And they get $$ for their time. Financial compensation and satisfaction with personal effort are all they are entitled to. They get paid to do the job and players buy their products. I know NO players who ever purchased a WoW expac specifically not to play it.
WoW devs (pre WoD) at least accorded players the option to choose their activities and when they hit the expansion level cap, they could use their flying mounts.
But of course, back then, all forms of player mounted travel were regarded as merely incidental to the game – a means to get from one place to the other – and not the entire objective.
Tolerance for Pathfinger has already grown razor thin, even among players willing to do it. If they continue to ransom the single greatest and most popular feature of WoW behind these absurd chorelists and timegates, consumer interest will continue to plummet.
At least we can fly in the revamped 8.3 zones. We’ll apparently be getting knocked out of the air and/or one shot by a flying worm that has a stacking slow (guess Blizzard listened to all those PVP complaints about players being able to escape on their flying mounts), but we’ll be able to fly.
Now you know how Blizzard feels reading these threads. But yeah, I’m totally “screaming at the clouds” for simply saying something barely affects me, not the people being outraged over this.
I simply asked you for proof and you never provided it. You know you can’t, so you resorted to attacking me directly. The sooner you admit that, the sooner you can stop acting so childish.
That sounds… like as much fun as being mobbed by ground trashpacks and getting killed by terrain “hazards” and defects.
Jesus christ on a bicycle were these devs all tortured as children? Were they never allowed to have fun?
I just want my mounts to take me from place to place. I like traveling to and from combat, not being constantly in it.
Putting some dangers in the world is great. Overwhelming the postage sized real estate that is the expac with them is just … a word I can’t use here. Sheesh…
And that’s why I’ve been calling the anti-flying zealots the Taliban, and Al Qaeda, and Puritans. They’re just hipsters who aren’t happy unless you’re doing it exactly how they want you to do it.
It’s like they want to take away your phone and tell you that if you want to listen to music, you have to buy vinyl LPs.
Wow, you are absolutely delusional, because I let my sub lapse when my 60-day card ran out in January of 2015 since flight still was in limbo. I had leveled two characters to 100, covered one in purple, as well as his followers, yet flight still wasn’t available, and I was tired of constantly being attacked by ground clutter and never being able to find locations because the map was a lie and unmarked barriers kept me from getting where I wanted to go.
In other words, I needed flight, didn’t have it, and quit BECAUSE OF FLIGHT.
My only regret now is that I didn’t hang around long enough to witness the exodus of so many other frustrated players or get polled by the devs on why I quit. I guess I was a trailblazer.
I came back only because my brother bought me a gift sub so we could play Classic, so I figure my flight protest cost Blizz at least $810. And I will never buy another expansion if Pathfinder remains.
That’s reserved for people who think that flying magically solves the reason people quit. I still find it quite hilarious that people think WoD would’ve been good if it had flying.
The sub decline started in late Wrath and has continued to the day. If people were actually quitting over flying, why did they quit in Cata in MoP?
Flying is a minor thing to all but a very small group of people. You can’t even fly in content that matters.
Sure. When you’re playing Shadowlands, I’m sure it will be “b-b-but my ‘brother’ bought me the expansion and game time, so that’s why I’m playing”.
And if you played in Wrath during the early days of the expansion, you would have seen why that did not work.
But since you obviously never did I will break it down for you:
In Cataclysm they were forced to give us flight from the get-go. Because three out of the six new zones were integrated into the “old world”. Those being Hyjal, Uldum, and Twilight Highlands. Deepholm could have been designed without requiring flight but since the aforementioned three already required it they did not bother. Vashj’ir was already a “flight” zone in the sense that we had 3D movement because it was under water.
The lesson Wrath provided was that you really could not have a zone without flight integrated around areas that did. This is why flight worked in Burning Crusade, Pandaria, and even Wrath with the one exception. Those were isolated continents.
