Aggrend rules out shared tagging

Shared tagging is not coming to World of Warcraft: Forever. Senior Game Designer Josh Greenfield, known as Aggrend, says the team has to hold the line there. He wrote that on 20 September in a reply on X, picked up by Wowhead.

What Aggrend wrote

Aggrend was answering Nobbel87, who argued that grouping up for a camped mob is a small effort, and that getting it done faster or alone costs a community. “This is one of those things that we simply must hold the line on,” Aggrend replied. “I think there are other things we can do to help alleviate some frustration here but shared tagging is not it.”

Which other things those are, he does not say. His reply drew more than 140 replies of its own.

The first hit owns the mob

Forever keeps the Classic rule. The first player or group to land a hit owns the mob, and the kill and the loot go with it. Shared tagging is the version Retail players are used to, writes Wowhead: everyone who does damage gets credit. Blizzard has no plans to move Forever to that model.

The beta is crowded

The beta opened on 17 September and is one of the largest beta tests Blizzard has ever run, writes Wowhead. Virtually every quest mob is camped, and even with the new phasing technology players compete hard for tags. A zone refresh moves players to a fresh copy of the same area and warns five minutes in advance.

Why the friction stays

Social play steers most of what the team decides, writes Wowhead, so the friction that makes players talk to each other is worth keeping. Make it too easy and people stop interacting, make it too hard and they stop having fun.

Blizzard drew the same line earlier on 20 September. In an interview with Game Informer, two leads called a long flight path a moment in which a player answers a question in general chat.