MMORPG's are dying because other games are taking over their market in chunks and they themselves have no redeemable qualities. It's not 2010 anymore when MMORPG's could serve as a good substitute for actual RPG, I'm pretty sure even the biggest schlock is more fun as a PVE game than content from any WoW expansion, especially when compared to WoW in 2010 where there was like WotLK or something and to go raiding you still had to go through all the drama of collecting people etc. So PVE is meh. No MMORPG has managed to make questing and low-level content fun and it's against the philosophy of the genre anyway. PVP? Okay fine, it has to compete with various drop-in games that are far more competitive, less grindy(or have various mechanisms to make it slightly less bothersome) or whatelse. Wanna make career as streamer? LOL GOOD LUCK, MMORPG's are so unreadable that nobody but the biggest addicts will watch it.
BUT MY SOCIAL ASPECT
If you use steam you have integrated chat client in the game's overlay. Otherwise you can use IRC, Dischord or whatever and talk with random people online.
The only worthwhile quality of MMORPG's is that they waste time very well. Getting to max level, grinding gear to make yourself competitive, whoa now you can have some fun, after 40-60 hours in. OKAY let's fix it by making it all more streamlined. Okay, fine, now you've just turned it into drop-in game and people are wondering why would they play this game. Being MMO makes some compromises in design inevitable, so now if you want to cut the "timewasting" - defining feature of MMORPG - out of these games, why don't you just make another game? I'm pretty sure if you made a game that was all about doing dungeon finder/mythic+ with teams made by matchmaker(and premades) as fast as possible, you'd get better game than what good majority of "serious" WoW players play right now. They only stick with WoW because they are familiar with the mechanics.
And yes I'm using WoW as an example since it is the only game that showed the ability to maintain multi-million playerbase for 5 years.
BUT MY SOCIAL ASPECT
If you use steam you have integrated chat client in the game's overlay. Otherwise you can use IRC, Dischord or whatever and talk with random people online.
The only worthwhile quality of MMORPG's is that they waste time very well. Getting to max level, grinding gear to make yourself competitive, whoa now you can have some fun, after 40-60 hours in. OKAY let's fix it by making it all more streamlined. Okay, fine, now you've just turned it into drop-in game and people are wondering why would they play this game. Being MMO makes some compromises in design inevitable, so now if you want to cut the "timewasting" - defining feature of MMORPG - out of these games, why don't you just make another game? I'm pretty sure if you made a game that was all about doing dungeon finder/mythic+ with teams made by matchmaker(and premades) as fast as possible, you'd get better game than what good majority of "serious" WoW players play right now. They only stick with WoW because they are familiar with the mechanics.
And yes I'm using WoW as an example since it is the only game that showed the ability to maintain multi-million playerbase for 5 years.