Mindlessly following metrics without any thought as to why those statistics exist as they are would be a huge mistake. I hope for everyone’s sake that isn’t what’s going on at Blizzard.
No, the ‘whiners’ don’t truly amount to anything. This is nothing but our opinions and discussion, really, not a movement: yet Blizzard should take note. Players don’t like mechanics that merely exist to frustrate them.
You can downplay them as ‘whiners’ all you like, but people are going to want to discuss things like this. They love the game, and they want it to be better.
Yes, and if that’s how it was planned to work I think a lot of us wouldn’t care at all.
As an aside, that’s the real issue with the Water Strider change. The Sky Golem gets to keep it’s innate ability, but doesn’t benefit from mount equipment. It just seems arbitrary to not also allow the Water Strider to keep it’s water walking and not benefit from equipment.
The problem is that they want you to choose one effect (barring the Sky Golem, for reasons unknown), and have to spend gold to swap between them. That doesn’t feel like “meaningful choice” it feels like “arbitrary limitation”.
The whole thing feels like a theoretically good idea, but with bad intentions and worse implementations.
“Wait you don’t wan’t to buy a new wheelchair? I made a bunch of new wheelchairs and I think you’d really like them…”
Breaks your ankles Kathy Bates Misery style
“See!?!?! I told you you’d wan’t my wheelchairs! You all love them don’t you, you must cause every single person I break the ankles of, they get right in and wheel away as fast as possible!”
“How do you fix the shortage of tanks?”
“Make it more annoying to move around the world as a non-tank. Fewer DPS players means the tank shortage is no longer a shortage.”
Oh god… only half your body comes through in the Inn, just a pile of torsos of people that don’t have the right amount of hearthmaster rep to have the sockets unlocked… AP for hearthstones…
The problem is that this is exactly how Blizzard assesses “participation” in their game when looking at future development. For example:
Every person who wants to fly in modern WoW must mandatorily complete the Pathfinder achievements. When Blizzard looks at players with flight, they note that 100% of them have completed Pathfinder, and in their warped view all those players must love Pathfinder and want to see more of it, completely ignoring the fact that there was no actual choice involved, and that those players simply can’t fly without it, regardless of whether they like that system or despise it.
They set this up all over the game in a hundred different ways, all so they can point to all the players doing X and boast about “participation” and other skewed metrics, even though players are only grudgingly doing whatever is necessary to get past the next artificial gate.
Just read about this over on Wowhead.
Very unwelcome change.
Welcome to mount equipment, the system that takes things away to try and insert itself into the game.
Why solve actual problems with the game when it’s easier to create new ones that you already though of a solution to!
I saw this happen in GW2, as well. I used to love that game, and for a time I played it about as much as I played this. … At the time, that was a lot.
Anyway. Sometime into that game’s development they added a map called the Silverwastes. It was a fine enough map - had a big boss event that people had to cooperate to do, good fun. But players quickly realized it was the best way, period, to earn gold.
So now people were playing in the Silverwastes and leaving all the other content in the dust. The developers looked at the statistics and came to the conclusion that people must really like the Silverwastes! Now while it wasn’t a bad zone, what happened next is what I’m getting at.
The entire next expansion, and all the content to follow, followed the exact same template. They’d seen that players engaged in that kind of content (because it made them rich), and wrongly came to the conclusion that they were there purely for fun.
Too many people said they were just going to equip water-walking and not bother with the system. That goes against Blizzard’s agenda so we can’t have that. This mount equipment mess isn’t even an interesting feature anymore. I just don’t care anymore. Blizzard got what they wanted in nerfing the strider now they buffed daze so…
To me, it doesn’t even matter how slow it is. I don’t care overly much if I have to take a while to get somewhere.
If, however, I have to stop and fight trivial, pointless enemies several times on my way to a destination before I actually get there - because mob density is just too high - then I’m going to speak up.
I’d rather traverse the entire, Vanilla Barrens, without a mount, than try and traverse some of the newer zones that are just chock full of mobs. A sole exception would be Timeless Isle, I feel like those mobs were fun enough to fight, and the place so full of secrets, that it wasn’t as bad.
Tanks, especially Blood DK’s should be on notice at this point.
Patch 8.2 was supposed to be a big, maybe even epic, feeling patch but now it will be forever marred by bad decisions designed to inconvenience players.
Still plenty of time for them to “balance” the mount equipment more before it goes live
![:worried:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/worried.png?v=6" ":worried:")