When the gates opened on the World of Warcraft: Forever beta, it was a free-for-all. Everyone fought to be the first to “tag” enemies with their attacks so they would count for their quests—a problem that is essentially obsolete in modern WoW.
My memories of doing this in the real classic WoW came flooding back as I frantically tried to claim enemies before someone else did. But that old frustration also prompted old solutions: Whenever I came across a quest to kill seven wolves or whatever, I invited other players into my group so that everyone got credit.
This, according to senior game designer Josh Greenfield on X, is exactly what Blizzard wants to see.
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Greenfield responded to a conversation about whether or not shared enemy kill credit should be a thing in WoW: Forever to say pretty firmly that it’s not going to change.
“This is one of those things that we simply must hold the line on,” he wrote. “I think there are other things we can do to help alleviate some frustration here but shared tagging is not it.”
“It’s hard to see the value in something like this when you are frustrated in the moment,” he added, “but it is extremely important to our social pillar to maintain some of this friction.”
The chaos of the beta launch is a limited-time thing. It’ll happen again on November 4 when WoW: Forever fully drops, but eventually it’s not going to be as much of a problem as the population of players spreads out across Azeroth.
From that point-of-view, I like the firm stance Blizzard has on this. It requires almost no effort to invite someone to your group for the 5 minutes it takes to finish a quest, and in that short amount of time there’s the possibility for a longer-lasting friendship to grow. I’ve certainly met friends this way before and it would be neat to have it happen again.
But at the same time, I hope Blizzard is prepared for what will probably be an overwhelmingly popular launch week. Hundreds of players squeezed into a small field with 30 wolves is only going to cause frustration if there’s no solutions for things like slow enemy and item respawns. Beta players have already posted screenshots of people lining up to interact with a quest object that only shows up every few minutes. That’s the kind of friction nobody wants when they only have a few hours to play.
