My July 1st post on World of Warcraft’s huge barriers to playing with friends generated a bit of discussion about what lower barriers would do to the game.  In particular, would it increase anti-social play?

Well, we’re about to find out– Blizzard just announced cross-realm grouping for instances.  Details are slim, but it sounds a bit strange so far: it appears biased towards Pick-Up Groups (as opposed to playing with friends), instead of playing with friends.  There are even special rewards for cross-realm PUGging an instance.  Maybe this is their way to finally get folks to use the Looking For Group system?  It’ll probably still be within battlegroup, and not cross-faction, so playing with an arbitrary friend is probably still out of the question.  (Most of the downsides with few of the upsides?)

With WoW’s current reputation and loot systems, this new feature would be pretty griefer-heavy.  But I don’t imagine we’ve heard nearly all the details.  Blizzard doesn’t usually release things half-assed– well, except the Looking For Group system.

Also, they’ve started hinting towards mentoring/sidekicking to allow people to uplevel/downlevel to play with their friends.  They’re really pushing the alt thing with Cataclysm.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 22nd, 2009 at 10:26 pm and is filed under Game Discussion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.