WoW Forever: the group finder now asks how you play

A new field has appeared in the group finder on the WoW Forever beta, and it is not optional: a character cannot queue for a dungeon until a playstyle has been chosen. There are 4 of them — Learning, Relaxed, Competitive and Carry Offered — and the choice sits on the group rather than on the character, so it is the advertisement that carries the label.

The first 2 are the obvious ones. Learning and Relaxed both describe a slower run and give a group a way of saying so before anyone zones in, which is the sort of thing players have always written by hand in chat. Competitive is harder to place in a game where dungeons are not timed and there is nothing to be competitive about yet; it makes more sense for raids, where guilds chasing fast kills need to fill a slot and want to say so.

The fourth one is the one that will be argued about. A carry means somebody is run through the dungeon by players who do not need anything from it, and in practice a carry is usually paid for. Blizzard has already ruled out GDKP runs in Forever, the loot-auction format where a raid sells its drops for gold, so an option that advertises carries in the game's own interface sits oddly beside that.

This comes from one report of what players are seeing on the beta client, not from an announcement. Blizzard has not written about the field, has not said what it expects players to put in each category and has not said whether it survives to launch. The beta runs until 21 October, and WoW Forever opens at 23:00 UK time on 4 November, which is midnight on 5 November in Central Europe.