it’s a two year expansion, and we will have waited a year to get flight. i guess that’s middle ground?![:thinking:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/thinking.png?v=6" ":thinking:")
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When they first started restricting flying, they said flying was never intended to skip through all the content and bounce from specific area to area, literally within an area. That’s just what everyone ended up doing. So they made it so you can’t do that unless you complete the zone or continent first. Or whatever the rules are these days. This way they could create specialized content without people flying directly to and killing 1 boss then flying to the next and so on, while skipping everything else.
I feel like the devs have basically said “we want you to spend as much time possible on the ground while it’s relevant” and “we don’t care if you like it or not” in regards to this topic.
Tanaan jungle and broken shore are the exceptions, which is probably because a lot of people would not have bothered with the zone or even stayed subbed if those zones did not have and reward flight.
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“The world is designed to be seen from the ground” or some such.
Well stop doing that! Design it to be seen from the air for a change, eh? Every inch of ground doesn’t need to be an elaborately set scene that we’ll spend hours admiring… in real life, there’s a lot of dull areas in between points of interest. Figure out how to paint the inbetween spaces with broader strokes and the interesting spots with finer detail! 
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Flying was never a problem until bliz chose to make it a problem.
Then all that soon™ weeks not months™
it cost them tons of good will, and a huge loss of faith and trust in them to do what players wanted. Once lost trust is nearly impossible to restore.
it is why so many of the remaining players are in a when It is in game I’ll believe it. Words are cheap, and seem subject to lawyer weasel words at every turn. (Well washington lawyers, what do ya expect?)
Flying should be
Get one character to max level, talk to the flight master / trainer and do a short 5 minute pathfinder, certainly no longer than the initial unlock a AR quest, not the rep / gated part, the short quest that takes maybe an hour usually a lot less.
After that quest the account gets pathfinder in all previous expansions back to level 60 and the current one.
They need to stop playing skinnearian psychologist mind games to keep people chasing the carrot and rng gambling addiction activities.
WoW was at its best when It had a main line of things to do, but also alternative ways to do stuff.
Simple traveling is a very minor part, but flying allows many to do that immersion thing that being stuck on the ground with overly dense mob populations, scaling and huge agro ranges and pretty much zero reward for going on the ground except as another slow you down, keep you logged in for MAU metric.
If one could grind rep killing mob and rep gave something other than just a time gate to major main line content people who wanted would grind. Mechagnome may work there.
Larger zones would help. They should have a new player enter a tutorial start zone a la the DK start area and by the time they play an hour or three they come out at level 60 which could be the new level 1 and travel to outlands or northrend. They then level up to 50 all the way through BFA zones to 120 which would be the new level 50, then return to origional azeroth at level 50 and the whole world is available of the 9.0 expansions without having to use small zones.
Pathfinder would then be completed by leveling out of the start zone to hit the new level 1.
Those who want to see the old azeroth zones from 1 to 60 could play the new classic areas. Give an option to transfer in only one direction to a retail server with you toon so progression could move forward. That way either the retail start or the classic start gets any toon to level 1 in outland / northrend, flying, and opens up land for further expansions.
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Is there a time where these devs DON’T pat themselves on the back?
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Not since Ion Hazzikostis been at game director helm. It’s Ions WoW or the highway. Pathfinder is alternative otherwise flying would be axed. No pvp vendors class tuning dumbed down and not fun, RNG, Titan forge and warforged is the ticket. No more fun. We having fun yet? You think you do but you don’t.
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Thats a GREAT idea! Let let people with alts earn flight sooner! You get one month off for each toon @ max level
If you play 1 toon, you get to wait a year before flying.
If you play 6 toons, you have to wait 6 months before flying.
When your 12th toon hits max level, all get to fly!!!
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I’d go for that. I don’t even need to fly high.
Just above the tree tops.
But I enjoy my mounts , give us a way to still enjoy them.
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I don’t know. I actually like not having flying until the content is no longer relevant. It makes world pvp so much better and gives you the full scope of the story and art in the game. You are lead down certain paths at certain times for a reason. Val’Sharah did amazing with this. And the illusion was ruined once you could fly.
