How Much Choice is Too Much?

One of the reasons why I prefer an MMO such as WoW Classic Era is that it simply doesn't have that much choice when it comes to in-game activities.

Sure, you can go wherever you want in the two continents, you can go into dungeons, Battlegrounds, and raids (if high enough level), and you can even do some repeatable quest grinding out in Silithus if you're so inclined. Or just hang around and fish or just kill things. It sounds like a lot, but compared to a lot of other MMOs it isn't.

Even compared to other video games it isn't that much.

In the early part of the Summer, I played through My Time at Sandrock, the sequel to My Time at Portia. 

That was about the best I could do to create
another Redbeard. Considering I was supposed
to be a "youngster" of about 18-20-ish, it'll do.

Compared to the original game, the new one has several quality of life advancements and presents more of the post-apocalyptic world than ever before. The story, while a bit grimmer than that found in My Time at Portia, is well done.* If you've ever played a sort of building / creating game such as My Time at Sandrock, you know that romancing and potentially marrying a character is a big part of the game. 

And that, my friends, is where I fell down on the job.

There are potentially 21 romanceable options to choose from, and based on my own personal preferences I've whittled it down to 9.** Well, I couldn't make a decision, so I kept putting it off and putting it off, and then... The game ended. 

Damn.

That wasn't what I had in mind. I was going to focus on someone, but I found the options presented to me so appealing that I couldn't make a choice before the game ended.*** All of the characters spoke to different aspects of my personality and what I found attractive, yet no single option presented itself above all others. 

Again, in my experience real life doesn't operate like a video game in that manner --the Tinder-fueled appeal of hookups notwithstanding****-- so when you get right down to it, I had nine options to choose from and I couldn't select one. When everything has a certain level of appeal, trying to decide which option to choose leads to a form of analysis-paralysis.

***

This is not a new phenomenon, as it's been studied before. One of the more recent studies, conducted by researchers from the University of Buffalo's Department of Psychology, discusses how trying to make a choice between options that have a high level of importance make people freeze with indecision based on the number of choices presented. Maybe selecting what you want for dinner from a menu may not be a life altering choice, but if you present it in the context of a first date or a business lunch with a client, the stakes are raised and selecting poorly may cost you in other ways.

Or, to put it another way, take a look at Covenants in a recent Retail WoW expansion, Shadowlands.

You'd think that Blizz or Wowhead would have a usable
graphic, but nooo.... I had to go to a boosting service's
website, Boosting Ground, to find a good version.
Still, just remember that you're DEAD if you're looking
at this. Well, theoretically so, and handwaving is involved.

When you reach the end of the main questline where you have visited and quested in all four Covenants, you're asked to choose one. One of those four would provide a good buff to your abilities, but if you choose the wrong one, you originally had to work hard in-game to be able to switch Covenants to the "correct one". 

If you don't have any knowledge of which Covenant to select --"What is this Wowhead you speak of?"-- you kind of just have to wing it. Knowing WoW players as any MMO player worth their salt does, if you don't pick the "correct" one you're going to get crapped on in group content. And let's be honest, switching Covenants as originally designed would have put you far enough behind any friends you play with that, well... Yeah, the stakes are pretty high here.

Sucks to be you, homie. 

                    --Blizzard, probably

So while the number of choices isn't high, the stakes were high enough that the potential was there to simply freeze with indecision.

Blizzard eventually learned their lesson and eased the restrictions on Covenant selection, lowering the stakes a bit, but one place where they haven't really learned their lesson is in the volume of activities found in Retail WoW.

***

In Retail WoW you don't suffer from a lack of things to do.

This is no means an exhaustive list, but off the top of my head as a Classic Andy here's what you can do in Retail WoW:

• Quests
• Main Questline
• Leveling Questline
• Max Level Questline
• Side Quests
• Daily Quests
• Weekly Quests
• Monthly Quests (are these still a thing?)
• Grind Reputation(s)
• Darkmoon Faire
• Transmog Collecting
• Professions
• Crafting Orders
• Weeklies (no more dailies, is that correct?)
• Just craft/gather to sell (or wait for a queue to pop)
• Delves
• Dungeons
• Normal
• Heroic
• Mythic+ (Coming soon!)
• Raids (Coming soon!)
• LFR
• Normal
• Heroic
• Mythic
• Battlegrounds
• Arenas
• Various 2x2 through 5x5
• Solo Shuffle (have I got that right?)
• World PvP
• Marked as PvP (or whatever it's called now)
• Duelling
• Are there flying races that could technically be put in here?
• Pet Battles (Is this still a thing?)
• OLD STUFF
• Things to do from previous expansions
• Level an alt
• Sit in a capital city and talk smack on Trade Chat

On the face of it, all of this choice must be good, right?

