Flying... Here's the truth

My family have been trying to convince me to join them in SWToR, but you can’t even fly there. I’d rather they came to WoW.

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I’ve rode this train too long too abandon it before the wreck. If Blizzard really wants to crash and burn then I’ll be first class seated for it.

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An update to this: I kinda stopped queueing for LFR while doing pathfinder grind. It was just a matter of getting the ball rolling. I enjoy it quite a bit for now. Sometimes I’ll queue while grinding, other times not.

In classic you will never be able to fly so there is that LOL.

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This expansion is almost over and players still don’t have flying… Yeah, that sounds casual friendly to me.

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I started incredibly late in this expansion, and only started the pathfinder grind yesterday. I get your point, but once you start, it doesn’t take long. It’s daunting for sure, but if you start you can see

There’s no logical explanation for us to have to grind reputation for flying. It’s just straight up spite.

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Flying has made me actually want to play alts now. If I had flying at the start I would have stayed subbed throughout the entire expansion. It really does make everything better, even the HoA grind isn’t so bad with flying.

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Yeah. The reason they removed it was to make daily activities take more time. If someone tries to unlock races and get flying, they might as well give up any group activities because the time expended without flying is gigantic. It must double the time to completion at the very least.

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Also tie some lore into it at least in wrath the cold weather affected my inability to fly when I could before. Having reputations to grind is because? They will shoot me out of he sky? I’m fine for a quest or even a long chain requiring some exploration and dungeons or something even a gold deposit but as of now it makes as little sense as time gating allied races behind two as well. To make matters worse if it’s not so mandatory why am I afraid to level anything through WoD without pathfinder? “Yes I’m behind and playing catch-up” fix the leveling experience in some place that desperately need it.

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It’s not really, it’s because they want us to play the content. If flying came naturally they wouldn’t put all this effort into the end game casual content, because only a minority would experience it. In classic, there will literally never be flying and people love it.

Just earn it. I have a free schedule 95% of the time so I get a real sense of how long it takes to grind stuff out, and it’s a 3-4 day grind at most if you’re not trying too hard. I don’t mean 3-4 days /played, I mean 3-4 days of serious WoW playing. It’s only daunting if you don’t try to do it. What I learned from actually grinding it out instead of complaining, is that things always seem much worse from the outside looking in, than they are when you just do it.

When you engage in the pathfinder grind, it makes a great deal of sense to you why it is the way it is. If you’re unwilling to engage in it, I don’t know if you really want to play WoW that badly. It made me feel utterly defeated. I really really wanted to play, I considered quitting, but then I considered that I was ignorant, and turns out I was ignorant. My drive to play was strong enough to overcome my ignorance, how about yours?

edit: Looks like you’re someone who both has pathfinder part 2 and complains about it lol. If you look at my next post though, there is a very logical explanation for flying being tied to rep. It’s not spite, no matter how much you believe it to be. The fact of the matter is that WoW is not hurting for subscribers and they don’t care about the vision you have for their game. It’s their game, if you don’t like WoW don’t play it lol.

TBH the lore for BFA no flying makes a thousand times more sense than WotlK cold weather flying. If you’re not proven with the reputations, why would they let you fly in their skies? It’s sketchy. It’s a big deal to be in the airspace above contested territories and we shouldn’t just be able to hover over bases of factions that we haven’t proven ourselves worthy of trust to.

I can dig this. But northrend wasn’t so much a nation-state like Zandalar or Kul Tiras as it was simply open country - nothing to govern the skies, really. To me, they both make sense in a way: cold weather and pathfinder. Though I would imagine as speaker of the horde, for example, you would be granted certain privileges initially.

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Ya it’s true northrend is really cold. Got to buy fur or something so your mount doesn’t die from it.

Yeah it’s hard to say because they’ve made the individual we play to be such an important figure rather than just one of many heroes of azeroth. Literally millions of us lol and we’re all treated like the end all be all. If you think of it as if there are countless faction representatives among the playerbase it makes more sense, but they’ve written us as an incredibly significant individual in the world. I still think it kinda makes sense for them to be tentative of us even as we are written, but it definitely makes sense when you think of it as every hero of the alliance/horde being an equal representative. Still doesn’t make sense when you consider the missions we do solo paired with jaina and other key figures lol.

