An endgame event in World of Warcraft Midnight causes a lot of frustration, as it feels unfinished. It is either chaotic or just boring.
Although the proper endgame of World of Warcraft Midnight with Dungeons (Mythic+) and Raids has not yet started, there are a number of things to do. Especially the four different world events serve as weekly tasks that lure with solid rewards and a lot of reputation. However, one of these 4 events, the “Abundance” event, feels unfinished and quite boring. It seems that there was a lack of development time.
What kind of event is this? The Abundance event takes place at several locations in Midnight. There, you can pay homage to the Loa of Abundance and must gather as many resources as possible within 3 minutes – by killing enemies, mining ores, gathering plants, and so on. The more resources you gather, the higher your score will be.
Abundance is not well thought out, needs more development time
Why does the event seem unfinished? This is mainly due to the strange scaling of the event and the lack of information. When one starts Abundance, it is not visible how many other characters are also participating. This typically leads to one of two states:
- Either you are completely alone in the Abundance cave.
- In the cave, there are 15 or more characters.
Depending on how it looks, you have a completely different experience:
- If you are alone, then the Abundance event is a boring mob grind. Within 3 minutes, you try to kill as much as possible. The big bonus events are hardly triggered since you cannot achieve the necessary score alone.
- If you are there with many people, the bonus events are triggered continuously, even every few seconds. So much stuff spawns that the server lags, and some graphics cards overheat. Here, you don’t even need to move, as you typically gather items faster than you can turn them in at an altar.
Basically, there are only these two extremes. Either you struggle just to reach a minimum amount of rewards, or you just stand around and get overwhelmed with a high score.
Community wonders about the feature: Even in the WoW subreddit, questions about the event are piling up. Many are confused whether they simply don’t understand the event or if it really is as simple as needing many people to succeed:
- “Abundance somehow manages to be both too easy and too confusing at the same time. It feels more like a mobile game. But at least the Loa has a great voice.” – Kohlhaas
- “I don’t want to lie, but I’ve already spent 9 Dundun shards, and as far as I can tell, it’s just an endless grind for enough currency to buy stuff from the vendor?
I feel like there should be more to it, but I just don’t see it. It feels like someone had an idea 5 minutes before the release and just shoved it in there.” – EternalNewCarSmell - “Abundance should have been a feature for patch 12.x.1/5/7 and needed a little more development time. It is simply underdeveloped and didn’t need to be this way.” – TheBiggestNose
Cortyn says: Honestly, the Abundance event is the one thing about the weekly activities that makes me raise my eyebrows in confusion, as it doesn’t make sense from my perspective. Unlike the well-thought-out loot system, at least solid defending in the Voidstorm, or the Harandar relic research, the Abundance event simply feels unfinished and poorly thought out.
In its first version, the event was essentially a waste of time solo. Because alone, you couldn’t achieve a high score at all since there was no scaling with the number of current participants. However, if you were active there with 10 people at the same time, then the event became completely absurd – you could achieve scores of several million points and rack up achievements that Blizzard surely planned for several months.
The Abundance event is, in my opinion, something that needed a few more weeks or months of work to become really good and meaningful. In its current state, it is merely an annoying weekly chore that is neither fun nor challenging. It feels poorly thought out both gameplay-wise and design-wise. It is an element that I could easily do without – but I have to “play” it if I want to have strong profession gear.
Maybe the developers can manage to revise and improve the event by the next major patch. Because the current state does not match the quality that one would expect from new features. Very different is the Prey system, which is really good – and can even be completed in just a few minutes with some tricks.
