Quote Originally Posted by Ardeth View Post
And what makes it worse is nobody is willing to give you the slightest courtesy otherwise. Like even saying, "Hello." At the start of a dungeon is rare anymore. Even staying long enough to get commendations out is rare. I've been playing since 2013, and it was really bad back then as well. I just expected after all this time and the multitude of communication apps that we as a playerbase would be more social and less selfish, but here we are. I'm in a group of people who care more about the reward than the gameplay. More about the wasted time than the comradery of it all.

This is caused by a few things. Liana touched on one of them. What you can technically get gaol'd for in this game is so ridiculous that it's gotten to the point a lot of people don't wanna talk. And because of their customer service policies, they won't even tell you what you did that got you in trouble. They'll just give you some sanctimonious boiler plate that's the customer service version of "do better". I've had friends get in trouble for telling white mages in level 80 content that spamming cure 1 makes their job harder or that tanks shouldn't be treating provoke as part of their rotation in alliance raids.

Combined with data center travel and cross server roulettes, you get players who don't really care about the community. "Why talk to someone if I'm never gonna see them again?" (same problem WoW has) or "I got my comms and there's nothing I need from this raid/dungeon/trial, I don't need to stick around to hand out any comms. These other players are like NPCs and don't talk anyways."

As much as I like PF for convenience sake, it's nearly killed the prospect of making new friends in content. Just trying to get a conversation going in even the most boring content (looking at you Crystal Tower) is almost impossible as people just wanna get in and out.