LOL - the history of the bait and switch was clear in the forums when they did not release flying in WoD. You might not have been around then, the dev team was called out on the deception in the forums until they went back to the presale promise of flight.
Get your facts straight and don’t defend them, they can do that themselves.
You do realize that, were Blizzard to put Isle of Thunder or Wintergrasp content into PvE leveling, people would whine and moan for weeks. Look at Stormheim for example, it has a cool system where you can use that grappling hook to traverse the cliffs. Flying invalidates all of that. People complained about Highmountain just because its not a freaking flat plain and people had to explore. They know they can’t do anything beyond the kill-gather, because the players whine about anything and everything on the forums
Your post just reinforces your anti-flying bias. When flying is available you have a choice not to fly.
The issue with flying is that it imbalanced the world for those without it. So for me, the major issue is the player who (for example) comes in at patch 8.3 when we’re all zooming around and they’re walking. Getting to WQs, managing new quests, PVP…it’s all grossly imbalanced. In my mind, if you have 3 patches
It wasn’t so much that the dev team was “called out”. It was more like they had come to believe that endless waves of trolls posting obnoxious and repetitive anti-flight threads would somehow change players’ opinions of flight.
It didn’t. But it wasn’t a matter of posting whiny threads. People talked with their money. A huge number of players left the game over the issue, and many have never come back.
Good for you. I hated having to grind gold for each of my alts to pay for flight. H. A. T. E. D.
And it made my game more enjoyable, and gave me more options for leveling alts.
I don’t have “anti-flying bias,” calm your tusks. Yes, I believe that no-flying is beneficial at the start of an xpac. I have been very open with that position. I just happen to think that the WoW playerbase whines a lot.
And I’ve never felt the “mandatory” need to do anything. But its a common complaint on these forums whenever anything that ISN’T gated by a cap or time contstraint. If you remove the time-gate, people will stop whining about the time-gate and instead whine about having to do the achievement in the first place.
Flying at max level worked out very well for BC and wrath. It certainly didn’t hurt those expansions at all. Why did it all of a sudden become a problem?
If you want to use “whines a lot” as some kind of basis for anything, the anti-flight crowd with their endless reposting of lame debunked rationales for removal of flight is way ahead.
“People will complain anyway, so we may as well make bad business decisions that will drive millions of them from the game.”
Not part of the plan, but in the end it was what happened.
And MoP as well
I’m crossing my fingers that maybe the devs will listen to all of the people who’ve spent the last 2-3 expansions asking for flight to be released earlier with part 1. But I really don’t have a lot of hope left honestly. If Shadowlands is released and it’s just the same old waiting to fly for almost a full year again, I already know I won’t be able to enjoy it because I wasn’t even able to enjoy Legion due to waiting for flight too long. And Legion was a fantastic expansion!
I have tried Blizzard, I have genuinely tried to still enjoy this game that I’ve always enjoyed for well over a decade with this change, but I just can’t do it. Pathfinder and the wait for flight completely ruins my enjoyment of this game and that’s that.
The arguments for Pathfinder are fairly solid. Maybe theres a better way of doing it. Its certainly better than the “Blizz, if you don’t give me flying I’m gonna unsub” who’s subs never run out crowd.
You know when I like being on the ground? When I’m doing the zone storyline for the first time. You know when I don’t like it? When I’ve done the entire zone storyline 4 seperate times, gotten exalted on all factions on 3 different toons, explored the map, but then get to wait several months for the privilege of another time gated rep grind. Blizzard used to make content with flying in mind.
Notice how when level scaling was implemented and flight opened up automatically in mop, there was not a single voice saying that this was horrible, and a giant meta achieve was the only solution.
No, everybody said, hey, this is great! I never saw Pandaria like this while leveling before!
What’s the big difference between Jade Forest and Draenor Shadowmoon Valley that makes it so that flying mounts would ruin Shadowmoon but didn’t ruin Jade Forest? Jade Forest even has treasure hunting for XP like Shadowmoon.
Most people are fine with pathfinder. It’s the spiteful time gate that is the most hated.
and I agree on the time gate but not on forcing players into tedious travel to get repetitive content done.
The Pathfinder thing is the reason I don’t explore zones.
It puts me off from going anywhere. So I’ll continue to camp my butt in Org next to the AH.
Really? How?
Ngl, I do believe the time gate could be quite a bit shorter. I think there should be SOME time-gating, so as not to create a pressure to mad grind the reputation. But i do think a year (approx) is too long. The x.1 or x.1.5 patch of the xpac would be more appropriate from my opinion.