Huh TIL. Never played WoW and everything I've heard about it has involved guilds and raiding with people. I didn't even know it was possible to play solo.

Yeah, after yet another "fetch 5 random organs" quest I gave up in disgust around level 20 (twice).

This was kinda me, I literally have never done a single raid in WoW despite absurd hours of /played. Still doesn't fit definition of parasocial but since we've diverted: that was the cool thing about WoW, you really could make it your own game back in the day (200...7? To about 2010ish). My buddies and I, irl and online-only, would spend our time chit chatting either in game or using VoIP software while flying around on the game's transit system, levelling alts. Or I would be sitting in a city getting into political debates on /2 (channel available across all cities for your faction when you're in a city).

So it was still a very social game even if you weren't raiding. And the problem solving was very strong back then for the pvp scene, the concept of "meta" was still in it's infancy, I remember when one guy utterly changed the entire game of pvp with his pvp warrior videos, or another dude started publishing naked rogue gank videos. Anyway point is the social aspect was like any human society: incredibly diverse in form.