WoW Forever: bad luck protection for quest drops in groups

Blizzard senior game designer Josh Greenfield, known to players as Aggrend, said on 26 September that WoW Forever hands out quest items differently when players are in a group. Writing on X, on his personal account, he said someone had asked him whether Blizzard is changing how quest drops work in Forever. The short answer is no, he wrote, but the team did do something it had not yet had a good chance to talk about. As part of what he called the game's pro-social approach, it added functionality under the hood that shares out quest items more predictably, in turn, between players who are grouped.

Greenfield described the problem it is meant to fix: a group kills a huge number of furbolgs, and one player ends up with 8 of the 10 items the quest asks for while another has 1. In Forever, he said, the game makes it a bit more likely that everyone in the group gets drops evenly. In a follow-up he added that this is not a pure round robin, where items would go to each player strictly in turn. There is still some randomness, and it works more like bad luck protection: it helps a player who has not seen a drop in a while and is falling behind the others. He also named the awkward moment the change should ease, when the others are finished and the last player tells them to go on without him.

Drop quests will still take time, just as in the original game, Greenfield said: a bit of grind on them is part of what he called the vanilla magic the team is keeping, and the aim is small changes that make them feel more natural and encourage grouping without giving up the original design. With the new system they should be, in his words, less feast or famine, and in a group you kill monsters much faster anyway. He said the team is still fine-tuning the system, and asked players who are wary of grouping on drop quests to give it a try. He also pointed to Recent Allies, a feature that makes it more likely you will keep meeting the people you grouped with in later sessions.

Greenfield did not say when the system was added or which beta build brought it, gave no drop rates and did not say how long a player has to go without a drop before it helps. We found no mention of it in the beta development notes Blizzard last updated on 24 September. His invitation to try it suggests it is already on the beta, but he did not say so directly. Grouping on the beta has a known problem of its own: with its 24 September beta update, Blizzard warned that forming or changing a group may move players to a different instance of the world. The beta runs until 21 October, and WoW Forever launches at 23:00 UK time on 4 November, which is midnight on 5 November in Central Europe.