Anyone who has leveled through Classic with another player knows the ritual.
You both need ten suspiciously rare wolf organs. Twenty minutes later, your friend has collected nine while you have three, despite apparently killing the exact same wolves. Eventually one player finishes, the other does not, and everybody stands around wondering whether friendship really requires another fifteen minutes of murdering wildlife.
WoW Forever is quietly doing something about it.
Senior Game Designer Josh Greenfield has revealed that Forever includes a new behind-the-scenes system designed to distribute quest-item drops more evenly between grouped players. Importantly, Blizzard has not simply increased the drop rates. Instead, the game uses a form of round-robin protection to reduce the chances of one player racing ahead while another gets spectacularly unlucky.
The Drop Rate Has Not Actually Been Buffed
Greenfield explained the system after players began noticing that collection quests seemed unusually pleasant while grouped in the beta. As detailed in the explanation of Forever’s new quest-drop protection, the underlying item drop chances remain essentially the same as Vanilla and Classic.
The difference is what happens after somebody receives an item.
Forever now tries to distribute subsequent quest drops more predictably among the other eligible group members. Blizzard is still tuning exactly how aggressively the system works, but the objective is simple: stop groups reaching the familiar situation where one player has eight quest items and another has one.
Or, to use the traditional scientific measurement, eight bear asses versus one bear ass.
This Is About Making Grouping Less Punishing
What makes the change particularly interesting is that Blizzard still refuses to introduce Retail-style shared tagging. We recently covered why WoW Forever is deliberately keeping contested mob tagging, with the developers arguing that a little friction encourages strangers to form groups rather than simply attacking the same creature independently.
That philosophy only works if joining a group does not create a different kind of irritation.
Collection quests have always been awkward because random drops can leave one group member finished long before everybody else. At that point the successful player either leaves, which feels slightly rude, or stays and helps kill another small ecological disaster’s worth of animals.
The new system attacks that problem without turning quest items into automatic shared rewards.
Forever’s Social Systems Are Starting to Connect
This also makes the recently added Recent Allies system considerably more interesting. Forever remembers people you have grouped with, where you met them and what you did together, allowing useful strangers to become familiar names instead of disappearing forever after one quest.
Now Blizzard is also trying to make the actual act of grouping feel less inefficient.
That combination says quite a lot about Forever. The developers are not trying to eliminate every inconvenience from Classic. They are trying to distinguish between friction that creates interaction and friction that merely makes two people stare angrily at the same pile of dead furbolgs.
Our WoW Forever beginner’s guide already recommends grouping for difficult quests and crowded objectives, and this change gives players another reason not to avoid grouping on collection quests.
You still have to find the bear asses.
Forever is merely trying to make sure your friend does not somehow find all of them first.
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