Yeah, I’ve seen that happen in some other MMOs too - it’s usually to do with “autojoin” features, they do tend to make PUG-ing convenient, but too impersonal. It doesn’t capture the social aspect quite.
Similar for GW2’s brave attempt to get some kind of casual-social thing going - those events where everyone would rush together to do the thing. It had a certain echo of some of the old-style MMO social habits, and it was kinda fun, but it didn’t quite reintroduce the sociality in the way that I think the developers might have hoped.
Again, hearkening back to CoX, there was no autojoin (not until much later in the development of the game, anyway), you actually had to build a team “manually”, but somehow the way the game/UI was set up it was incredibly easy. In the first place, PUGs had a well-defined “leader” position, and the leader had some hiring and firing responsibilities and capabilities that others in the team didn’t have. There was an easily-identifiable list of people who had flagged themselves up for teaming, they had quickly-identifiable icons for what “class”-equivalent they were, it was quick and easy to fire out a bunch of private tells, there was an alert tone for private tells that was distinct from the alert for someone saying something in the team, so you could easily respond to any responses on the side, while chatting with the team. Just … etc. SOMEHOW it was really easy to do, SOMEHOW everything clicked to make it easy to form PUGs just by chatting to people. PUG-building was fast, so fast that you could guarantee to be playing with other people within a few minutes of logging into the game, either as a leader or as a joiner.
Another neat thing was that everyone could see all the missions everyone had, so you could have a little discussion about what mission to do next out of all the missions everyone had - again, just a small part of the strange synergy that Cryptic had (probably accidentally, in view of their seeming to forget everything about all this with their later games) set up.
And what this resulted in was “ship of Theseus” PUGs that would last for hours, dropping and picking up people as they went, doing instance after instance together, maybe ending up with only one or two of the people who had originally joined. (Even the leader who’d initially formed the PUG could drop out - and pass the leadership “star” to someone else in the team, after a wee discussion as to who might be up for it - again, another little opportunity for conversation, as with the initial forming, the mission list, etc.)
I’ve never seen that kind of casual-social gameplay repeated in any MMO since, yet it would seem to me to be the ideal way to have an MMO that both has a mass appeal AND manages to foster social gameplay at the same time.
(Comparing and contrasting with Vanguard, which I played a while after CoX - it had a similar “manual” way of forming PUGs, superficially actually quite similar - but something about it was just clunky in comparison to CoX’s system, so one tended to use autojoin instead. WoW’s system for team-forming too, it was clunky in a different way - and of course if it’s a toss up between clunkiness and autojoin, it’s human nature to go with the autojoin.)
I think this is one of those cases where the synergies necessary are really subtle and delicate (maybe even down to seemingly irrelevant things like the colour and size of icons) - and CoX hit an elusive sweet spot in its way of PUG-forming that developers have never managed to duplicate.
I think even the way the gameplay was pitched made PUG-ing enjoyable. For instance, the “classes” were well-defined, so you actually needed at least one of each in your team, and each class had one or two spectacular “neat tricks” that could turn the tide of battle for the team, and wow everyone else (e.g. dps toons had a massive, room-clearing “nuke” on a long timer, cc toons could lock down an entire room maybe once or twice in a mission). There was a difficulty slider, so the team leader could pitch the difficulty right for the team (i.e. if everyone was experienced, at level or above, whack it up to invincible, if there were some newbies in the team, lower it a bit to give the newbies a chance to do some actual damage, etc.), but also the general spawning in missions was somehow just right so that there was a balance between steamrollering some bits of content, and having occasional bits where you’d have some difficulty, but nothing so tricksy that new players could fuck up so badly as to embarrass themselves. Plus, no loot, so no contention and bad vibes (although that’s a different argument).
And finally, it was rewarding to play in PUGs, marginally more rewarding enough, in terms of xp, that people wanted to do it.
The sense of casual camaraderie in being in a PUG that moves from mission to mission together, dropping people and picking people up as it goes - that’s what you really want in an MMO that’s both casual AND social, IMHO.