The narrative Ion is painting does not line up with the reality of what the situation was at all. This is what REALLY happened:
A tiny minority of players complained that flying ruined world PVP
The devs wanted to remove flying because they claim they wanted people to see the world on the ground more before flying over it (or was it really to increase that MUA number?)
A huge majority of people complained about removing flying.
Tom Chilton states in a recent interview that an overwhelming or significant majority of WoW customers needs to be in favor of flying for flight to be introduced into WoD.
Blizzard added flying back in with this ridiculous “middle ground” compromise when flying was never a problem for the majority of players to begin with until Blizzard made it one.
And now they’re pretending like a significant number of players had a problem with flying by saying there were people with “different playstyles” who opposed it. No Ion, no there were not. There was a small minority of world PVPers and you and possibly some of the devs. That was it. Stop trying to paint a false narrative to defend your ridiculous stance that time gating flying for months to a year is a good thing, when huge amounts of people have repeatedly voiced their feedback about disliking it ever since.
This in an interview that was meant to give players faith that the devs were listening and aware of the problems with the game. It’s pretty clear they are not.
Nothing is preventing the developers from putting zepplins and transport ships into the new expansion lands. The reason everyone teleports everywhere is because the developer’s easy, lazy way is to make portals or NPCs with chat teleports (like at the docks). That’s not our fault. We didn’t tell Ion and Co. to take the easy way out. So, why are we punitively punished by having them take away flight every expansion?
Because they want to condition us to not have it, so when they finally remove it for good, no one will fuss. Then they can skip all the corners when they design the world, by putting only 2 or 3 walls around buildings, and bugging out geometry where we can’t see.
Zepplins/Ships is the most specious argument I’ve ever seen someone against flying make. They could put those things in AND have flying. It’s not either/or. Fact is, the developers want BOTH gone to save development cost and time. Period.
Just think about how much wasted energy, time and community goodwill go into keeping us from flight… it baffles me. It’s like a resentful parent taking out their frustration on the children by taking our toys away. I’m so glad I’ve moved on to other games, where I’m not talked down to and belittled by a video game director of all people.
“Nice middle ground”, my hoof.
Ion, the only ‘nice middle ground’ would be the ground you land on after Activision-Blizzard kicks you out the door.
If I can have flying I promise not to do that…seriously.
I was going to edit the post but just gave up and made a new reply. Never called anyone a “idiot” nor do I plan to. Believe what you want, i was just comparing the two.
I hate when people don’t consider the opposition’s opinion. Look, there are people who enjoy the game without flying too. This objectively makes pathfinder the middle ground. You still get it, just later. We can keep it, and we can stop whining about our compromise.
[quote=“Clocklock-laughing-skull, post:262, topic:142292”]
Whats the benefits of flying, moving faster, skipping content
[/quote]Wha? How exactly can you progress, if people are skipping content? Complete opposite actually. Them trying to remove flight, and now gating it has nothing to do with skipping content, pvp, or muh mersion, or any of the other rubbish the forum lurkers like to spew. It is about slowing content consumption down. Nothing more. And like that works lol. The addicts are still burning through content regardless of flight. Been grounded since the start of BFA, and you already see when is 8.2? Or i’m bored, there is nothing to do threads. They may as well just let folks fly, because the content is going to get burned through anyways. Still surprised people have not figured it out. Nobody took the pandas advice when they said slow down, so the devs took matters into their own hands lol.
And Timeless Isle, and Isle of Thunder, and yes, Argus. When Argus hit, we’d been flying for less time than we’d been waiting for it, and it lasted longer than we’d been flying. This “flying is bad because we said so and since we still win, we feel like it’s fair” nonsense is part of what’s driving players away. (“Then let them go!” isn’t an ok response. We should not encourage the playerbase to leave.)
Edit: Pathfinder is great. The 8mo+ time gate is not.
They all already left. It’s still a pretty divisive issue among remaining players, though I don’t know why any player would agree with having choices removed from the game.
The game has never recovered from that self inflicted wound. The remaining player base is a fraction of what it was at WoD launch.
That would be news to me, figured it was just another gate system like last few.
sure, I argued pretty much all morning about flight. 1am and im hitting the end of the day for me. I just dont care. You can find everything I said up above. good amount of replies.
There is only one boat/zeppelin that could even compete with flying. That is from Org to TB. Maybe the Deeprun Tram, but that gets you from SW to IF so much faster than flying could.
You do bring up a good point. How much cooler would it have been to have had a whole network of Zeps all over the world than a network of portal hubs. I guess Blizzard was the lazy one after all and now they think we are the lazy ones!
Your opinion is you like being on the ground and nothing has ever prevented that. You want ME on the ground, and that’s you not considering my preferred playstyle. How is that ok?
It’s not working anyway, because once I have PF completed, I don’t go out in the world until it’s actually activated. At least with flying I’d be adding to the zone’s population. I don’t know what you think you’re succeeding at aside from your hypocrisy.
Nope, I like the way things are in the game I pay for. If you don’t like the way things are in the game you pay for, you probably don’t enjoy it and should stop paying for it willingly like you do.
It makes the world look dumb with hundreds of visible people on these rare and exquisite dragons, and less active, with less things happening.
I have only stated that I like the pathfinder middle ground, I’m not advocating for removal of all flying mounts. This said, we have a middle ground. Everything is satisfactory. Have fun when the pathfinder achievement comes out, and the flood of these posts on the forums suddenly stops.
If you don’t like the way the game is stop playing. If you don’t like flying in a game where it is a mechanic than stop paying. As for the rest of us, we are voicing our opinions about one of the reasons why we from time to time do stop playing and paying for the game. Just quietly quitting the game does not make the game better. If Blizzard wanted 0 feedback they would have not ever made a forums.
I never stated I don’t like the game. I have however stated, that I like the way things are with the pathfinder achievement. If you don’t like the pathfinder middleground, unsubscribe I guess. Because you’re never gonna get it from the start of an expansion.