Sub decline started post cata launch but yeah…this is the piece of the argument flyers keep missing. It was the accessibility and casualization of the game that destroyed it. Saddest thing is there was something in the pre-launch hype of WOD that brought all those people back temporarily, but the gameplay shoo’d them away.
I’m all for flight being back sooner…but it’s gameplay that needs to be resolved.
As if using a mount for the purpose of mere transportation is actually a “problem.”
Frankly, it’s both.
Right? And if it were a problem, there are easy solutions.
Problem: “Oh noes, the players will skip all of the trash when they fly in to rescue the prisoner, and then fly out again!”
Solution: “Champion, there is an important prisoner being held in that keep. We need you to go in, locate the key to his cell, defeat his jailers, and release him!” (Quest objectives: search the area for the key, kill Bruno the jailer, and free the prisoner)
Problem: “Oh noes, players are skipping our windy roads full of trash mobs!”
Solution: Give them a reason to be in the area, whether it’s quests, treasure chests which actually have something worth looting in them, or a rare item/currency which can only be farmed in certain areas (sky shards, anyone?). If you really NEED people lurking on back roads, give them a better reason to be there than “oh god, I have to run along this stupid windy, trash filled path again.”
Sing it bro, sing it!
Nice cherry picked quotes from my post. Next time, try reading the whole thing because the “harebrained reason”, as you put it, was explained. It was called Wintergrasp.
Not to mention the fact that that one of the main features of the expansion was the fact the, sans the Burning Crusade additions, Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor were flight-ready.
Sorry, but you’re wrong. See, back on the old forums a former CM, Bashiokk, posted extensively on this issue. Blizzard has since removed the archive of those forums but, thanks to the First Cardinal Rule of the Internet, we still have access to it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150213020741/http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/10571977123
Edit: Endgadget also discussed this post. (https://www.engadget.com/2013/11/14/bashiok-on-flying-mounts-in-warlords-of-draenor/). Note the date of the post… 11/14/2013. Coincidentally that was the day after Warlords of Draenor Launched.
You never saw such a content drought before WoD either. So you can’t pin this on flight.
Sorty, but I was here since Vanilla. And no, I did not “misstate facts”. See the post I linked to above via the Wayback Machine. Sorry it is not convenient for your narrative, but c’est la vie.
LOL.
The fact is Blizzard was going to remove flight as of May 2015. I don’t gaf what Bashiok did or didn’t say before that. The attempt to remove flight trumped anything that came before it. The player exodus that followed was undeniably triggered by that effort.
The content drought would have been much easier to bear if flight had been available at max level. No one wanted to slog through Draenor again on the ground on an alt, whereas lots of people would have happily played through again if they could fly.
Of course not everyone plays the same way, some players just play one toon and when it’s max, they’re done till the next content cycle.
Most of the people I’ve guilded with and played with across 6 servers over the last 15 years however, all have alts (some are altoholics like myself) and we all maintained year round subs. We would level a main, run dungeons, BGs or raids but also play through the expac again (sometimes several times) on alts.
Before WoD there was always enough content so that much of it would be fresh for alts. WoD, as good as questing was, only had that. Blizzard failed to capitalize on the Mission Tables, which could literally have been used to launch dailies to be done by yourself and your followers in the real world. But they decided instead to make the table a mere timer. PF just removes any chance of replayability, since you have to play through all of it on your main! Ironically, your alts can then fly in the expansion zones, in which they needn’t do ANY content. LOL and at the same time SMH.
Coupled with a lack of the usual cycle of content patches, WoD quite naturally alienated many, even before the no flight ever debacle. However, there is no doubt or serious debate that the May 2015 interview provided the catalyst for the massive player exodus, the likes of which never happened before or since.
The player base never recovered. Legion never had the population even of pre-WoD MoP. And within a few months, Legion servers started to empty out.
Blizzard’s ridiculous efforts to force cyclical players (players who play, then unsub between content patches) by imposing time-gates on every little bit of content and by ransoming the single most popular feature of the game – player flight – have only resulted in alienating even more players.
CRZ was neither never used nor required at any time before this new dev philosophy became the new WoW. Empty servers suggest that this game design is not as popular as the game was in the old days when flight was available from launch and the moment you maxed and had the gold, you could travel faster and by air.
