Haven’t been for a long time now.
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I’ll admit I’ve wanted cross faction for some time even though I play Horde and don’t need it purely for gameplay, but I do want to play a better looking character in a better looking environment, Orgrimmar is fugly.
And up until about 2-3 years ago we didn’t need cross faction, but traditionalism? What is he smoking, they killed anything traditional about this game about 4 expansions ago and are the reason we need, not want, but need to have cross faction or the Alliance will die off.
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What is fun though?
My idea of fun right now is rooted in no valor cap and pushing keystones and helping guild mates. I don’t care for mythic raiding and I will get to heroic raiding when I get there, I am having fun. I haven’t had an issue getting loot because I work at it and not wait for it to come along.
So that’s a pretty solid base of fun for me, but if I were to play every day and max out every class on my account…yeah I would be pretty bored too, but if that’s the case for many, is that on Blizzard now or the gamer?
As far as I know, many of the original devs regretted adding flying.
It’s the difference between writing the story of Frodo and company traveling across the land and up a mountain versus having the eagles fly him past every obstacle and dropping him at the edge of the pit.
The alternative is to embrace a world of flying which leads to countless ridiculous conceits in order to keep us grounded. Developing around everyone flying all the time would fundamentally change the world. Any being who couldn’t fly would be beta lifeforms doomed to submit to every mounted invader that came their way. Everything would have to be reorganized. Walls would be mostly irrelevant and air defenses would be the most common technology used by our enemies.
Except that once the story has been told, and the player has played the way the devs wanted them to flying doesn’t take away from anything.
Face it. Flying isn’t liked by the devs because it makes it harder to stretch gameplay out with easy obstacles and clusters of mobs that slow the player down.
There is little evidence that the wow deciders cared about story or narrative in SL.
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Fun is not having ridiculous grinds and crazy iLevel differences.
For example PVP has been destroyed in SL by Ion’s stubborn doubling down on making PVP bad.
After losing a few more MILLION mau’s, you’d think they would get it. Acting like a rock star and pretending his idea of fun gameplay isn’t lacking has driven players away from WoW.
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You do understand that’s called storytelling, right?
Stephen King doesn’t write long books because he’s trying to trick you into reading for longer. He’s putting content between the first and the last pages.
Flying lets you skip too much on the ground. It’s such a simple concept that so few people seem to grasp.
SO much of what we deal with in WoW would theoretically be voided by the presence of flying.
I need you to understand this: Military bases are surrounded by chain link fences and not castle walls, for a few good reasons. This game is a mélange of medieval aesthetic and technology with totally anachronistic elements like lazers and flying.
If they added flying from the outset the entire nature of the game would need to change dramatically. I’m not convinced that would be for the better.
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I’m sorry, but I DO understand.
The obvious point I was making is that once the story is told there is no point to denying flying. Once you have explored the area and done the quests there is no point to trying to preserve the ground experience.
And no, I don’t believe that the devs are focused on game play and story telling.
Based on SL, I would say quite the opposite. Falling MAU’s seem to indicate that I’m not the only one that thinks so.
Literally tens of thousands have stopped playing WoW every day over the last quarter, based on the latest ATVI numbers.
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But the WoW developers do this. That’s why there is a MAU-chart to begin with, because it’s a game and they want to capture your attention and time.
What they forget is the following: Alts are king. People would play naturally more alts if the system would have been better.
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I have not seen wildstar… but I do know that everquest 2 has an outstanding housing set up, that is on par with professional home design and architect programs.
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It has dozens of housing zones, thousands of items and an in-game placement tool that is very easy and simple to use… add that to full virtual walk through and playability.
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I hope if wow adds housing , that they plagiarize eq2 .
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Funny he admits this with factions but gates flying still at all cost, flying was a slam dunk addition to the game imo and I actually log longer hours doing stuff since travel is not so scuffed.
Who here remembers mop? An expansion with flying in mind at max level. Had some of the best zones this games ever known so yes they do know how to work flying in from the start the question is will they.
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To be fair, those qualities were enshrined by people that no longer work there, and those who now do simply didnt update their terms of service.
I have cancer, and have never gotten covid.
Conclusion: Cancer is a cure for covid.
… really?
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I’ve always agreed the faction conflict is nessecary for World of Warcraft… and honestly, it’s so sad that Blizzard has mismanaged the game so badly that they have no choice but to abandon it.
How many years were the factions relatively balanced?
How long had the drift toward Horde started?
How long had Blizzard had to nerf Horde racials? How many years did they refuse?
