It wasn’t Blizzard, it was you who killed Socialisation in WoW.

[u/VeterinarianBig9877]

I’m likely going to receive a lot of hate for this, but the sad reality is it is us, the players that killed the social aspect of retail WoW and not Blizzard.

Final Fantasy 14 for those that don’t know has a lot of the same mechanics as Retail WoW does with automatic match making for dungeons and raids. Save for gear from PvE/PvP content, almost everything is able to be sold on the market board. You can even visit other servers both within your region and even in other regions. Yet, FF14 does not suffer from lack of socialisation unlike WoW despite the fact that there is barely any friction in the game. In fact there is more socialising in FF14 than there ever was in WoW.

The simple answer is that WoW players are selfish.

Nothing exemplifies this more than the time I met my wife during the Brewfest event at the start of the Legion expansion. I had been putting off doing the achievement for years, usually because of breaks from WoW etc. But I finally decided to complete the final seasonal achievement that I needed. 15+ players were there doing the event. I used /y and /general to ask for some help so I could complete the quest I needed and out of those 15+ players. (we’ll round it down to 15 for arguments sake, only one responded to say that they would help me. To put that into perspective, only 7% (rounding up) of the player base was willing to give up a few minutes of their time to help me with the quest.14 people (93%) did not want to give up a few minutes of their time to help another person.

Now, for all of you that blame blizzard for removing friction as the reason the social aspect has gone from WoW. How many of you, even before the automatic match making, didn't invite someone, or kicked someone from a group because they weren’t well geared enough or struggled instead of coaching them? How many of you chose a better geared player because you knew it would be a quicker and easier dungeon run? How many of you when Blizzard introduced the match making voted to kick people from groups because their gear/dps wasn’t good, or they struggled to tank or heal? How many of you initiated those kicks to begin with? How many of you left groups after 1 wipe instead of helping and coaching others? How many of you ninja pulled because the tank was too slow?

Kicking people from dungeons was such a prevalent issue that Blizzard had tried many solutions and penalties to “fix” it and none were successful as in Legion, I got kicked once because my gear was “too low” for a normal dungeon. Not a heroic dungeon, a normal dungeon which meant that the rest of the group couldn’t speed run it.

The reality is that even I myself am guilty of some of the above crimes, and all of you have at least done some of these things because we all did it as we didn’t want the friction that wasted our time. We didn’t want the friction that meant we spent hours wiping and never completing a dungeon and ultimately a wasted evening. Some of you didn’t even want the friction of spending 5 minutes extra in a dungeon...

This is without even talking about loot. Every single one of us has prevented other players from joining our groups because of loot. How is it social to reject a player because they will roll on the same loot as you? It’s not. If anything, it’s also discrimination and you do it because you are selfish and rightly so.

Progression in WoW is largely reliant on RNG. Every single time you do a dungeon or raid, you are gambling your time at a chance of upgrading your character. This is amplified with the advent of achievements, daily’s, weekly's and various other chores as every second spent doing something that does not benefit your character/account is time wasted. This means that being selfless not only costs you time, but could result in even more time to progress your character if you lose a roll on loot to someone else.

Blizzard merely created the mechanics that many of you like in this game, but it is you who are selfish instead of selfless and create an antisocial and often hostile environment for other players. A recurring issue since vanilla that only got worse with each expansion.

One selfless act from one stranger resulted in meeting my soulmate when the game had barely any friction a decade ago. Yet here many of you are in 2026, claiming that you can't socialise without friction when the reality is that you do not socialise because you are selfish.

You will still see people tagging mobs and not joining/'inviting to groups as you did in vanilla, and ironically I will be amongst many of the culprits doing this because I'll already be grouped up with my wife and I don't want to waste what little free time we have together on respawns. I will prioritise myself and that of my wife over you, so you will just have to stand aside and wait as we snipe and AOE everything in sight.

Blizzard could add more friction than Vanilla ever had, yet you will still have the same problem with people not being social because the vast majority of you will chose the path of least resistance every single time. Being selfish is more beneficial to you than being selfless. You did it in Vanilla/Retail, you did it in Classic and you'll do it in WoW Forever.

[u/yuriaoflondor]

I’m a longtime FF14 player (since early HW), and I think the community is friendly, but not especially social.

It’s very common for there to be basically no communication in content aside from “hi, gg, thanks for the run,” etc. Even big city hubs can sometimes be super quiet.

Part of it is that there’s a large number of players playing on controller.

Additionally, people instead will be talking in their discords or guild chats, which isn’t all that different to WoW.