The problem with flight that cropped up was with Wintergrasp. Originally it was a No Flying Zone period. The issue was players who were on their flying mounts in surrounding zones would stray too close and go splat, often times having to spirit res. So, based on feedback, Blizzard switched it over so that you could fly in it but when the zone started to clear in preparation for the battle, the no-fly restriction turned back on. This was also why Tol’barad, the sixth Cata zone, was an isolated island where they just simply had you port in and out.
Except they saw what we would do with it. Fly to quest-giver, fly to quest area, complete quest, fly to turn in. Wash, rinse, repeat. There were whole sections of areas and mobs that they actually had to make quests for just to get us to engage them. And even then we only did it once. They did not like that. But since Pandaria was already in development and they were locked in, WoD was the first chance they had to design with delayed flight in mind.
No WoD was the 1st chance for them to get rid of it. They (blizzard) wanted no flight…but the playerbase said oh hells no…then delayed flight was introduced…
MoP was already in development when Cataclysm was launched. It was too far along for them to have delayed flight in that expansion. So yes, WoD was the first real chance they had since it was not started yet.
Second, delayed flight was actually what was advertised for WoD. We knew that for over a year when it was announced at BlizzCon the year before launch. Blizzard just botched in how the handled communication and discussions and basically kept us in the dark except for a few mixed signals including a blue post from Bashiokk stating that it was coming in Patch 6.1. Then over Memorial Day weekend in 2015 they dropped “No Flight from Here on Out”
They wanted no flight from the jump…but did not know the reaction they would get…but its simple for me i wont buy the next expansion if there is a pathfinder part 2 and wait darn near a year for flight…its that simple for me…your mileage and or addiction to game may vary
I think in shadowlands they are trying to revamp rep and world quests but if they continue the same zone design that punishes ground mount usage while sequestering flight for half an expansion I predict more players walking away IMVHO.
And your source for this comes from where? Oh yeah, your imagination. Because unless you actually worked at Blizzard, were privy to those discussions, and are violating a probable NDA, you are making this stuff up.
They weren’t forced. They made the conscious decision to allow flight at level 60 for some harebrained reason. If they had stuck to flight at max-level, level 85 in Cataclysm, as done in the preceding expansions, none of this would have occurred. This was a problem of their own making. It didn’t even make sense to allow it at level 60 since a level 60 would move on to Outlands anyways.
You are incorrect. Delayed flight aka PF happened when players refused to accept Plan A which was No Flight Ever.
And, given that player travel is just a means of getting from one place to another, I can’t imagine why anyone would have a problem with players using mounts of any kind just specifically for that purpose.
Turning player flight into the entire object of the game apparently isn’t working out too well. Never saw empty servers till WoD.
Obviously one set of devs had it right, the new ones, don’t. Coupled with the absolute garbage they package as “content” I can see why retail servers are empty.
As far as I’m concerned, what they do with the retail game is their problem. I haven’t bought an expac since WoD and have no plans to do so until and unless travel just becomes a convenience again and not the entire objective of the game.
Since this is the second post where you have obviously misstated the facts (or perhaps you just weren’t around then and don’t know the facts) I will repost this: Pay careful attention to point No. 4.
5/22/2015
Blizzard announces no flight ever again.
During that 19 day interval, servers emptied, guilds folded, long-time veteran players left the game in droves. For the first time, Blizzard employees solicited, online, cancellation reasons from departing players. These forums were flooded with over 150,000 posts, hundreds of threads in protest.
That’s 19 days where nothing else happened.
As you can clearly see, no one held a gun to Ion’s head when he gave this third party interview, the result of which was the single biggest player Exodus from the game from which btw the player base has never recovered.
The plan to remove flight failed and the spiteful Pathfinger resulted.
And they never saw that anywhere else, ever, because nobody in the entire game continued questing once they reached max level? That seems unlikely to me.
And, for what is probably the millionth time since this argument of “but people will just fly to the destination, complete the quest, and fly back”: if that were the real problem, the solution to it already exists within the quest design.
Also, if there were “whole sections of areas” nobody was engaging with, that sounds like those were sections of the map with…nothing to do and no reason to be there. Again, that’s a design problem, not a flying problem.