WoW - sense of community gone? Who's to blame?

Seems to be one of the biggest issues in the game according to players. Question is who's fault is it?

Just started playing again about a month ago. I stopped playing during WotLK. Those were super fun times. It was one of the things that made the game even more fun. I was main tank in our raid guild, had a good group of close, long term e-friends playing. I come back to the game and it didn't take long to notice the problem with the social aspect of the game. I think I talked with 4 people in the first few weeks. I was leveling as fast as I could, but I'd throw out some chat to people and rarely got a response.

I joined a guild recently to try to regain some of the social aspect of the game. It helped a bit. We hang out in discord some and chat about stuff and run mythics.

When you watch streamers talk about this or read a forum thread, they all seem to blame Blizzard.

WHY? That makes no sense. Go out in the real world. People, especially younger people, are MUCH MUCH less social these days, and that seemed to have translated to the game.

Blizzard isn't to blame for this. The players are. Plus I think players make the problem sound worse than it is.

This is an interesting debate to me. WoW is social only if the players are. So the players should make more attempts to be social rather than blame the game.

I guess you could point fingers at sharding/phasing. I do very much dislike this game mechanic which wasn't around back when I played. But I don't think it makes that big of a difference.

But, yeah, it is interesting. Players bitch about the social aspect when they're not social. If you wanna have a social game, be social.