Legion proves World of Warcraft’s community is just as captivating as ever

I haven’t played World of Warcraft for about four years. The last expansion I played was Mists of Pandaria, and I completely skipped Warlords of Draenor, the expansion from 2014.Blizzard has been dropping add-ons to the king of MMORPGs on a pretty regular biennial basis for a while now, and Legion, the latest, came out about a week ago. My husband restarted his account, and now I find myself back playing a game I thought I was burnt out on. But it’s not the content of the game that’s captivating, it’s the community it’s made.

When I say captivating I mean it for both the good and the bad parts. When I was playing WoW most regularly it was as a really easy way to keep up with my friends from school. One of them was roleplaying his character as a pacifist healer, so wouldn’t complete any fetch quests that required killing animals. If I was getting griefed in a PvP area they would mount up their higher level characters and fly over. The first time I ran a dungeon with a group of strangers two of them, who were strangers to each other as well as me, gave me advice on re-specialising my character build and which spells were best to use based on how I wanted to play. Around the time Duncan Jones’ Warcraft film came out a ‘Call to Arms’ started circulating, encouraging veteran WoW players to be forgiving to the possible influx of new players. My own dear husband has been playing WoW since the very beginning. When I still had a gaming PC we would play it sat next to each other, and now he sits behind me shouting advice.

Then, on the flip side, there’s the player who refused to heal me because it was my third day playing the game. There are the aforementioned griefers who troll lower level areas and players just because they can. There are responses to the Call of Arms like ‘in this world there is only war’ and the idea that Warcraft ‘isn’t for casuals’, sentences which epitomise the kind of spunktrumpetry that puts people off playing games altogether. But both sides of the community contribute to the chaotic multiplayer maelstrom that made WoW interesting. When you read lists of people’s fondest memories of WoW almost all of them are rooted in the player interaction made possible by the game, often about groups banding together to wreak revenge on one or more members of the asshole side. This kind of thing has always been central to WoW’s appeal: the Corrupted Blood Plague, wherein a highly contagious disease escaped the raid it was supposed to be confined to, happened early on in WoW’s history, but still gets talked about. The way people reacted (some hiding in the virtual countryside away from infected areas, some helping lower level characters by healing, and some intentionally spreading the disease further) was so interesting that it was studied from both a disease control standpoint and a terrorist activity one.

In recent years, however, people have been saying the community feeling is gone. There’s been a large player drop off. At the start of 2015 WoW’s active user numbers were half of what they were at their peak. A lot of factors theorised as contributing to the decline, but the result is the community as a whole is much smaller. Some attribute the perceived degradation of player interaction to the game now being easier to play in single-player, so you don’t need to talk to other players as much to progress.

Legion is arguably the most single-player friendly WoW has ever been, staged mostly on a new questing area of the map, and with a greater emphasis on your journey as a character. It’s actually a lot of fun. One of the reasons I quit playing before was that it became a very obvious grind to me, and at least this time they’ve given it more set dressing. Though the Alliance and the Horde must work together, only you, it says, are truly special, a declaration lessened a) by the dozens of other players swarming around you, all on exactly the same heroic quest line, and b) if you chose to name your character Boaby. “It’s good to see you Boaby!”; “Come quickly, Boaby!” None of this, however, stops you interacting with other players.

The other night I was questing on the Broken Isles when I found myself continually running into another player. It was a male goblin warrior, level 100, and he was on the same quest line as I was. We had identical mounts and made them jump and roar at the same time. Eventually we grouped up and played together for a few hours. We never actually spoke to each other once. I’ll never know anything about that player, and we may never meet again, we just both happened to pick the same area of the Broken Isles at exactly the same time on a Sunday.

WoW has always been increasing accessibility (the newer expansions come with a push to level 90 or 100 so you can dive right into the new stuff). The difference now is that it’s more on you to play nicely with others, rather than the game throwing quests at you that require teaming up with other people. Some of the changes actually make it easier to work with strangers: anyone who lands an attack on an enemy these days will receive the XP and loot when it dies, which means there’s more incentive to get involved in a fight rather than run past. World of Warcraft is still a great stage to enact multiplayer madness, you just have to take the first step yourself, which may seem worryingly close to the first day of school, but is surprisingly easy in a virtual fantasy game. What’s the worst that could happen? Apart from being ganked by some assholes from eastern Europe, or something, obviously.