Buy another for me then burn it in a dumpster.
I think most of them were redirected to Overwatch (since the completed parts of Titan were rebranded as Overwatch) rather than WoW. It could be possible that some were though.
Flying is definitely a necessity, and it wasn’t included in Vanilla because it would have revealed what an embarrassing mess the world map was.
The devs admitted after the release of Cata that designers had to rebuild Stormwind from scratch because Vanilla SW was not 3D at all, but a series of flat planes–tunnels, basically–that gave the impression of three-dimensional space. But now flight is absolutely necessary to get around, and I’d really like to know how you’d put out the Horde’s Burning Man without being able to fly into Lordaeron–fight your way in? Good luck with that.
BTW, I just visited Nazjatar for the first time yesterday, and I don’t want to return unless I can fly there. It looks like it was designed to be a 3D puzzle and I just don’t want to deal with that crap. Mechagon is so much easier to get across and it even has flying backpacks!
So, in short, the entitled whiners are the folks who insisted after seven years of flying mounts that they suddenly were offended and the mounts must go. If you don’t like flight, don’t fly. Simple as that.
I liked Flying in WoTLK and quest hubs, but no flying in classic vanilla zones, it made sense you know, outland had these beautiful flying islands and massive gaps and they could do really fun things like massive continent spanning craters and beautiful forests you could just fly over and expansive ruins to explore with four stories high. There were quest hubs out in the world, and despite there technically being more ‘content’ to do with world quests the first week, it quickly devolves into ‘Find the easiest closeby thing to kill’, ‘repeat this quest you did while leveling’ ‘Fall asleep playing the turtle quest since you need the rep’, etc.
Honestly i really kinda miss the daily valor point system and flying across the world to do quests around the continent was pretty fun. I’d much rather have a giant 5 continent with flying to get around than two seperate islands kinda zoned off from eachother. Contrary i kinda liked questing with flying in storm peaks where if you want no flying you could just have quest zones inside of a keep or cave to explore or do things like those open ice caves you could fly into, and see a jotun, or a giant collossus the size of the earth just wandering around. Like Thrym
It was kinda fun and offered a lot to explore in the world. i don’t really see what the problem was. Sure you didn’t need to grind 2-8 hours straight everyday unless you wanted to but people hung out in dalaran, dueled in the sewers, laughed, made friends, leveled alts for fun (for new playstyles, gearing, and no cancer essenses grind, even attunements weren’t that bad. I’d liken essences to having to grind 2-3 WoD legendary rings just for the time gating.)
Replying again because I see you are posting and not sure you would see an edit.
I would probably divide it up a little differently:
Vanilla-Wrath Cataclysm-WoD and Legion-Shadowlands.
Logic being that is when game directors changed.
Watcher of course broke the tie and said he doesnt want flight which proves the only compromise reached was between the dev team
But yet you notice the ones supporting flight wont dare speak up publically in support since itll most likely cost them their positions for going against the boss
Wouldn’t be surprised if those were the same Blizzard staff that covered the plaques outside Blizz HQ because of the fiasco with China
It’s the reasoning behind Pathfinder that’s just an example of the flawed game design that has destroyed the game.
To put it simply: WoW isn’t designed to be fun anymore. Fun is a carrot they dangle on a stick and string players along chasing it through a series of pointless and repetitive grinds that they know players don’t enjoy, yet are necessary in order to get to the things we do want…like flying.
They have no faith in players playing the game just out of sheer enjoyment. Rather they rely on manipulative and exploitative designs like this to keep players subbed and p(l)aying for months on end.
Of the 150 members, 40 were transitioned onto Overwatch. The rest were distributed to other projects and if I remember correctly, about 50 moved to WoW. Integrating that many back onto WoW apparently caused a slowdown due to retraining the returning members which is one of the stated reasons we had the 14-month content drought at the end of Mists.
True, but design-wise, Warlords is sorta the odd one. There clearly was a break in the design between Wrath and Cataclysm but Warlords was far more transitional as a stepping stone between Mists and Legion. It retained much of the leveling design from Mists but began the process to include an alternative progression system (the Artifact weapon) through ability pruning and it had the seeds of the world questing system with discrete max-level zones within the leveling zones. For those reasons I consider it more of the Legion/BfA design model than the Cataclysm/Mists model.