But to me, I look at this list and kind of mildly freak out. It's like going to Jungle Jim's here in Cincinnati and trying to figure out what hot sauce to buy:

Look, this is only half of their display; the other
side has just as many different hot sauces.
From Reddit, but since I go several times a year,
I can confirm that this is accurate.

If you know what you want, great. If you're planning on following whatever Wowhead or Icy Veins tells you to do, kudos. If your guild has already mapped out what you should do --and you're fine enough with being told explicitly what you're supposed to do with your time-- go for it. But if you're new, interested in trying something new, or you have no particular choice in mind, well... Good luck with that.

Yes, this list above does cover a wide range of activities, but if you're new/returning to the game, the number of choices alone can induce analysis-paralysis.

Or you feel like you have to do all the things, and that induces burnout. Just ask Battle for Azeroth or Shadowlands veterans about all of the activities you were expected to do if you were on a raiding team, as if you were just checking off boxes on a daily checklist at work, and they'll tell you the burnout was real.*****

All of these choices might not be readily apparent to long-time players, because they've slowly been added to over the years and as a consequence they're used to them. It's only when you take a step back, walk away for a while, and then return do you realize just how much there is to do and how it can easily confuse people. And that's not even counting all of the systems changes over the years. 

The problem is that the game is going to be 20 years old in a few months, and 20 years is a long time for a video game to acquire baggage. But every time Blizzard actually cuts things from the game --didn't this happen with trimming abilities back in Warlords or Legion or something?-- you get a certain subset of the player base who goes absolutely ballistic. 

The thing is, to grow the game Blizzard will have to do something about this huge list. Something will have to get trimmed out, and some players are going to get butthurt about it. Otherwise, Blizzard will only cater to those who have kept up with the game, and that's a finite number of people. Those people over the years have already prioritized and ranked what they're going to focus on, so they don't have the analysis-paralysis that new or returning people will have. 

Unless someone already has things planned out for you...

To be honest, I'd imagine that there will be
a Generative AI solution for all of this work
in a year or two. Just have an addon play
the game for you and do all of the busy work
before you need to re-engage in time for raiding.
From Maru and Reat via Reddit.

*I can see that --in terms of gameplay-- people may look at Sandrock and think it's pretty much exactly like Portia. That being said, story-wise there's quite a few differences. Well, that and the personalities involved. The moment I arrived at Sandrock, I took an instant dislike to my new boss and I liked the other new builder, which was the reverse of what I experienced at Portia. There are twists and turns to the story, and there were at least a few times where it went in a direction I didn't expect. 

**Of course, real life doesn't work like that, but bear with me on this one.

***Yes, the game does apparently continue after the credits, but... Come on. The game ended. That's like the "Just one more turn..." option in Civ IV after you win the game. You've already ridden off into the sunset, so to speak, so whatever you do doesn't really change anything.

****I could go into a long post on how my psyche works in terms of the hookup culture and how on the surface it might seem fun but that hookups aren't appealing to me, but that's not something I'm going to talk about. Besides, My Time at Sandrock isn't a hookup-fueled game anyway; you first have to become a friend with the person and then you can move into a relationship. That is, if the person agrees to do so, as some of your romance options can push you off and say "nope, not now, I'm busy" or "maybe later" or something to that effect. In that respect, that can be more representative of real life than the "you hit 8 hearts and now they'll say yes" that you get in some games such as Stardew Valley. Even if you do enter a relationship, there's no guarantee that they'll agree to marry you in the end either. (I found that out in My Time at Portia.)

*****As in most expansions, if you come back to it after it's been supplanted by newer expacs, you'll find things not that bad. That confuses the point, however, since you don't have to grind and grind and scrape your way through upwards of two years of doing similar things on an endless treadmill, so yeah it feels better. I discovered that doing the Quel'Danas grind was not my cup of tea in TBC Classic when you have people in guild and outside of guild yelling at people to DO YOUR DAILIES! to progress the story in the Isle. But when I did it on my own back in Cataclysm, I had fun just noodling around Quel'Danas. My past self would never have believed you if you told him what happened in TBC Classic.