If you’ve been playing the World of Warcraft: Forever Beta and you’ve grouped up with someone for a quest, you may have noticed a few differences in how quest items are distributed among the party. While they have continued to hold the line on shared mob tagging, Blizzard has changed the way that quest items are dropped for players who are in a group. WoW: Forever Developer Josh Greenfield recently explained these changes.
| Josh Greenfield: “Someone asked me something earlier about how quest drops work in WoW: Forever and if we are changing that. The short answer is no; however we did do something cool that we haven’t really had a good opportunity to talk about yet. In the interest of our Pro-social approach, we added a bit of under the hood functionality to quests to more predictably round-robin quest items to people who are grouped. |
Greenfield explains that the drop chance of quest items has not actually been changed from Vanilla or Classic at all. Instead, the number of quest drops per person in the group feels smoother because they have enabled a “Round Robin” system in the background. This means that whenever one person loots a quest item, they will likely not loot another item until everyone in the group has around the same amount. Greenfield goes on to state that this was done to promote the social aspects of the game.
| “This is the exact thing that we wanted to help alleviate with this. There’s also that awkwardness if you are the guy with 1/10 bear asses and everyone else is finished. its like “its fine guys, you can go, I’ll wrap up here on my own”. Then everyone feels bad for leaving you in the lurch after getting help.” |
One of the worst feelings in original WoW was grouping up to quest, earning all of the quest rewards, and then feeling like you either had to stay to help your ally, or leave them with more work to do solo. With this new system, players can group up, obtain a similar number of quest drops at the same time, and not feel like they’re wasting time or getting unlucky.
While this system is still a work in progress, the team hopes that this will encourage players to feel safe grouping up in the world to help each other take down challenges. And with the new Recent Allies feature, the hope is that players will continue to group up with the same people to form long-lasting social bonds.