Problem is it would be unfair to newer players, essentially requiring them to purchase tokens to afford it.
Exactly. It may not be flying per se that’s making people quit. A percentage may quit over flying alone, but I think far more are quitting over the restrictive, controlling design philosophies that led the dev team to try to remove flying in the first place.
Restrictions on flight may be the most visible symptom, and a symptom that many of us dislike, but it’s still only a symptom of the larger design philosophy issues that have been altering the game since WoD.
(I also have a suspicion that things like paid boosts and the compartmentalization of professions have less to do with making it easier for players to reach endgame and play with their friends, and more to do with minimizing just how much more freedom we used to have in finding our own story path, and how much utility professions used to give. People can’t miss what they never get to experience, and if you boost them right into the current RNG grind then they don’t know what’s been taken.)
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That’s a very sad suspicion and now that I’ve read it I kinda agree with it.
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Might be 2 mill to unlock flight acct wide, but it would not be 2 mill per character like that one clown mentioned. You can blame garrison tables, and Legion mission boards for the gold bloat. Believe that was just a way to help counter the hack gold seller sites, and is also why tokens are a thing now. And now that you can use tokens and convert to game time, people were screaming a couple months into BFA not enough gold missions, or gold wq dailies haha! Instead of just some hack gold seller sites getting people to farm gold for them back in the day, they, now blizz has turned the playerbase into gold farm bots to keep feeding the addiction lol.
Even in Nazjatar, they could have covered the tops in ship wrecks and put something there. It could have increased the zone by a third.
Exactly. They don’t USE mountains (for gameplay) in their map design anymore. They use them as aesthetically-pleasing obstacles, and to decrease how much of the map they actually need to fill with content.
Have an empty spot on the map and nothing to put there? Drop a mountain on it. The map still looks big on paper, and you’ve decreased your workload.
And Nazjatar, being a zone that was underwater, should have 100% been designed for travel in all three dimensions. That’s exactly the kind of zone that shouldn’t have ground paths to everything, because the natives would have been swimming everywhere.
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I think they gave up on balance of lower levels some time ago, which was a big mistake as it gave the casual player base something to do beyond the same WQs over and over. I also think MoP was where we really saw the change in their design philosophy, but they were sticking their toe into the idea of forcing dailies and soaking their feet in WoD (and finally fully immersing in BfA).
At least in MoP they were willing to go “Yeah, we put too much emphasis on the daily rep grind” by (IIRC) the first patch and make changes. And MoP gave us the Commendations you could buy at revered, which doubled rep gains with that faction account-wide, making it far more alt-friendly.
I don’t know that MoP was them sticking their toes in, so much as seeing how far they could push players onto rails, and then going “You know, this would make our lives so much easier.” Serendipity, rather than actual intent.
WoD really seemed to be them grasping onto the idea of “we don’t need to give them a world as long as we build a windy enough train track and herd them all onto the train” and running with it.
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I don’t see how certain idiots believe the crap they persuade other to believe.
I dunno. You had to rep with one faction to open up quests for another faction so you could spend justice points. I think they were doing what they are now but they didn’t have the right bait. Then in WoD when they announced no flying and so many people left they realized that was the carrot to get people to run the dailies over and over. Same trap, different bait.
At the start of the expansion, yes. But that’s what they changed, I think in 5.1 (which is quick compared to the year it took them to admit the HoA wasn’t working and change it). They removed the gate of needing to grind Golden Lotus rep before you could start on Shado-Pan and August Celestials rep.
But you’re right, that could have been them taking a step back to calm the fires before they took a running LEAP into WoD, now with better carrot.
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see that’s just it in MoP they dangled the carrot but in WoD they basically had us bend over then told us to turn our head and cough when it came time to use the carrot
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I agree that it makes travel faster.
I disagree that it allows you to see more. I’ve discovered way more fun things while on the ground rather than from the air.
Yeah, they’ve definitely embraced the idea that if they can’t lure us to the carrot, the carrot will be forcibly applied to us.
Look at paragon caches. People disliked having to grind them for mounts in Legion, but they did it. In BfA, Blizzard appeared to relent by having the paragon caches initially only drop currencies, but I guess that didn’t get them the metrics they wanted, because we’re back to RNG pets, mounts, and blueprints in the Mechagon and Nazjatar paragon caches.
Another piece of evidence on the side of “if it gets them the results they want, Blizzard doesn’t care if it’s fun.”
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That’s entirely a matter of design. If they’re designing for flight, they put little easter eggs in otherwise inaccessible places, like the two skeletons sitting at a mah jong board, high atop a spire in the Jade Forest.
Blizzard’s current design, though, is to create mountains and other dead spaces that are little more than painted backdrops, because they don’t want us flying and don’t care about the experience from the air.
That said, you can’t properly appreciate the dinosaur skeleton near Xibala unless you’re looking down at it from the sky.
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I will say you always have the option of staying on the ground if that makes the game more fun for you.
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I never said I wanted to not fly.
When someone says something positive about being on the ground vs flying I just feel like I need to point out you can always have that experience because it’s a choice.
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Yeah, that’s not really necessary.
Posting anything on here isn’t really necessary yet here we are.
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