Mob/node tagging promotes Toxic behaviour

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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To Blizzard Activision, World of Warcraft Classic and the #NoChanges which actually never happened.

Dear community

I felt the need to post my personal view and feelings about certain aspects of this game. Feel free to read with me.

World of Warcraft has quite the long history, over the years many things changed. Expansions where either a hit or a miss and players all over the globe will debate about what changes were good and which ones were bad. It’s good to have a constructive debate about a game which once moved millions of players.

For me retail, I have lost connection with retail. Several reasons I will not mention here, perhaps for another time, another forum, another post. But there is one aspect of Battle for Azeroth that I think is straight out the best thing you as a Gaming Studio could have done.

Mob/node sharing.

Quite the opposite of what we experience in Classic. Mobs & nodes are only available to those who tag them the first.

Throughout Classic, I was farming gold to invest in consumables for my raiding. Or I was farming reputation in order to keep up with others. Or perhaps I was plucking Black Lotus just the nanosecond before another player arrived just to see it vanish before his nose.

Mob/node tagging promotes toxic behaviour. And it promotes this in 2 ways.

  1. The person who actually takes it, can have good feelings that he got a certain herb and another person not. And can laugh or chat about this in the ingame chat interface.

  2. The other person can be offended by this and try to steal off said mob/node from same player and it can evolve into a toxic battle.

Apparently for some reasons a certain amount of the playerbase finds it enjoyable to be this toxic. To be greedy, call others just slow or tell them to f*** off you crybaby.

This happens in daytime currently on the Naxxramas Scourge Invasions. Trying to find a group of players willing to cooperate seems, and this is a personal and thus biased view, seems almost impossible.

It’s me versus you, and if I can have the possibility to get more stuff than you, I’ll do whatever I need to get that extra tag. This makes honest players, players who want to group up and share and cooperate doing exactly the same as this toxic person. Because if they don’t do this, they will get nothing. So they need to start ‘steal’ and ‘tag’ as hard and as fast as they can in order to get certain breadcrumbs.

I just farmed 20 Necrotic Runes because I fancy the tabard, I really like the possibility of shaping your character in a certain way.

And I am deeply shocked that cooperating with people on that invasion was nearly impossible, the toxicity and accusations/cursing and straight out harming behaviour was the ‘new’ standard.

In 2 occasions I found 1 player willing to work together and rotate a +1 on the runes. I have multiple screenshots of players being rude, offensive, just off limit. Players who I have reported ingame.

After some time, I started to think, why are we this toxic and is there a way that we can by-pass this. And it came to my conclusion that Mob/node tagging is the prime source of toxic behaviour. It literally ‘promotes’ it.

Sharing is not rewarded. So why should we share? In an often competitive gaming environment sharing is never rewarded. Working together is not rewarded.

Since the current patch has also brought us to the very end of Classic as a game (content-wise, not community-wise) and with the possibility of a new The Burning Crusade around the corner, I strongly ask the team behind World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Classic that they implement certain changes to TBC that never were a part of a TBC, because the #NoChanges policy is - been proven - not a realistic approach. And you realised this as a Gaming Studio aswell.

One of these changes I’d like to suggest is to at least evaluate and think about the current game design about mob/node tagging. Try to come up with a solution that doesn’t promote toxic behaviour, the you versus me thinking, a solution which doesn’t harm the economy or the player experience.

Try to bring players together, make cooperating rewarding, rather than have old-systems in place that more often than wanted put players against each other rather than creating bonds.

At least, think about it.

/hat off
Konkrete

I am Konkrete, a 33 year old, Belgian based gamer. Been playing the game since the start all the way upto and not including Legion. I hate toxicity or drama and prefer constructive criticism, ingame I like to enstrengthen bonds with players even those out in the world. I like to immerse myself and help others, and be part of a beautiful world. Keep it beautiful, thanks.

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It’s why it’s been changed in retail.

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Hello my belgian friend,

There are no changes that can make the toxic attitude to disappear. You have to embrace the truth that some people are just garbage. They are the same pos in every other game, but almost never irl.

The anonymity of the internet allows often meek and obedient guys to act like they are some sort of badasses/villains.

The game won’t get changes and people won’t change either.

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This is better than retail - where other players are just like NPCs who happen to help you kill the same mob as you. These interactions (and some are toxic, yes) made wow for what it is.

Test on retail what you proposed - you will just see hundred of NPCs, there’s no player interaction at all. If you can’t solo a mob, you press a green icon and 4 more NPCs appear in your party to help.

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on the invasion consumables.

They’re optional. Go whine somewhere else about your 1% parse buff.

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Literal deluded monkey. ook ook

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My experience is quite the opposite. I have cooperated with both a pre-made group and with groups that formed on the fly at the event nodes. Instead of the game forcing personal loot on us and therefore no need to interact with each other as would be in retail, we chatted to each other and discussed an order etc.

Initially we chatted to say “Hi - fancy grouping up on this thing?” and then once grouped we discussed and decided “The person who spends the 8x to activate gets to need on the 30x”. We aimed for 2/4 shadows from each node, sometimes getting the 2 and at other times getting 1 or 3!

We moved with the invasion to new zones and had the odd person drop out and we would pick up a new 5th part member easily at the next node.

