Accessibility should not have to be earned. Steady flying should be automatically available as an alternative

Community General Discussion
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As title says.

If Blizzard has acknowledged that some people cannot dragonride for accessibility reasons, then steady riding should not have to be “earned”. It should be automatically available as an alternative to dragonriding. It’s not even “better”–it’s just a different type of riding. It’s slower and more precise, and more importantly, not mechanically demanding.

I tried to include a link here as an example, but it wouldn’t let me link it. Here is a direct quote from the most recent one I saw:

Do you happen to know if they have dragon riding/dynamic flight options? I’ve been playing for 20 years and now have extremely arthritic hands so it’s been bad enough I didn’t raid last season, and my main is only at 74 because it takes so much to just fly never mind the actual leveling. (I actually enjoy leveling very much normally, but man this version of it sucks.) All of this is so bad that I’m seriously considering like turning over my guild and gold and everything to my friend and then being done with wow.

Edited to add Yes, there IS an option to turn off dynamic flying, but it’s not something that you can turn off for tww until you can get the achievement at max level. https://www.wowhead.com/news/take-to-the-skies-with-skyriding-in-the-war-within-342685 In the old world, I have no issues. Even more than that, I’ve been running on ground mounts, but within the leveling campagian and dungeon, there are things where you’re not only required to use dynamic flying, but also need to be at least decent at it. I’m not, and after DF and this, I don’t think I will be.

(This isn’t an isolated case–there are multiple times I’ve seen people comment that they’re unable to dragonride for various reasons.)

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notice they arent complaining about getting skyriding so cheap and easy, lol…its just steady flight that should require work rofl

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Genuinely.

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Accessibility should not have to be earned. Steady flying should be automatically available as an alternative

give it time.
Ion is clearly coming around given how fast PF is this time.
Its an antiquated achieve literally destroyed by dragonriding and now skyriding on day one…he’s going to have to admit this and move on from PF as a requirement for any version of flight sooner or later.

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I think that “steady flying” is clunky, but I was perfectly happy with it for most of two decades until the new thing came along.

But regardless, I think that it should be available for everyone wherever any kind of flying is allowed, because it really is 1000x better for accessibility, and flying is flying, dammit.

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oh, they’ll have none of that.
They’ll make up circus clown excuses why it ‘wont work’, lmao…because their entire agenda in here is to mock those who just want EQUAL treatment where BOTH flights are concerned.

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I don’t think there’s any reason to lock steady flight behind anything different now.
It’s not like it’s a power spike or anything like that. I don’t even use it 99% of the time myself but it should just be available.
And I bet after this expansion, or even in a later update, it will be.

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Honestly, I was totally surprised they gave us Dragon Riding at launch. I actually expect to have to unlock both flight modes at max level.

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Well it seems like going forward expansions will be designed around skyriding from the start.
Plus even if they wanted to make an expansion based around ground mounts, it would be a hard sell after spending a whole expansion on super fast drakes.

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It is locked behind the lowest possible requirement that can exist in the game. And that’s the compromise for it to remain in the game at all. Because the way people used this type of flying is to skip content, distance themselves from the game, avoid players, avoid playing, and trivialize content.

It still does that even after you unlocked it, but since folks lost their absolute minds when they have attempted to remove it from the game they settled on the compromise that " if you participate in the least amount of content that can be reasonably expected of you to play, you get access to a tool that encourages degenerate and an overall negative gameplay behaviour and experience."

It existing as a tool for folks who cannot use Skyriding, well congratulations. You are unaffected. Because you aren’t using it for these purposes but as the only alternative you can have at this point since flying is the norm, and made into a good thing with and since DF. So you can unlock this after playing the game as you normally would unlock anything else in the game, just like how the game has worked since TBC.

So yes, there’s a really damn good reason to still keep it locked as a compromise. As the alternative would be its complete removal from the game and the introduction of a whole lot more of taxi NPCs around the world.

