Shared tagging: more cooperation, or no reason left to form a party?

Should everyone who hits a mob get credit for it, grouped or not? Punchline opened that argument on the US forums on 9 October by asking "Why do people hate shared tagging so much". It's a request and a debate, not a plan: none of the posts we read comes from Blizzard, and we found no announcement of shared tagging.

When we checked at about 04:10 UTC on 3 November, the thread had 360 replies, 572 likes and 4,766 views. We read the opening post and the first 19 replies, all from 9 October, so this is how the argument started, not a survey of the thread or of players.

The case for sharing

Punchline's request covers more than kills: "Shared Tagging/Looting of Quest Items means that anyone can hit a mob and get credit, regardless of being solo or grouped." That, they argued, makes cooperation automatic, with no invite and no limit of four other people. Typing "inv?" or "need X?" isn't much of a social life, in their view: "You're pinging them with a transactional prompt."

They would rather feel good about the people questing nearby than be "upset they took a quest item while I was fighting two mobs". And they wrote that players who prefer to be solo, or who have social anxiety, deserve a place too: "WoW Forever should be just as much for them as anyone else." Kalzandius said grouping isn't happening under the current system anyway: "still no one groups".

The case against

"I mean why even have a world you share with other people if stuff like tagging doesn't even matter?" DrunkPunk replied. "Stuff like this gives zero incentive to group, everyone might as well just be an NPC." Cryptoling put it more gently: "just like go out in the world and group up, it won't kill you."

Chroesire compared the idea to "world quest boss ride-by tapping" in retail, which "feels cheap and makes players treat each other like unwitting assistant-bots". Chroesire does want the competition fixed, but blames overfull layers and would rather "treat the cause than put a band-aid on the symptom". That diagnosis is Chroesire's. We have no layer population figures to test it.

Mikihiso raised money: "way more gray loot/raw gold for everyone", and so, in their view, a worse economy. No figures came with that either. Kalzandius's answer is the nearest thing to a middle ground in these posts: "So give only one person loot but everyone kill credit for quests/quest items." That would meet the gold objection, though not the one about having no reason to group.

What Forever is for

It was also an argument about the game itself, from the opening post on. "Forever isn't classic. It's not even vanilla," Punchline wrote. Rad called it "a version of classic, not necessarily vanilla" and said "change should not be rushed". Roktar blamed "Classic Andys" for opposing "literally any QoL improvement", and Dilatory replied: "if your take on vanilla is that it's a broken mess perhaps a reimagined vanilla WoW isn't meant for you." Forum likes aren't a poll, but those two posts had 38 and 27 in the same capture.

Rad also saw this as "a huge problem mostly when the game first comes out" and wrote that it was "pretty bad" when the beta first opened, but that levelling a character by then was fine: "I can get mobs and do quests just fine." Punchline answered that launch "is going to be a nightmare". That was one player's forecast in October, and we aren't making one.

Quest drops inside a group are a separate question, and we covered the developers' answer on its own.