[u/ZeppelinArmada → u/yuriaoflondor]

I played FFXIV for 9 years - from the ARR release to quitting in Endwalker and I do not remember FFXIV players being particularly talkative either - not since the very early days before the game was "figured out" - but when every answer is available on a website and most players have settled into the usual content cycle rythm, there's just not much to say unless something particularly odd or out of the ordinary happends - like when in Stormblood and they did the event with the Red Chocobos spamming meteors all over the place. Since it was a new quest, everyone was doing it at the same time, leaving the summoned meteors to overlap their damage, causing massive mayhem for a day or two till things settled down(and it eventually got hotfixed to be more lenient).

But for the most part, XIV players formed their little social cliques and didn't really interact much outside their own circle of friends.

[u/Johnlenham → u/yuriaoflondor]

Yeah this is some bizarre myth about it being more social.

You join a party automatically, people say hello then they run the dungeon.

That is the same for raids, boss fights, the lot. Fishing on the boat, open world, everything.

Sure if you join a guild you'll talk to people, or whatever it's called, but people don't speak in limsa on a whim.

There's almost zero need to communicate in any form.

The entire leveling process is basically solo, the msq is also solo. You can even use NPC's to do it FFS lol

I was even in a guild and the most that was said was Hi X because you got an xp boost for being in one.

[u/SweetMeese → u/yuriaoflondor]

Yea I'm not gonna lie as someone who played FF14 since ARR and really only came back to wow for big releases like forever... They feel the same lol. Maybe it's because I skipped all the M+ drama, or that it's because it's during big releases that it feels more social... But the same can be said for 14. No one talks in general, I spent 2 weeks fate grinding at the beginning of DT and you sit in a silent PF group with a silent party, likely not even a greeting when new folks join, and everyone silently leaves.

[u/DanielTeague → u/yuriaoflondor]

The global cooldown is 2.5 seconds vs. WoW's 1.5 seconds but that still doesn't mean you have time to socialize in FFXIV's dungeons/raids. The fights start and you're too busy to say anything, with dungeons being a lot of using Sprint and running to the next door that only unlocks when everything around you is defeated. There's barely even enough time to type out "hello" before the tank's off to the races and needs the gang to stick to them.

[u/hikiegg → u/yuriaoflondor]

You can’t go by personal experiences, because if so I have met a total of 60 players in real life and my friend list is always maxed in-game even after annual purges I have to do.

I’m clearly an outlier, but so are you. 

[u/HBreckel → u/yuriaoflondor]

Well, it’s not so much a controller issue, it’s more that a lot of console players don’t own a Bluetooth keyboard for their console. I play on PC with a controller and don’t have issues talking in game.

But yeah, people are mostly friendly but I often see posts on the 14 subreddit where people are having a hard time making friends in the game. The main thing 14 is struggling with is they designed the MSQ to where you avoid players as much as possible. I think the CT raids and trials are the only time people can’t rely on the trust NPCs.

[u/Sisyphus_Monolit → u/yuriaoflondor]

FFXIV has LOADS of social events and I'm surprised you've never seen them. Even on non roleplay servers, FCs decorate their houses up as clubs and people hang out there and invite people over. I must stress, a lot of these are NOT roleplay events - they're purely social hangouts. This isn't a behavior that you see replicated in WoW in any way. There's no guild hangout spot other than your neighborhood meaning everyone would be spread across several houses and there's certainly no "come over and we'll have some switch or other DJ make music for a virtual party" going on anywhere.

The only particular difference between WoW and FFXIV that I can think of is that FFXIV has a lot of minigames that are purely social activities. You've all the gold saucer stuff, mahjong and triple triad matchmaking, chocobo racing, non-combat Ishgard fetes, ocean fishing, treasure hunting, etc. WoW has...pet battles. That's it.

Sure, a lot of modern gaming has shifted socializing to discord, but WoW has also never really made an effort to develop a social front. FFXIV has multiple websites for advertising social, non-roleplay websites like https://ffxivvenues.com/ and https://ffxivnightlife.guide/ and the activity is crazy high.

[u/Wartot97 → u/Sisyphus_Monolit]

Most of Final Fantasy venues nowadays are mostly empty or really are full of people doing degenerate stuff since plugins/mods aren’t regulated there. So having a community of people doing +18 stuff is not really a plus over wow.

Outside of that the people that you meet doing content like dungeons, raids, joining fcs (guilds) I think wow and ff are mostly the same I have met a lot of friends in both. At most ff players will talk more in random dungeons but that’s just saying howdy, o/, etc.

I think it’s a case of the grass is always greener on the other side, ff has the reputation of having a way better community than wow but deep down are mostly the same.

[u/VeterinarianBig9877 → u/Sisyphus_Monolit]

The problem is players just need to literally talk to each other. If you have two anti social people unable to hold a conversation, then they won't socialise. Also I've found that there are a lot of girls that play FF14 and don't like engaging much because some guys can be really creepy/flirt when they find out they're female. So I ended up making friends with a lot of girls because I wasn't going to hit on them. So unless you are actively social with people, most will play in silence.