Have you felt exhausted when leveling your alt and you realize that questing through the zones doesn't give you as much joy as at the first time you played WoW? You can't feel the same immersion when you played as a kid. How can you improve your leveling experience?
If you like reading quests, you are passionate about lore of Warcraft, you love to explore or you are altoholic, this simple trick will make sure you never play with quest addons and maps the same way again.
The trick is:
- Never use your map and quest addons that rely on map.
TAXI DRIVERS & NAVIGATION
First of all, WoW is a 3D game. When you look at your screen, you can see nearby terrain, trees, buildings, NPCs and location that surrounds your character. You feel like you are in virtual world and steer your character. Almost everything you do in the game takes place in 3D world - you interact with players, fight enemies and explore dungeons. The only 2D elements of the game I can think about are quests, chatting with other players, crafting ... and map. But what's wrong with map then?
As a parallel example that will help you understand the problem, let's look at a car driver and navigation.
Navigation is a tool that greatly helps driver finding optimal way to the destination. Back in the days when navigation wasn't widely used, drivers had to remember the way to the destination or if they didn't know it, they had to pay much attention to the surroundings (road signs). People had to memorize the way and surroundings to the destination. This whole process required constant focus of your brain in 3D.
When navigation showed up (I mean 2D one on the phone or screen in your car), people no longer needed to memorize the way and surroundings because they could look at this 2D map shown from bird-eye view. You have exact layout of roads around you with one colored and thick line that shows the way. It is a great tool... but at a cost.
Constant switching between observation of your surroundings in 3D and map layout in 2D from bird-view resulted in deterioration of spatial orientation as well as problems with remembering the route.
As a fun fact, before navigation was widely used, taxi-drivers had significantly more advanced spatial orientation than normal drivers. Research using brain imaging has shown that they tend to have a more developed hippocampus (region of brain responsible for spatial memory and navigation).
IMPACT OF MAP IN WOW
Going back to WoW...
I think that opening a map in World of Warcraft might cause similar effects to your brain and hurts your game and exploration experience. Similarly as for driver with navigation, players who press M to open map regularly no longer need to pay attention to surroundings in game.
Frequent switching between your map and character's view is especially harmful. It forces your brain to instantly switch between 3D and 2D modes. It's like multi-tasking. You can't stay focused on 2 things at the same time. Opening your map distracts you. You can't be immersed into a game without being focused - that's the clue. If you use quest addons like Questie or pfQuest, you are vulnerable to this beause these addons rely on presenting quest objectives on the map.
Ask yourself: when you receive a quest in Elwynn Forest to go to Fargodeep Mine, do you open your map and rotate your character straight to it or do you go behind blacksmith building without looking at map because you remember it's out there somewhere?
Also if my theory is true, lack of map would explain the success of dungeons and raids in Vanilla as an ultimate content - those were the only places where map didn't work and your brain constantly worked in 3D mode. Also, those places were the most memorable of all WoW. Is this a coincidence?
REMEDY
Remedy is simple: limit your access to the map.
It doesn't mean that you should never use map. Personally, I use it a lot on my main character. But on alts where I do quests a lot and explore low-level zones, I've adopted 0 map rule. On one character I even hide minimap - that's the real hardcore! Another idea allows using map only in inns/cities. It's up to you what challenge you take.
Also note that it's impossible to completely remove 2D elements of WoW. Chatting with friends is core of this game after all.
I want to share my experience. I've made a challenge for my 2 alts: I can never use my map in game.
So when playing on those characters, I can't press M. I must rely on the world, memorizing the terrain and if I don't know where to go, I blindly explore the area. "What's there? What's behind that corner?" etc.
All of that without quest addon of course.
The results were great: I could feel the experience of playing this game for the first time.
COMMUNITY TEST: NO MAP CHALLENGE
With that being said, I know nobody who has done similar challenge here. To my knowledge, I was the only tester of "no map" challenge. I guess if you still read this long post here, you might be attracted by it.
I ask you one thing: if you decide to create a new alt, consider this challenge and observe how much you enjoy this new playstyle. Leave your feedback below, I need more people to test it. Your feedback is the only way to draw empirical conclusions.