Cooperating with people in classic is easy - you just need to talk to them! It is also a more sincere and genuine interaction as there are no tools to automate this for you and instead being a nice human helps. Also these interactions matter in classic as we are not cross realm questing etc and the people on your realm are your player pool! Actions and reputation matter and people who are nice, friendly and cooperative are remembered for being so and find groups easily.

I am afraid on this one part I have the opposite experience.

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toxic behaviour is part of classic. if you want ur safespaces go to shadowlands

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I feel over population and events/resources not scaling with that population is the main cause. I play on a fairly low pop server, where low pop likely means more than on a Vanilla server, though not sure as we do not get official numbers.

But during the launch of the invasion when it was most popular, we had every big guild present (you get to know who is who on low pop servers) and mostly cooperate. Most of the tag stealing was done between our several guild parties and we where having quite a laugh about that on Discord where all the groups where.

Sometimes when arriving at a new spawn crystal, others where already there asking us to look for another. Some case we did, some case we did not, and it was more of a race, but never toxic.

Low pop kinda forces you to keep your reputation positive as people will know you and you will end up guildless and alone if you are a prick all the time.

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Yeah, invasion is pretty nice in ten storms :slight_smile:

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Reading this makes me wanna puke man…

You know when i see that blacklotus my hearthrate goes up because now there are 100g laying around for the guy who is the fastest/smartest. Then when you fail to pick it up at first try then it gets really exciting!

I also found a blacklouts once at the same time with another ally and we both tried to loot it and we both failed a few times… then the other guy who got it first offered to sell it and share 50% of the gold. THIS WHOLESOME PLAYER INTERACTION would not be possible in retail/with shared nodes.

There is no good without evil - just monotone safe space solo player experience where fragile weaklings can feel immersed…

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Don’t really mind competing for tags or nodes. The only thing that triggers me is seeing lv 60’s try their heart out to steal my tags when I’m trying to complete a quest in a lower level zone such as Badlands. Then again that’s on Vanilla devs for making Earth Elementals in badlands the best g/ph mob in the game for some bizarre reason. If the game was better designed these 60’s would all be elsewhere leaving questing people to compete with other questers but it is what is.

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Back in Vanilla I do not think I have once seen the term gold/h used. For the gaming standards back then it was a great design. Fact that the game still runs (retail) and even popular as re-release of a 15 year old version tells me the vanilla game defs did a great job.

Players create toxity.

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There is no real solution to mob tagging that wouldn’t hurt the economy. If you take for example mote farming in TBC if every player can get a tag on an elemental then they all have a chance of a mote if everyone is getting a mote then Primals will be worth less as there will be more of them in the market. This would also be abused in that bots/gold farmers would simply put more bots in any given area as they can then farm one spot for multiple chances at the same resource. You’d also have guilds locking down locations as it would become more worthwhile.

Personally I don’t want this changed, it’s annoying to say the least when you get out tagged but that was part of the game back then. If the reason for the change is players being toxic then that is not a good enough reason as the game doesn’t make players toxic imho that’s all down to the type of person who is playing and those who are toxic would be toxic on any game they play and in other aspects of the game.

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You obviously didn’t read the post. That’s okay.

@Breitsamer

There is a difference here. One you seem to forget. The excitement, the thrills, the adrenaline rush you describe is ofcourse part of ‘having’ the said node. And many - if not all - players have this ‘reward’ feeling.

That’s quite different than to people actually insulting, whispering you with all the curses, and trying to steal the next node in the hope they can feel ‘revenge’. This behaviour is simply not wanted, it’s childish and toxic.

Also calling one a fragile weakling is not quite what I’d expected from a mature player. But hey, I’m the fragile weakling, who am I to claim that ^^

@Mynmax

Nice explanation! Something to bear in mind, aye.

@Diokhan

Players indeed create toxicity. Why do sportsmen have referees? Because without a referee the played sport would never be fair. You’d think that all these Olympic Athletes are fair players, dedicated time of hard training and yet without a referee they’d still not be able to hold a fairplay-game. It’s pretty much the same with gaming. Or with traffic. Without a certain set of rules and a controlling institute to oversee that these set of rules are followed you simply would create pure chaos and anarchy. No traffic without traffic rules and police/judges who are able to intervene when someone kills a pedestrian because they were drunk driving.

No World Cup of Football without referee’s leading all the matches in a fair way.

Mankind cannot self-regulate. Never will be able too. Hence regulations are always forced. Wether that by laws or rules, referee’s or judging systems. What you simply said "Quote: Players create toxicity’ is the baseline of humanity.

We are however smart enough to understand this and to implement changes to regulate what otherwise is not able to be self-regulated.

@Diokhan

You speak wise words. Many truth in that.

@Jackyy

I don’t want safespaces. And I refuse to call that toxic is a part of any game. It’s currently a sad reality, yes, that’s true. But it’s not because it’s currently like this that I we should accept it.

But hey, that’s my opinion.

@Artan

Good to see that there are still realms who are willing to cooperate. I must say that the majority of my classic experience has been lovely. The genuine chatting to others creates the willing to work together.

The necrotic runes where only an example to use because it happened/happens at this very moment of writing. I am not complaining about Classic being overly toxic - it is not - nor am I complaining for my own gains.

Nor do I have the desire to change Classic. But I thought I’d bring it up to open a constructive debate for our - most likely - upcoming expansion.

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