Ah I see that makes sense.
I can see that, content wise I agree. I was thinking more along the philosophical lines. Both ways probably have some truth to them.
Yeah, I’d read years ago that working at Blizzard was quite unnerving for new hires who didn’t conform to the corporate culture. If you applied because you loved the game but your main was Alliance, you had to keep that a secret (don’t ask, don’t tell) and pretend you played Horde or face hazing and/or harassment from a thoroughly pro-Horde management.
As if that was a surprise, though, since the storylines over the last decade have been so thoroughly and obnoxiously Horde-centric.
What’s fascinating about Warlords to me, given everything that was going on in the background, is the overall game design really looks a competition between designs/clash of designs with many ideas unfinished, unexplored, or given up in Warlords. I continue to be fascinated with Warlords for this reason. How one design style seemed to have lost and one design won can be found like clues scattered around within that expansion.
WoD just makes me sad. It had the potential to be one of my favorite expansions but it just totally failed to be… complete. Like I really liked my garrison (no hate! I did), but… outside that what was there? Raids? Sure, but at that point I had already stepped away from high end raiding. PvP? That doesn’t really interest me. Had it had more “meat” outside garrisons I am positive I would have loved it.
That’s the way it was UNTIL the snowflakes decided flying upset their “sense of immersion” (as if naked RP in Goldshire didn’t exist).
The beauty of Wrath is once you’ve “seen” the content, then you can buy flying passes for your alts so they aren’t stuck to ground as you had to be.
I’d really like to see Blizzard go back and complete the things they left unfinished in previous expansions.
I’ve heard a lot of TBC was abandoned, too.
Probably. TBC will always hold a special place in my heart because it is when I started so I saw absolutely no faults with it, lol. I am almost scared for if/when they progress into BC from Classic (or just BC servers), I don’t wanna ruin my perfect image.
Finishing stuff could be cool though. I don’t know how popular it would be (probably not very lol), but similar to how I feel in regards to focusing on the classes/races we already have now vs creating new ones in Shadowlands, I may be equally ok/exited to flesh out the areas (and what that entails) already in existence as well some day.
They could try the Wrath system again, where the last zone (two in Wrath) were designed with flying in mind and let you buy it again or earn it as you start the last zone(s).
I absolutely love my garrisons – my demon hunter even has one! – and the follower system was amazing…which makes me wonder why both were kicked to the curb afterward.
Sure, the PvPers hated garrisons because no one left so they could get ganked, boo-hoo, but the follower system in Legion was pathetic and half-baked – as if the designers were forced to include it but didn’t really want to – and the system in BfA is even worse.
If you can’t bring it back in its full glory, then drop it. In the meantime, I may just keep one of my alts permanently in their 90s just so they can keep their followers busy.
Warlords makes me sad too. There was so much potential left there. Farahlon, the Orge empire, etc. I mean, who didn’t want to see what Netherstorm looked like before it was shattered?
The garrison was actually a good concept but they took it too far as Blizzard often does. Which is interesting, they’ve always stated that they’re wary of including player housing because it would isolate players but then they built the garrison to be entirely self-contained, completely isolating players. Another reason I find Warlords sad is because they can now point and say, “see player housing doesn’t work” when it was their own design which made it unworkable.
There was also this weird mix of straight-up Vanilla gameplay with reputation grinding purely via mobs. And they tried to recapture AV in Ashran but somehow made it more PvE-based than PvP-based with its objectives so the whole thing made no sense to players at a basic level.
Like I said, it’s like there was design going in so many different directions without someone making sure the whole thing was cohesive. Having many years in the design industry, it really intrigues me.
Wait don’t you hearth to your Garrison when you"re logging off and send followers out and stuff before logging? I do this on all my characters.
So you want to fly, but you’re ok with keeping people from flying because it’s an advantage. You’re ok with keeping others from playing the way they want, not because people enjoy that aspect of the game, but because someone completing quests faster than you gives them an edge.
Saying it’s a disadvantage is a mask for saying what it really is… forcing people to play the way you want.