I’m not suggesting that the ridiculous time gates, the razor thin gruel that passes for content, much of it redundant unoriginal and unrewarding (it’s more like a crappy full time job) have not contributed to player dislike. But adding insult to injury and withholding flight for increasingly longer periods of time, while imposing more and more chores on the Pathfinger list, has palpably and empirically caused more players to leave the game for longer periods of time, some, permanently, than any other single factor.
All your links prove is that they sold us “delayed flight” then tried to pull “no flying going forward” before being forced to walk it back to “delayed flight.” And the fact that the servers were not tested or ready for flying indicates that “no flying going forward” was the plan long before they admitted to it, or they would have been preparing the servers for that “delayed flight” carrot they’d been dangling.
14 months of SoO says hello.
Expansion vs Expansion. Not talking about the time between the final patch and the next expansion. I’m talking about all the content from 5.0-5.3 vs 6.0-6.2
Spot on. It was never even a discussion or an issue until they made it one. I miss those days.
THIS.
NTM Ion gave this third party interview at the start of the Labor Day W/e hoping no one would notice it. Notably “no flight ever” was not candidly presented to players.
Recalling the many thousands of posts railing against this “no flight ever” plan, many players expressed as much anger over how they learned about it (third party obscure mag interview) as they did over the putative flight removal.
The problem is these devs don’t know how to grow or innovate the game. So instead they choose to tear down, prune or butcher the work done from previous dev teams. They think they are making improvements but they are not.
The justification at the time for the WoD pruning was they need to make room for future growth of WoW. And yet since then the talent tier hasn’t budged since WoD, no new baseline abilities for classes or specs.
The game has literally gone backwards. WoD, Legion and BFA have literally not expanded anything and as standalone games they don’t stand up to vanilla.
Flying was a litmus test to see if this dev team has a vision and they simply don’t if they choose to take one of their crown jewels and throw it into the trash can. They did the same thing with the other crown jewel of this game which was the fluid, fun and dynamic combat system by forcing GCD and pruning of BFA.
And another crown jewel apparently is being jettisoned in SL: seamless area-to-area maps.
Continuous world design with zones linked to one another is the other big crown jewel which in shadowlands they are choosing the Argus method of zone design.
Other than EQ and L1/L2 not many other MMORPGs offered huge zones you could cross into without loading screens at the time. That is why it was called World of Warcraft as it was an entire world based on the Warcraft franchise and not a bunch of maps that the RTS is known for.
Well it’s World of Pathfinder now.
Hahaha I remember that Polygon interview. Where he said something about a epic questline to unlock flight. Still waiting for that epic questline btw lol. Some of the comments on the that polygon thread were epic needless to say. One in particular was hilarious. I wish I still had the link to that one post someone made. Something like it would be more of a epic quest for their pr dept to keep making up bs reasons for its removal lol.
You’re just proving how delusional you are by seeing words I never wrote. You said no one quit over flying, I proved you wrong, and instead of admitting you are wrong, you’re deflecting by imagining that I said people who quit before Warlords quit over flying, which makes no sense at all.
Players quit during Cata because the whole misbegotten, half-finished expansion was garbage, players quit during Pandaria because they thought Pokemon battles and panda characters somehow made the game seem more infantile…despite all the goofy mounts and the talking cows walking on two legs. And yes, plenty of players quit during Warlords because they hated the expansion for other reasons – followers fetching raid purples for you and players never leaving their garrisons bothered them for some reason – but 3 million quit over flying alone. Unfortunately, many returned when the “compromise” of Pathfinder was offered.
I did not.
BTW, my brother would never buy me an expansion because I can get a discount on them where I work. I won’t be buying this one, though, because it also looks like yet another chapter of the moronic pro-Horde merde the devs can’t stop shoving down our throats. Gee, maybe Thrall will make yet another appearance to save the day!
Patchfinder waiting game is basically what it has become. 
There are anti-flight zealots who consider “convenience” a dirty word. And no, I’m not exaggerating. They actually sneer at the concept of getting from point A to B without being repeatedly attacked.
Wait, what? Zone loading screens?!?
HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!
Oh good lord, they want folks to re-experience the fun of playing Everquest in 1999?
“TRAIN TO ZONE!”