Joonhwa:
Please explain in detail how TBC flying negatively impacts your psyche to the point that no one should be able to use TBC flying outside a specifically 5-second cast. […] If you know specific details about this particular game design, then explain the coding or the literal decision-making process Blizzard used to arrive at their decision to all of us here. […]
Because in this regard it negatively impacts game design as well.
You can do quests that go from one end of the isle to the other because of Dragonriding (now Skyriding). Without the speed of Dragonriding that’s not possible.
And you can’t put those tools to TBC flying for multiple reasons:
If you make a convenience tool too powerful you eliminate all other things (see the Skygolem for Herbalists and the Water Striders compared to literally every other ground mount).
Because of how it flies, one small tap going at 800+% … you have no control over that, at all. Which means that you need to reduce the speed even if you increase (like they have) TBC styled flying … but you still can’t end up in a situation where a regular continent is the size of an entire other expansion (because remember, DF also had Zaralakk Caverns and the Emerald Dream, both of which are zones larger than Dragonblight which I believe is the other largest zone to date otherwise - could be wrong about that one though).
If you stand on the ground in the middle of Ohn’ahran Plains or in the middle of The Azure Span … look around you. All of those things are affected by the particular type of flying you have access to: the ground is curved, and in the Azure Span you have trees that are in the way.folks were afk when going from point A to point B not interacting with the game at all as they were afk .
No one cares whether you prefer or like one type of flying above another. What people like me care about is what’s actually good for the game though, unlike you. Because that is the basis of every single argument against TBC flying and why over and over again it has been limited or outright removed from people over the years.
Ever noticed how rares and activities sitting inside of caves were treated completely differently by the playerbase than those that were completely outdoors? I betcha you never thought of that. “Why go inside of a cave to kill a rare when I have to dismount for it”; rares inside of caves stay alive for much longer because people can’t find the entrances and don’t care enough to do so.
Because people spent their entire time in the sky not looking around on ground level.
Yes, how you play the game in this particular regard has a MASSIVE negative impact on the overall health of the game. That’s not disputable. Period.
How folks interact with the entire world was distinctively warped by how folks used flying. Heck we even had an example of it in Dragonflight when a design oversight caused an uproar on these forums: time rifts.
What people do when they have the ability to sit just out of reach of harm’s way but still be around an activity, is that people choose to not engage with the activity. With Skyriding(/Dragonriding) folks have to land meaning that there’s a lot fewer convenient places to afk, so when that happened in Dragonflight because of poor game design and environment building … the same thing happened.
Folks just sat afk and didn’t help with the activity, leading to frustration for some and just a general attitude of “not my problem.” Because… it wasn’t their problem. Folks who were there for the final portal were there for the final portal. Why engage in an activity if it is pointless towards the endgoal?
Compare that to the Tuskkar cooking event. Or the Researcher’s Under Attack. Or the assault on the Dragonbane keep. Or the frozen-futurist world.
When people are given a tool that is TOO convenient, people opt for that. This is a well-documented psychological and honestly just straight up logical human behaviour. In the real world we see this effect when it comes to incentives for people to use other vehicles than cars that it isn’t enough, you also need to desensitize unnecessary car usage.
In WoW it is the same thing with TBC flying, which is why Blizzard has spent over a decade trying to solve these issues when the player base flat out refused to do much than anything but afk in the sky rather than play the game once we got access to those tools. Flying on it’s own ain’t the problem, it is how people have used it over the years. That’s why Skyriding is fine, it has issues, but none so egregious that ever existed by players having access to a mobile afk platform that quite literally warped and reshaped how people played the game.
All of this is why this is a question of human psychology and game design. Not opinions because there’s not much to discuss here; this change is objectively good for the game’s overall health, regardless of whether people like the change or not.
Heck, Hirai’s post here demonstrates part of it as well.
There’s no “those” people. This is human psychology and folks not wanting their toys taken away from them. Regardless of however damaging those toys are.
I have explained it more times than just those two, but I figured two examples over the most recent few days should suffice. But there’s more examples both from WoW and other games one can derive what a positive travelling experience is, how that impacts how the world is designed to be interacted with, and more.
If you want two vastly different games that understood this, just look at The Witcher 3 and ARK: Survival Evolved.
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