Flying would be a non issue and a baseline option in all expansions if Blizzard devs knew how to make content based around flying. In its current form, flying ignores basically all the created content.
They’ve had years to think about how to integrate flight better into the game, but none of the supposed talks about making flight a bit more dangerous/engaging have come to fruition.
…like the dance studio #neverforget
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I prefer my pvp in battle grounds or a few contested areas, the way it was done in legion.
I don’t want to be forced into the zone detail by lack of flight, I want to be lured in by the desire to do things there, like gathering materials for interesting recipes, finding unusual things that wander around, questlines that gradually build towards something I want (like Kua’fon).
Right now, there’s simply no motivation to stay on the ground between regular WQs, (with the exception of zone assaults which are placed very close together).
And we don’t even mount up after we’ve completed a WQ … We use the flight whistle or hearthstone and teleport away.
Doing daily emissaries is, fundamentally, little more than “fill in these checkboxes as fast as you can to claim your reward and then go try to find something more fun to do”.
Being restricted to grindy ground travel to put checks in boxes is not fun. It’s repetitive unrewarding time wasting filler with no entertainment value.
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I prefer world pvp over instanced pvp. Instanced feels fake, while world pvp can happen at any time and any where whether you want it to or not. I’d rather not skip the world as fast as I can because the art team is doing amazing this expansion. They were pretty good last expansion too with the remodeled demons and undead, but fell short in some areas with the reused textures, many of which were from Wrath. People have forgotten what it means to enjoy the journey in World of Warcraft as we have been spoiled with so many things. Free flying, LFG, LFR, summoning stones, automatically getting teleported to instances.
The world is always so much more alive when we are in periods of the game where we cannot fly in current content. Yes the world quests are repetitive, but WoW has had daily quests since the beginning. So what? That doesn’t mean you should be entitled to complete them as fast as possible with little to no effort on your part. Why play the game if you want to just skip over everything? The world is there for a reason.
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The first time is a journey.
After several dozen times on the same path… It’s not a journey anymore.
It’s a commute.
Why keep playing? Hopefully because there are larger goals to pursue than completing today’s various progress bars and check boxes.
But since the larger goal of BFA is currently nothing more than the AP grind… People have lost their motivation and many have just stopped playing. As I have.
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In past expansions, I unsubbed till I read in these topics that flying was available. If they decide to remove flying in current areas, I may decide not to return. Especially now that arch alt can longer fast track the gear grind. IT’s quite annoying
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How was the game before flying? It was flat,it had roads where most cases around 80 percent of the time the mobs went back where they came from,3-4 classes at least had a travel form to move around on but got dazed if hit by mobs,there was no 3d dimensional maps to find your way around unless you went in a cave–so most cases you hearthed to town if lost in it.
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Flying is “at a nice middle ground” if you don’t think that flight should be in your game but can’t get away with removing it completely because the last time you tried to remove it you lost a lot of subs.
Also flying doesn’t ignore the content that matters. Being dazed and thrown off your ride by aggro mobs every 10 seconds and getting blocked by the artificial barriers everywhere isn’t content that people enjoy experiencing.
There is not ONE SINGLE THING in BfA that is better experienced on a ground mount.
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Ion is simply wrong that we want long time gates for giving us back flying. He is always free to use his ground mount all he wants. Not a single game breaking reason why we can’t have flying back at max level, except for WM people.
Devs are clueless what their customers want and why they want it. not a single one of them communicates with us or can summarize why we want flying given back to us at max level.
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Fight was not about what the player wanted, but what the Dev’s wanted so that the content would be consumed at a pace that they controlled. They have never hid that from anyone. The fact that the Dev have for a long time wanted to remove flight from the game all together. Only after a great deal of loss in sub’s did they decide to use the pathfinder method of granting flight half way through a xpac’s life as a means of what they feel is the middle ground between no flight and flight.
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I dont like PvP in the world at all. IT screws up the game even for people that dont do it. Like Flying.
I HATE only being able to followed the devs prescribed path. Build a world, let me play in it. The devs can get their ego - driven control fantasies somewhere else.
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