The friend system has been changed. There are NO character friends. The WoW Friend system works identically to the bnet friend system, except only for WoW Forever, or maybe WoW retail as well when it’s live.
When you friend some person you met doing low level dungeons on an alt, they can now see what you’re up to and when you’re online on your main.
This places too many barriers between making friends. To friend someone so you can play again later, you now need to both ask them if they want to be your friend and also commit to them always knowing you’re online and having a permanent direct line of contact to you unless you choose to hide offline.
There is no more casually adding a healer to ask them if they want to run things with you another time.
I think the friend request portion of this is tolerable, and might make stalking and harassment harder. But the account-wide friends list has to go.
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Yeahhh… I had someone friend request me after we did a couple quests together. I wanted to accept, but also that felt like a lot for some rando I ran with for 15 minutes. I’m sure they’re great and I would have loved to be friends, but not “see my entire account and message me offline” friends. Jeez.
Back in vanilla, I had some friend drama that I escaped by switching to an alt and leveling it to 60. I just needed to step away and get some space. After 60, I reconnected on the new char and we had some good times. If we had this system back then, I would have just quit. Nowadays, after a few bad experiences, I’m very careful of who I let have that kind of access to me.
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Absolutely agree. There was nothing wrong with just adding a character to friends list this other way is absurd.
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This has been looming ever since they added the Bnet stuff way back when. Remember the massive revolt that happened when it was initially pushed? Now we’re the frog in the cool pot being warmed up.
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The friendsystem on beta is like every other beta friendsystem
It isn’t. They just overhauled the ui and how it wofnz.
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Lame. I miss the days when you made a cool friend like Moosaderx or something in WoW. They were a cool cow. Then you logged off and got to look forward to seeing them online again. And you didn’t know when they were playing another game other than WoW. It all existed in the moment.
Ever since Discord, online friends have kind of become my “Saturday morning cartoons” moment. Like, only being able to watch cartoons on Saturday morning sounds so much worse. But in the moment, it was just so good. Even Vent or Skype weren’t so personal.
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ya, like, Droodnucken was cool, but he doesn’t need to know my real name is Kyle.
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In 2019 Classic and SoD and Anniversary, I absolutely refused to be bnet friends with people I met in WoW - just character friends only. Does this mean I can’t have character friends in Forever?
I had 5 characters in Classic, and a couple only came about to hide from stalkers (most people are fine, but being nice to the odd broken guy can make him fixate, and then trying to maintain boundaries can make him mad, and then things get bad). If I’d been foolish enough to accept bnet friends back then, I couldn’t have even hid on a new character for a couple months until they moved on. And I’d learned that caution from a guy using my info in a prior MMO (Star Wars) to find me in real life, and that got really bad.
I just want character friends, and character friends only.
To me, when someone expects access to know what I’m doing at all times - that’s a big red flag.
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yep and its not like online games dont have issues with such things either. Wow has never had a brigading, social engineering or stalking issue. Ever.
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I think that keeping the request portion of the system should help with this too. As long as the account-wide stuff ends.
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I’m going to be a lot less likely to want to add people knowing how much of a heavy commitment it is. We need old friends lists back. We can have this, only if we have the old as well.
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How does that encourage people to add friends and actually socialize?
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When I want to socialize,
Status → Online
This is actually an awful change and will make it super likely I just never add friends in-game which is a shame. Character friends is such a great system.
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Character friends is good for safety AND sanity. Bnet friends eventually leads to someone seeing you online in guild, and offline in bnet and immediately asking why you’re offline. Unnecessarily awkward and uncomfortable.
I will not add random friends like I did back in the day if this stays the way it is. 
Which is sad and very much against the original intent of friends.
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