TWW was designed with both ground and flying in mind. Flying isn’t going away anymore since they figured out how to make it work in WoW with Dynamic flight introduced in DF. But otherwise, yeah they tried to make people play the game and folks got upset that they were asked to play the game.
That’s quite literally the full reason as to why TBC flying still exists.

You have to land with Dragonriding/Skyriding. That change affects how people can use it in such a way that it isn’t the same thing. It is a false dichotomy to compare the two and insinuate that both should’ve been locked at the start.

TBC Flying wasn’t locked because it was flying, but rather because of how people use the thing to make the game smaller, distance themselves from players, interact less with the world, view people as a means to an end, and a myriad of other psychological impacts that the design of TBC flying caused.

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I will state for the record again, Druids should have a separate regular flight form Icon for herbing , so we don’t have to shut it off on all characters. Its a pain as it is.

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No feature used for accessibility should be locked behind an achievement. Saying it’s easy to get does not change this.

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You are meant to pick one type of flying and stick to it.
Not swap between them. The swap exists so folks can do it, but you aren’t meant to do it on the regular.

Druids only need one type of flying for that reason.

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I don’t see how steady flight lets you skip content but skyriding doesn’t. One takes skill to use properly, sure, and I would say is also much more fun, but the trade off for steady flight is it’s much. much slower.

So for people who know how to skyride they’ll get places twice as fast.

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Every game isn’t for every person.

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Herb gathering with dragon flight sucks on druid. I call total BS on it , like it or not

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What? I LOVE gathering herbs with skyriding! It’s so much faster than steady flight.

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This portion of your reply?
None of it matters. The speed isn’t the reason, the fun of it is hilariously not the reason, the skill is not the reason … but “Num Lock”-flying is the reason.

What you can do with TBC Flying is to effectively afk anywhere in the entire world at any time. That ability DRASTICALLY changes how people use it, because it is no longer just how you get around the place but it is the ONLY place you are at unless you are doing an activity.

This is why World Quests were invented, because they forced players to stay on the ground (note how ‘flying’ world quests only became a thing with DF, or otherwise used vehicles to do it).
This is why instanced content became more and more important ever since TBC.
This is why more caves and no-flight zones have been introduced and used more liberally with each expansion.
This is why quests that require you to engage on the ground gives you debuffs.
This is why around A LOT of world bosses there was an ever increasing number of ways to knock people out of the air, either by killing them, putting the boss in a cave, or by other means making flying nearby and then tapping the boss undesirable.

All of these things and SO MANY MORE examples all exist just to counteract people’s ability to sit afk on a flying mount, next to an objective, just waiting until it is the most convenient time to tap the objective.

The flying isn’t the part that is bad, it is the incredible power of being able to sit afk in the sky that is causing a near endless number of issues in WoW and have done so ever since TBC.

Sorry that you think so but… learn to do it, or use steady flight.
You are still not meant to toggle between the two on the regular - you can do so, but then you have to deal with the cast time to do so.

Simple as that.

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Framing this as an accessibility issue will probably never not come across as scummy to me.

What are some examples of these things? Because the very first time when you’re “required” to used dynamic flight (taking a stormrook to Dornogal after the Dalaran intro) you’re given the option to just let the bird do it.

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Yeah I don’t really care about the aesthetics or immersion … there is a substantial group of people who have a lot of difficulty with the way that dynamic flying works.

Not because they’re bad, not because they don’t want to earn it, but just because they have difficulty with the controls.

If WoW were a “flying combat” game where it’s all about who twitches flying controls the fastest and bestest, that would be one thing. But this is a game where:

  • the only purpose of flying is to get from one point to another while not touching the ground.

So imo there is absolutely no question that if there is flying, both “BC flying” and “DF flying” should be equally available. If it takes 5 seconds to switch between them, fine, because honestly I don’t think people are going to switch often.

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