WoW Forever: Blizzard designer rules out shared tagging

Blizzard senior game designer Josh Greenfield, known to players as Aggrend, said on 20 September that WoW Forever will not get shared tagging. He wrote on X, on his personal account, in replies to players during the beta, that keeping it out is "one of those things that we simply must hold the line on". He thinks Blizzard can do other things to ease some of the frustration, he added, but shared tagging is not one of them. He accepted that its value is hard to see when you are frustrated in the moment, but said that keeping some of the hassle is extremely important to the social side of the game, which he called one of its pillars.

Tagging decides who a monster belongs to. In Forever, as in Classic, the first player or group to hit a monster gets its loot, the experience and the quest credit; a player outside that group who joins in gets nothing. In the main game, Midnight, tagging is shared, so several players who are not in a group can all get credit for the same monster. The beta runs until 21 October and is crowded: press reports from it describe players waiting their turn beside nearly every monster that a quest asks them to kill.

Greenfield was backing a player who argued that grouping up takes only a small effort and could be the start of a community. Another player asked where the value is: you invite the stranger who is taking your kills, nobody says anything, you kill the monsters, leave the group and never meet again. Greenfield's answer was a feature called Recent Allies. As he describes it, you group with someone once and hardly talk; the next day, questing in another zone, you see the same player with their name in a different colour, remember them and find it a little easier to invite them again. Perhaps this time you talk. The more this happens, he says, the more ties players form.

Greenfield did not say how long the game remembers a player or which colour it uses. One press report from the beta says the game also marks players who were simply nearby; Greenfield spoke only of players you have grouped with, and Blizzard has not said more. Blizzard's recap of the Forever deep-dive panel at BlizzCon, published on 13 September, sets out the same aim. It calls chance meetings a core foundation of Forever, meetings that can turn a rival for an enemy tag into someone you stop for. It also says the move to rulesets instead of realms is meant to combine larger populations with the sense of belonging that realms gave, so that strangers become familiar faces.

Two more replies in the same conversation deal with the frustration itself. Johnny Cash, a principal game designer on Forever, also writing on his personal account, agreed with Greenfield and asked players to report places where they have serious trouble completing something: he said there are plenty of ways to adjust such spots, and that the team has already adjusted plenty. One player complained that when they already hold the tag on a quest monster and accept a group invitation, the game moves them to a different copy of the busy area and the tag is lost. Greenfield called this very fair feedback that the team will work on during the beta.