The answer to some old, recurring, problems...

After reading roughly a billion threads from people whining about the new expansion... (I'm not too thrilled with it either, I've barely done anything because I find it incredibly boring...) I think I've realized one of the major problems with content in this game, and I don't know why it took so many years for me to realize it. Mainly, people don't know what's there or how to do it...

This game has a ton of quests and missions and just general content. None of it is very organized. Honestly, over the years I've resorted to a filing system here at home and on my PC to manually keep track of all of the things I need to do. Crafting recipes and skill caps, gear and drop information, quest information, upgrade information, calculations, etc. There is literally a stack of random papers beside me with all of this stuff on it, along with some printed maps with stuff marked on them and what not. It really shouldn't be necessary, but it is. Now, I realize that this is a really old game, but so are several other notable MMOs that have managed to provide players in-game with all of these things. Crafting recipes? There's a menu for that, with a search function. Even the menus we DO have could really use one of those. My key item lists are a complete mess and it takes a while to find what I'm looking for in them (...and, by the way, I have no idea what most of them are actually for because the descriptions on them are just terrible and ambiguous...). Maps are vastly more dynamic when it comes to marking and customizing in other games. Quests and missions? The game helps you progress through them... instead of constantly needing to open a web browser so that a wiki page can tell you where to go next, it's right there in the game... so maybe you'll be more inclined to read the dialogue and keep track of what's going on, because it wasn't such a hassle in the first place to figure out what to do... you know why you're talking to this dude, why you need to find this item, and generally where you need to go to find it...

I realize that progress on the UI update is probably at some sort of stalemate in development hell, I don't think it's been mentioned in half a year or so. But this is what the game needs. People feel overwhelmed with the new content because they don't know what to do first. Personally I've played this game for what feels like forever, and I still find random content that's old as dirt (and completely irrelevant now) but I never knew it was there to begin with... so I do it anyway, because it's fun and it doesn't feel like such a task. When I go to Adoulin I have no idea who I need to talk to or where to go or what to do... I suppose I could go around and try talking to every NPC, but you guys have a tendency to make that a hassle too. The whole 'you need to talk to these NPCs in a specific order' quest is a perfect example of that... Had I not had a wiki page open to tell me where to go I would have never finished it, and even with the wiki page it was an extremely irritating quest. Meanwhile, I could talk to every NPC but I'd just have a quest log full of useless descriptions and I'll just have to open my browser again and look up each quest individually for actual explanations on how to do the quest.

You guys have done a lot of talking about how you want people to progress through this expansion in tiers, well this is a good way to do that... Give them some heads up on what you expect them to be doing, instead of just putting them in the center of a ton of stuff with no clue where to go or what they're capable of doing.