Overwhelmed by the Chaos: Struggling to Connect with Retail WoW

Community General Discussion
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This is not an anti-retail post by any means. I actually like a lot of things about retail (I think?). I played a lot of Season 1, took a 2-month break to play Classic, and have been back to retail for the last 1.5 weeks to prep my character for Season 2 and to experience Undermine.

However, I’m having a serious issue trying to find a connection to the game that makes me want more. I love the way the game looks, and the environment is top-notch. As a casual player, I like taking my time with as many quests as possible. I enjoy reading the main quest lines and understanding the lore behind what I’m doing.

And that’s the problem. This game is so “busy” that the screen is filled with a dozen NPCs at any given time (hostile and non-hostile), and half of them seem to be flying right above my head for some reason (jet packs, birds, some robot, etc.). Every 10 feet I walk, new NPCs are having conversations, and the text they generate takes up more space on the screen, while pop-up dialogue appears every 20 seconds from nearby events.

When I do quests, I read all about them and still have no idea what I’m actually doing in the quest—like the bigger picture. One second I’m delivering newspapers for some unknown reason, and literally the guy next to this NPC is having me go murder a goblin I know nothing about. It feels like questing is completely blind. After playing for an hour, I leave the game not understanding at all what I actually did.

I’m casually gathering the endless different currencies at any given time. I love this game, but it’s just so much going on, and it’s hard to invest feelings into it. I feel like this game is a blind grind that doesn’t fulfill much. I really want it to be fulfilling to play, but it’s such an odd game with 15 different things going on around my character literally at any given moment.

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it’s a goblin city it’s supposed to be chaotic.

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this is way before Undermine was released

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There seems to be some underlying design philosophy that more chaos and complication = more engagement = subscriber retention.

It must be true in some broad, statistical sense or they wouldn’t be doing it.

I hate it too.

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One of my pet peeves is the seemingly endless supplies of new currencies. It’s a way of micromanaging players and trying to force players to do certain content.

If I was conspiracy minded I’d think this was deliberately done to make sure Wowhead got steady and reliable traffic.

I like the mobs that give colour and life to the game, but in Undermine at least they seem to have gone overboard on the “annoyance mobs” that serve no purpose other than to make us stop and fight boring battles all the time. I don’t think it’s realistic that I’d be killing dozens of randos every day in a city without some sort of consequence.

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What I do is; First time through with my main I just focus on the main campaign and ignore the rest. Then I go through with alt1 and now I have a better picture as to what’s going on so I can start looking around more at why things are happening.

Then alts 2, 3 and 4 come along doing the world quests, dailies special quests, etc. It makes it a lot easier to get your arms around what’s going on.

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Plays into the ADHD mindset of players who get bored without constant and endless stimulation

:ocean: :crab: :ocean: :crab:

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I enjoy this response, thank you for your input.

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