Agreed! It is the heart of Azeroth, not a heart of Azeroth, even though the faction is “Champions of Azeroth.” Kind of schizophrenic to me, but it’s not too jarring if I don’t dwell on it.

The cold weather flying, to me, was more about technique. Almost a “here’s how to operate/care for your mount in arctic weather: make sure their joints are warmed up/oil temps above X value before increase manifold pressure/torque/etc.”

And they wouldn’t teach just anybody because, well, lower levels may simply not retain that and thus you’ve got hazards flying around above the terrain causing additional, latent threats beyond the obvious Lich King!

(My geeky head cannon!)

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Yeah this has been an issue with the world since legion and maybe earlier but idunno. Things start to feel a little odd when every single ret pally has ashbringer for example lol. It’s objectively immersion breaking and requires mental gymnastics, not hard mental gymnastics, but it does require them. I really wouldn’t mind a return to insignificance.

I really like that explanation for cold weather flying. There is a lot you can do with head canon in this game, a lot you kinda need to do too if you want it to make sense lol.

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I’ve been on and off this ship since Wc1. The game is starting to feel more and more like a foreign country for me. I took massive breaks during WoW but legion somehow felt familiar enough to keep me pretty engaged. I’m also just starting to feel like when i’m honest with myself i don’t have the amount of time for this that blizzard wants me to put in.

I can respect your position and because of that i expect WoW to stay online for a long time, but i think it may just fall out as the most popular mmo on the market and eventually never live up to its glory days as devs are shed to match its population.

To me, it feels like the devs are making arbitrary(usually annoying) decisions to force certain metrics that they believe increase long term engagement based on the early days of the game. I don’t feel like they’re trying to innovate anymore and they haven’t woken up to the full impact of discord. Lots of the communities WoW built are still alive, just not in WoW anymore and people don’t communicate with strangers as much in game any more which kind of erodes the gradual building of community. Mmos tend to be cliquish by nature, discord polarizes them further in this direction and that’s really what needs to be broken in order to keep the game’s social aspects alive.

GW2 meta events somewhat overcome this as they often force random chat communication between players for coordination. But even that tends to be somewhat shallow. Most GW2 players aren’t given much incentive to stay in touch after that really hard meta.

I think raids are also somewhat outdated in the current sphere, not just in WoW but in general. It used to be you chill with your guildies and take what you have, build strategies together using everyone and the boss goes down eventually. It was a hallmark of community cooperation within your guild. Now with content creators over optimizing and pretty much dictating strategies, everyone is expected to essentially be a cog in a machine & do a bunch of homework to participate. It also makes blizzard’s job harder because now they have to make content over optimized to match, or it just isn’t challenging.
Compounding this issue is that the demographic that plays mmos (mostly 80s & 90s kids and older) is getting busier, so as soon as a certain population % of the community has learned the raids, they’re less likely to be kind and teaching to newcomers or people dropping back in, making the community feel more cliquish instead of building community like raids traditionally have. I think they’re a portion of mmos sorely needing innovation. They just don’t build community any more the way they used to. And busier people will PuG now and just take who they think is best. Most guilds fill at least to some extent with randos. And when I raid, it’s usually PUG outside of LFR because i don’t have time to babysit my place in a community and my schedule is chaotic. I like playing with people. I generally like interacting with other players when they’re not toxic, i just can’t raid the way raids traditionally were intended to be done.

i like SWTOR too, almost sub it again this month.

It doesn’t have anything to do with the end game content. FFXIV has similar end game content for casual players and you can get flying very quickly on a zone by zone basis. Pathfinder is not 3-4 days. It takes weeks of world quests. I have no clue how you guys think this thing can be complete in 3-4 days. We are gated to about 400-500 rep a day max unless you get a few missions or the emissary quest shows up.
I’ve literally spent 3-4 hours a night being unable to do anything except world quests because my time is entirely consumed with pathfinder or race grinds. The optimal path here isn’t fun at all.

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Really all it did was add one of the final nails in the coffin of retail for me.

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Why don’t you just do world quests while waiting for queues though? Maybe the rep from 75% honored to revered is a lot more time consuming than I expect, but it’s far from daunting to get 3k rep.

edit: Oh I think I found the problem with your mentality. You are concerned with the “optimal path”. Just get it done the way that works for you. Don’t worry about the optimal path if you don’t enjoy it. It’s not your path, don’t try to walk it.