I agree to your statement, and woold like add “and INSULT your customers”.
How long do you think a restaurant, clothing store, or car dealer would last if they insulted their customer by saying NO to what the customer needs? Not very long! However, that’s exactly what Blizzard is doing by not providing a FAIR game which includes accommodations for customers - they’re shooting themselfs in the foot.
What? Why would those mounts fly in a no flight area? They are and always will be grounded in no flight areas…
No, they are doing what they think is fair and accommodating by providing other ways to get things done. The issue ie you and others are acting like since it is not what YOU want, they are not doing so.
How long do you think those places will deal with a customer that they have tried to accommodate but keeps complaining because it is not exactly what they want? This is what those that keep calling out Blizzard for not being “accommodating” are coming across as.
Love your post, agree with you 100%, and thank you for so eloquently speaking the truth.
Cheers to you! 
I think after seeing for the past 10 years what Blizzard did, they are just way to stubborn and snobby to actually look around what other games do. That is one of the reasons why I don’t like Ion, he always has a facial expression like he is royalty and it is beneath him to deal with the fans of the game that don’t like something they made. How dare they!
Why else do you think that year long wait on being allowed to complete pathfinder so you can finally fly? Pathfinder came in WoD, stayed relevant until Shadowlands which is 4 whole expansions. Plus even in Dragonflight they locked Steady Flying behind Pathfinder, and it seems they intent to do so in WW but finally in a reduced manner. Why the locking at all, I do not know.
That’s a false equivalent. Proponents of steady flight are not asking for any changes to it. What’s being asked for is a removal of the PF. And all everyone against that are coming up with are nonsensical arguments. So what you can afk with steady flight, that is not a reason to stick it behind a PF. No one is hurt when someone goes afk in flight. Skyriding and steady flight are both modes of flight and should be treated the same. You’d be making the same argument is it was Skyriding behind PF.
Reading this again, I think they started to turn WoW into some kind of Diablo game.
I somewhat understood it in WoD, as that they had to completely change things and such to include it after the no-flight debacle. But for Legion, BFA, and SL I find it pure spite, and keep in mind I was one of them suggesting they should split the pathfinder up based on patch content. Dragonflight I somewhat understood it again, but only as far as to give theri new thing time to breath and allow people to use it enough to form their own opinions.
Anymore I am suspecting it is tied to potentially slowing players down, but not in the way some might think. DR is something they have a lot of knobs to mess with and tune to what they want:
Where as Steady Flight, which is locked, really only has a switch (on or off) and 1 knob (speed) to fiddle with
And likely based on Diablo IV, the one that is not doing so well.
Those mounts shouldn’t fly in a ground mount area. But if a player likes riding them as a ground mount, they should be able to, right? The game intuitively handles that for them. When you enter a BG, do you need to cast a spell to use a dragon mount?
Nope.
When you want to use a dragon as a ground mount in the open world is there a 5 second spell?
Again, nope.
So when things go from seamless and intuitive to gated and cumbersome, anyone who objects to that sort of design, is correct in their objections and expectations for better.
Well, they wanted the experience to meet the goals they set forth in OG vanilla. An immersive experience, complete with all these activities out in the world, a hub out in the world, player housing, srs buffs to profs, and no borrowed power.
They completely ignored the prior 4 expansions and the flying aspect being such an integral part of the wow experience at that point. I agree and understood it as an acceptable design choice as well.
Part of me wanted them not to add flying to WoD. It was very very good as an expansion without flying. When they added flying, it didn’t necessarily ruin WOD, but it was also one of those things that never should have been added to any version of wow, yet it has to be now, because that’s the accepted precedent.
All future PF gating was arbitrary once WoD conlcluded, they had their answer and doing anything less than having flight in the game behind a vendor with a gold fee/level requirement, is a massive disservice to players.
I believe it’s far more basic: The overarching trend of ‘roll recent expansion into base game’ combined with the ‘lets make DF the 10-70 experience’ choice is incongruent with competent game design. It was done out of happenstance, Expansion is around the corner.
No effort was spent to ensure DF experience preservation, efforts were instead spent to break the feature and re-use it as a TWW feature, in a worse state. They removed actual game play opportunities to offer Skyriding at level 10 as part of leveling up.
Good then go find something else to play that sparks your entertainment interest. That is why there are so many other games to choose from. Stop with just spamming the forums with this game sucks and I refuse to play anymore over and over again, then pointing to the fact that you helped drive up a post counter on a topic that.
Because it’s unreasonable to expect better game development from a company with the resources and revenue generation of Blizzard… who happens to be capable of remaking a new wow game every two years, but not capable of preserving anything they’ve created before.
Is that you, Bobby?
I’d buy it, that syntax is spot on.
Listen you said it 500 times in this topic alone you do not agree with how WoW been developed since the end of Wrath. We get it, and that you refuse to pay for any further products, you listed the reason in a wall of text over and over again. Posting it yet again for the 501 time will not convince Blizzard or Microsoft any better than when you posted it in this topic or the 3 or 4 others any better.
Take a breath man, your point has been made, sit back and relax on spamming the same wall of text of how you feel the game been broke for the past 15 years.
BC, Wrath, Cata and MoP all had content that could only be accessed by flying. When they cut flight for WoD, they also made everything accessible by ground. That design went into Legion, BFA and SL. It was not until DF that they once again made content that was accessible by some kind of flight, even if it was an FP.
This is one reason I say the year+ wait for it was ridiculous, but by locking it behind pathfinder enabled Blizzard to at least try and recreate the vanilla experience for the first time through.
For ground mounts/riding, there is only the “Vanilla riding” mode in the game. Why would you need a spell toggle?
You will only need a spell to toggle flight modes in TWW because there are two flight modes to choose from.
Didn’t need it in DF, there were two flight modes to choose from. Difference? Choice was made by the player at the time you picked your mount.
It wasn’t a blanket ‘all mounts can choose between the two’ lazy design choice. I think extending dragon flying to any dragon mounts, any mounts with dragon flying type animations, makes sense.
Putting it on mounts that fly linearly anyway, rockets, Horses, ect, kinda breaks the skyriding aspect for that mount anyway. Some mounts have even become functionally different because of this. Turbo Charged Flying Machine no longer has a top rotor during flying, if using skyriding.
it only animates top rotor during steady flight. Which is a 5 second cast time. Feels awesome to have somewhat of a theme going between steady flight/rotor and skyriding/no rotor, but that goes away the second I have to stop, land, and cast a 5 second spell to then proceed the other way.
VS
Dragon mount just lets me skyride as a dragon by pushing buttons, no cast time. And then also be a ground mount whenever I want. Again, no cast time.
Game is intuitive like that for skyriding. But not when you want to swap between.
When that occurs my sub will die, and I have been railing against it for a long time.
Actually WoW and Diablo share many things between them. They have for a very long time. Anything that is really popular in one and can be in someway used or twisted to be used in the other. Is the next big addition to the game.
Right. There are two flight modes now. There is only 1 ground mount mode.
And now that the vast majority of flying mounts are capable of using both flight modes, the game needs a way for you to tell it which mode you want.
Again, there is nothing for the game to intuit here. You’re literally telling it what you want to do. Just like in DragonFlight you selected a legacy flying mount to use steady flight, because that’s all it could do.
There were two flight modes in DF too. I had pathfinder on my chars, could pick between ‘steady flight’ or ‘skyriding.’ Without a spell to cast.
The option was… pick the mount that does the riding you want… the same choice we’ve always had. Suddenly as of patch Tuesday, there’s a ridiculous 5 second spell to cast if you want to choose.