How many times did they create unforced errors, pushing more people Horde? From story issues, to developer attitude, to horrible Allied Race allocation that caused some of the biggest shifts toward horde of any singular events (Vulpera vs freaking diapergnomes)
I’m happy I can go back to playing my Alliance characters in 9.2.5, but very sad WoW had to abandon its primary vision and I basically blame Blizzard for it.
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About time he admits it’s ego driven, now that he and the rest of the Dev team realize it, maybe they can start to drop their egos and listen to player feedback and actually do something with it. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking though.
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it only took them 17 years to acknowledge what we’ve known since at least 2006.
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This happens when you have incompetent people working on the game. It is not this hard to even out both factions. At least Classic WoW tries, which is more than Ion Hazzikostas ever has done with his childish faction bias.
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I feel it is a tough decision to balance. On the one hand, they are convenient, and cool. On the other hand, i feel like they are a bit to convenient. Retail in general is to convenient and to hyper fast these days for me in my op. Wrath was the best because it had the intermediate, and was at a medium pace.
Back in burning crusade, you had to be max lvl, and fork over a ton of gold if you wanted to actually fly fast. Most folks were restricted to the 60 percent flying at the time.
In wrath of the lich king, for the longest time, it was level 77 to be able to fly at in northrend content. And i believe burning crusade was the same for a while until blizz shifted that to requireing level 60. And northrend still required lvl 77 for a while until the heirloom book was added, that allowed you to transfer to one toon to be able to fly in northrend at lvl 70. And all throughout the game for the first 60 levels in kalimdor and eastern kingdoms you were grounded, and even if you were lvl 70 or 80 in eastern kingdoms or kalimdor, you still could not fly. Also, at max lvl in wrath of the lich king because so many areas actualy required flight in order to progress for experience gains, you had a loaner mount seller who gave you a loaner wind rider mount for free if you were broke. Man the good old days.
Cataclysm universally changed the game in more ways than one. Do not remember how flying worked exactly, but i do remember being able to fly universally anywhere in the entire game at the time, with some exceptions. Blood elf starting area and silvermoon and the dranei and their starting zones. This was the theme for a while, and you just hit specific levels and paid gold to fly. Pandaria was the same deal. Hit max level. Pay some gold. Fly. Or get the rarest black market auction house book in history and be able to fly in pandaria at the lowest level required possible.
Come draenor, blizzard flipped the script. personally, i just feel they have been to wishy wachy and mood swingy about the whole thing. I mean, you have been telling players since cataclysm like, hey, it is ok to fly anywhere and everywhere. Look at all this revamped content you can fly over now. And now it is like, you have to do these long achievement grinds in order to unlock flying. As someone who never really cared for flying that much beyond looking cool, and i alway level pretty conventionally regardless of whether i am playing retail or classic, i will be blunt in saying that the achievement grinds are a bit much. I think it would be fine if blizz didn’t change their minds every other expansion, and we at least had some consistency, but i mean, expecting everyone to be all like, yah, ill trade buying flying with gold for an achievement grind to unlock flying. That is like how i feel when i had to trade all the old 1-60 leveling content in for the revamped content. The revamped content was good, but i missed the old content.
At the end of the day though, blizzard has made the decision. You have to unlock a long achievement grind process now in order to fly, and in my mind, there is still plenty of content to fly in also. I also like how legion and warlord’s content no longer requires anything to fly now. It is considered old news by the developer’s. Now you don’t need a stormforged grapple hook launcher to get around stormheim anymore. I do because i choose to not fly. I like actually seeing the development work, and i am a sucker for progression and old content.
But seriously people. If you want to fly in current content. Do the achievement. I am not a fan of it either, but i just choose not to do it then and not fly. Maybe with some constructive criticism here and there, blizzard and the players themselves, will actually come up with a more agreeable solution to the issue. Because i will agree doing all those achieves is kind of annoying. But perhaps a better solution will open down the road.
That’s not comparable in the slightest. Once you do all the quests and explore all the new lands and hit max, there’s no reason not to immediately unlock flying. Like it used to be back when the game was fun. By your reasoning the Eagles would have never rescued the Hobbits. But once the quest is completed, hop on them and off you go!
After those criteria are met it’s nothing but a time gating mechanism to string players along. It has nothing to do with challenge, or ‘appreciating the scenery’ (which is much easier to do when you can actually see the world below you), or any other nonsensical reasons. It is pure and utter manipulation design. That’s the only reason Pathfinder exists.
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Wsn’t Ion the dev watcher ? He failed then or he lied to us ?
Awesome. Now improve how we get rewards and upgrades, and he’ll really be on to something