Ever since Blizzard revealed World of Warcraft: Forever at Blizzcon 2026, the company has been laser-focused on maintaining its Classic+ identity, even if that means not implementing some quality-of-life features the game’s retail version has had for years.
In a reply to GingiTV and Nobbel87, two of the biggest WoW personalities on X/Twitter (albeit from complete opposite ends of the community), Blizzard developer Josh Greenfield confirmed that not implementing shared drops and tagging was “one of those things that we simply must hold the line on.” He continued, saying “It’s hard to see the value in something like this when you are frustrated in the moment but it is extremely important to our social pillar to maintain some of this friction.”
Yep, this. This is one of those things that we simply must hold the line on. I think there are other things we can do to help alleviate some frustration here but shared tagging is not it.
It’s hard to see the value in something like this when you are frustrated in the moment but…
— Josh Greenfield (@AggrendWoW) September 20, 2026
In the retail version of World of Warcraft, players who are questing or trying to farm rare spawns can all tag the same enemy (to a limit), so that everyone can get the rewards for killing it. This makes it a lot easier to play the game outside of a group, but it all but eliminates the need to group up with other players outside of high-end group content like dungeons and raids.
It’s not hard to see why some people would want shared tagging implemented in Forever, too. The beta for this new version of old World of Warcraft has been incredibly popular, which means there’s a lot of competition for anyone that just wants to kill some boars for some bones. The solution, which was suggested by Nobbel and confirmed by Greenfield is to “group up and get it done together,” which will give people more opportunity to socialize, which is really what WoW Forever is designed for.
To Blizzard’s credit, it seems like a huge portion of WoW Forever players agree with its approach. Most of the replies and quotes of Greenfield’s post are along the lines of “The Classic team we trust 💙” from MrGMYT, and “shared tagging taught players to pay less attention to each other and soon became less social” from covingtown.
World of Warcraft: Forever is currently in Beta, which you can access by spending $60 on the Skyborne pack, but you’ll only be able to play until level 20. The full game will launch on November 4, and will be included in your World of Warcraft subscription, just like any other version of Classic.
