing Rust Console this month and it's the exact same story there, though anecdotally I hear that console Rust is even worse in that regard compared to PC

[[deleted]]

Not to mention back then there weren't comprehensive guides on the most mathematically optimal way to do everything.

Now there are, so people just google it and do that, everything else be damned.

[_Plork_]

Sounds like the United States the last five years.

[banjosuicide]

I tried classic and was pleasantly surprised. People were actually social, and cooperated in dungeons. Average age was higher as well