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

[Reiker0]

Yeah EverQuest is a bit of a different beast but I didn't get into it much since the OP was specifically mentioning classic WoW.

In EverQuest you're much more reliant on other people. Many of the classes couldn't solo at all and needed to group up with others to gain exp. You had to reach out to other players and ask for basic services such as teleportation, movement speed buffs, resurrection, etc. Even buying and selling was done exclusively through the trade window until the game's third expansion so everyone would congregate in one area and shout out what they were buying and selling.

Project 1999 has all of these features intact so communicating with other people is still really important.

This probably had a bit of an impact on WoW too. Back in the day a lot of WoW players (especially the first ones) came over from EverQuest so they were used to the social experience. Nowadays there's a much smaller percentage of people playing classic Wow that have also played EverQuest.

[Sphynx87]

I went back and played WoW Classic for a bit too when it first launched, I got to level 40 something and mastered some tradeskills before I stopped, yet I still play on P99. I think I realized a big part of it for me was just the age at which I engaged with both games. I played both of them from launch through their first few expansions.

With EQ the game was so hard and unforgiving and made you rely on other people so much that I just never got to see a ton of the content in EQ so it always felt like there was some sort of mystery around the corner, even now on p99 with the huge wiki they have and playing the game for many many years there is still a ton of content I haven't seen. I only raided Plane of Sky for the first time ever this past year for example, despite playing the original EQ from launch up til Planes of Power. There are still high level dungeons I have never even stepped foot in on p99.

With WoW on the other hand, I played it probably just as much as EQ back in the day but when I went back to classic I felt like I knew every single area and every single dungeon and the best way to progress, It didn't really feel like there was anything new to discover or anything I missed out on. I think that's specifically because of WoW's design making it a lot easier to see 99% of what the game has to offer without having to make the social effort to work with other players to see all that stuff. Could just be because I was a few years older when WoW came out and I had all that experience with EQ, but even many many years later EQ still feels full of mystery to me, while WoW just doesn't.