Blizzard struggles to balance its Abundance world event in a way that makes anybody happy, with recent potential nerfs making it even more stressful to optimize
I'm still chewing on the thick, juicy slab of meat that is World of Warcraft: Midnight for our review—eagerly awaiting the launch of Season 1 later this week. I am also secretly very glad that I'm not into crafting, because profession-savvy WoW players are having a much worse time than I am.
Abundance events are little collect-a-thons that, for most people, see them romping through a cave eight times a week (more on that in a moment) harvesting abundance in a frenzy of nonsense, grabbing stacking buffs with which to gain more under a time limit. They're… fine. I've done a couple, and I cannot say that they gripped me nearly as much as Prey did. Certainly not enough to plug in eight runs in a row.
Players were finding the fun, however, by tackling them in big raid groups—which not only made them the brand of chaotic they seem to be angling for, but also made it far easier to bag Unalloyed Abundance, which is an important currency for crafters. Only problem being, these raid groups were lagging the hell out of zones, so Blizzard has seemingly had to put the kibosh on them.
As reported by WoWHead, but with seemingly no mention of it in the game's hotfixes for this week, raid groups aren't able to split their abundance anymore. Here's a thread on the WoWEconomy subreddit spotting the same changes: "I couldn't get to 900 on any of my runs regardless [of] the number of players in a group. [Early Access] players are already on purple tools and I'm getting pushed back another week."
That's part of the issue, too—you can only do eight of these things per week, which means that players who got in on the early access are now already ahead, and—in a decidedly Shadowlandsian, downright Torghast-esque move—implicitly encourage you to plug in eight runs a week or fall behind.
Which, if you care about min/maxing, all need you to sweat harder to hit that 900 unalloyed abundance cap as of this latest change—though there's a small chance it could be unintentional.
Here's another on the r/wow subreddit, with user Swaydonym understandably griping: "You can hardly get orbs now, and getting 300 unalloyed abundance instead of 600-900 each run feels like I'm drinking moldy dog water. It was even more fun with groups of people! Running around like a little Pac-Man eating up hundreds of Abundance with other players while Dundun yelled every two seconds felt so silly and was dumb fun."
It's a tricky one and, like a lot of problems Blizzard has had recently, all to do with how rewards are distributed—making Abundance events absurd, silly fun right into the issue of it providing vital progression for an entire slice of the game.
To me, it feels like a fatal assumption's been made that profession-based players aren't hardcore about it, or wouldn't want to optimise the event itself. As we have all learned by now, WoW players will optimise anything.
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