The year long time gate isn’t remotely a “compromise”. It’s a punishment.
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I’m not sure if punishment is the correct term, I’m thinking more wringing. It’s just one of many similar and unpopular decisions demonstrating decreased investment in the game.
That’s some major revisionist history right there. When flying was introduced in BC and was massively popular because it gave people the freedom to move around how they pleased, and because flying on a cool fantasy mount was just awesome thematically. It had nothing to do with shortening daily content, and in fact it opened up the ability to do even more grinds than before.
It also had no part in ruining World PvP. More people getting to battles more easily meant that the battles were bigger than they had been since Vanilla battlegrounds took the place of WPvP.
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Ah, yes BC. When flying was introduced. It was not only fun but it was A LOT slower. There was also an actual reason to have it in the game.
There were areas that couldn’t be reached without a flying mount. Today that’s not true. All of the content can be done on foot.
You say people can get to battles faster but low and behold there seem to be no battles to get to… only people cautiously hovering over whatever small skirmishes may break out.
I’ve noticed a lot less PvP on my server since the mounts have been released. The first couple days there were continuous raids back and forth in Nazjatar. Not anymore.
The past two weeks I’ve had real trouble finding 25 players to fight, let alone kill, for the weekly quests.
That simply wasn’t the case back before people started unlocking flying
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Now that’s some really fallacious logic and a total revision of the history of the game.
In Burning Crusade not only was flying not “almost freely given to us” but obtaining the slow 60% flight took longer than the grind to get your ground mount in Vanilla. Epic flying…forget about it. It could be months if you weren’t playing the auction house obsessively or sitting on a fortune from Vanilla.
If we went back to a system similar to BC/Wrath flying training would probably cost 2.5 million gold if not more and remember that’s PER character. With Pathfinder we get cool unique mounts, bonus to movement speed on land, and best of all its ACCOUNT WIDE.
All of the MASSIVE game systems changes since the peak in Wrath and you choose something as trivial as flying to describe the game’s decline? Laughable.
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The restrictive design that started in WoD has made wow a worse game. Flying is just at the forefront of the feeling of restriction.
Also stop blowing it out of proportion. I had fast flying on 3 characters before BC ended and I didn’t play the AH at all. I was still a keyboard turning clicker and I was able to get fast flying…THREE times. It wasn’t near as bad as you remember it.
Edit - just to be clear: I’m fine with pathfinder but I’m not fine with the spiteful time gate.
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Up until Mists there were flight-only content areas and flight-specific content. The only reason they don’t exist today is because Blizzard decided to remove flight in Warlords.
Flight was never an issue for world PvP when it was introduced back in BC. My PvP guild embraced it and we worked like crazy to obtain it. Because it gave us the advantage over opponents and allowed us to reach areas under attack in WorldDefense quicker.
The reason you see less world PvP in an expansion now is simply the natural progression of an expansion. In the beginning, everyone is leveling, on the ground and concentrated in a few quest areas. That results in more combat. As players reach max-level and gear up, they move on to more instanced content, and they start using quest areas less and less. Flight has no impact on this. It’s simply the convenient scapegoat because it’s so visible to see a player sitting high above on a flying mount or see them fly by. Meanwhile, prior to flight they used to ride by, behind some terrain and you didn’t even know they were there.
The reality is CRZ mortally wounded world PvP and the demise of the World Defense channel finished it off.
Basic flight only cost 800 gold which was less than the amount of gold you received simply from questing (remember the hubbub about how much gold we got in BC with 1-3 gold quest rewards compared to Vanilla). As for epic flight, I didn’t know anyone that didn’t get it back in BC in far less time than we’ve been waiting for it with Pathfinder.
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800? I remember paying 1000. Which seemed nearly insurmountable to me at the time I think I had like 109 gold
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I had enough to buy 60% flying the second I hit 70. Got it all from questing. What were you spending your gold on?
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This is the real issue!! Not many are really “whining” about the amount of work that goes into Pathfinder (although the xxx WQ one is a little redundant) but about the well named “spite-gate”. I’m extremely casual and I could have had PF 1done in early November if there had been a reason to push (IDGAF about the faction “war” so I didn’t do that until I was completely bored) but instead I didn’t finish PF 2 until 343 days into BfA. That’s around 250 days I should have been able to fly. I’ve learned my lesson. I’m letting my sub lapse and not buying the next expac until 100 days before flight opens up. The best thing I can do is let blizz know is the “spite-gate” is going to cost them ~$60 (I buy tokens for gold) and one less pre-order number. Hopefully everyone else out there with a similar viewpoint does the same.
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Anyone that thinks the Pathfinder is anything but a way to delay the player to get more subs in the future, over the “fake content” of enabling flying after the conten has been overdone to death, are just fooling themselves.
Cassino design, folks. That’s all.
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It’s a good quality of life thing, but they make it time gated, which is understandable to some extent. But holy cow man, I don’t wanna grind the same few things just go get rep so I can get it. It’s just not enjoyable, I don’t mind grinding but the way they make you get the rep just sucks. I also can’t stand playing one character too. I have 5 toons pretty much kept up with everything besides the War campaign, which I only do on my main. The game just gets boring. I’d love for them to change up the way to get flying, but, It’ll never happen most likely.
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BS. It would not inflate that much in just 7 years. it was like 2500g in mop. 10 to 15k would be more like it, and maybe not even that much. Love how the forum lurkers(mostly anti flyers) come up with these astronomical numbers out of thin air to try to make their arguments look legit lol.
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Blizzard could easily put all these threads to rest once and for all by adding flight back the way it was before as well as keep pathfinder but they wont do it because it would completely shatter the illusion that they worked so hard to convince us that PF is a better game design concept
have both systems in place and let the players decide for themselves and of course 95% of them will choose gold option thus proving Blizzard WAS wrong and it would crush Watchers massive ego seeing his “vision” is not as accepted as he seems to believe
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World PVP was massively crippled way back in Patch 1.5 when they added battlegrounds. That’s the reason they keep adding bonuses so world PVP can keep limping along.
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They seem to like stirring up, and feeding off controversary though with a lot of the things they implement into the game. So don’t predict them to put anything to rest anytime soon lol. I mean look at all the ruckus crz caused when it went live in mop. Then it was flight, then scaling, on top of that item level scaling lol. They love stirring the pot haha.
Unlocking flight in WotLK and MoP was relatively cheap and more than covered by the amount of gold earned by questing.
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yeah but it seems more like theyre tossing a cherry bomb in a toilet then flushing it
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I would be happiest with no flying, but the removal of the grind to get it would still be a better than the crap grind we have now.
Gold wasnt as inflated then as it is now. It wouldn’t be 2m gold sure… but in mists the most expensive mount was the yak and barely anyone had it.
Now we have mounts going for 2m…
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