When they removed flying in WoD there were people I knew IRL who liked it. They thought the game would be better without flying. Every single one of them has quit. And every single one of them now says they were wrong, and that the change was bad for the game and ultimately contributed to them leaving. Granted, that’s only like 5 people and personal experience varies and all that. But experiencing that is only going to strengthen my resolve and belief that I’m right.
People don’t quit the game when they’re given things. They don’t quit over fun mechanics. They quit when things are taken away, or made pointlessly and arbitrarily grindy and put behind all kinds of time gates. Pathfinder has been a complete failure. Even in its intended purpose (to string players along as a retention mechanic), I contend that it’s driven far more players from the game than it keeps around to eventually unlock flying. In the short-term such mechanics can be effective, but in the long-term players get wise to it, get burned out and move on.
I have some thoughts on this. I was thinking that the cast time for a flying mount be made functionally longer than cast time for a ground mount. obviously they’d have to do it in a non clumsy way so as not just to make people go crazy, but if it comes to a situation where a destination is 20 seconds by land and 15 seconds by air, then maybe the tables could be turned just a little. that way people would only choose to fly for the longer journeys and there might be more balance.
I don’t even think it would need to be made that much longer… maybe 2 seconds would do it. it would just make people feel like ground travel is at least a viable option.
What counts as a ‘situation that calls for it’ and how would you even go about implementing this in a way that isn’t going to confuse a lot of players and just create more problems?
Flying already enables us to do this. You’re arguing for flying with this.
Who gave you the authority to dictate the way people travel?
Mate, you’re playing a high fantasy game. If your argument is for suspension of disbelief, then why are you okay with essentially anything else in the game that’s involving high fantasy. And flying is completely fine within the context of WoW’s universe. There’s nothing in the lore or otherwise that suggests we can’t freely fly on our own mounts.
Use logical thinking. Earning pathfinder does not equal pro or no flight at all. Some players didn’t like repeating WQs on the ground so chose to queue for PVP or Dungeons instead.
My experience in talking to probably 300 players is that they all like flying. I have never met a person in game that has your view. Perhaps if I spent time in classic I would find some. I don’t know the real number that hate to fly, but I think the percentage of wow players is very low. A few WPVP gankers don’t like it perhaps, but I haven’t even met one of them.
Looking at your achievements and the oldest I can see are from 2019. So speaking as someone who’s been playing since Vanilla I can tell you that what people say is true: flying was never an issue until Blizzard made it an issue. I don’t recall any threads asking for the removal of flying…ever. And the complaints about it ruining world pvp happened later on. I was an active poster in TBC and I don’t recall any outrage about it. People were too busy complaining about raid consumables and the lore dying.
The point being, you’re attributing this massive amount of players that detest flying and want it gone from the game. I don’t see it. I’ve never seen it. I’ve never heard it in-game. And when Blizzard did it in WoD it wasn’t in response to any outcry by the playerbase. It was because some designer or designers hate flying, or were too lazy to integrate it into the gameplay experience.
I was against flying just a year ago for many of the same reasons as in the OP but a fair part of that could be attributed to me playing the game too much and analyzing things too much. I’ve since taken a break and returned recently, just unlocked flying and if anything feel appreciative I have it. I think Blizzard has already established a decent enough medium ground with this by keeping us on the ground until the middle to end of an expansion. I would rather they continue to do that than to go all in with flying or remove it entirely as both routes will create more drama than currently exists.
I don’t see how your bowling analogy works unless you are good enough to bowl without ever throwing a gutter ball, and your style does not involve the ball hugging the gutter until it gets to the pocket. If you are the sort who never throws gutter balls, you absolutely can ignore the bumpers.
As noted earlier in the thread, this toon pretty much doesn’t fly even though the account has quite a few flying mounts, and all the other toons use flight a lot.
Sorry that you have to rely on the game designers to create your problems for you.
you’re more likely to meet players who share your views because they will frequent the same places you do. I spend most of my time questing or soloing dungeons to get mogs, so you would probably never meet someone like me in game. especially since I’m generally introverted in game. I tend to avoid too much interaction.
If you read the whole post, flying, combined with LFG, LFR, and creating a hub city, removed the world from WoW. With it, a lot of social dynamics present throughout vanilla and TBC left with it; they first began to wane in wotlk. People who enjoy features like LFR, LFG, and flying over everything when you leave the teleport laden hub city are people who don’t really enjoy the mutliplayer aspect of this MMORPG game. The constant catering to these individuals has reduced this MMORPG into just OG. Retail WoW is just an online game.
Because they never added it in the first place? Nobody in ESO complains about flying because the game is perfectly fun without it. If WoW played like that, I wouldn’t mind not being able to fly.
Frankly I even enjoy how Guild Wars 2 handles flying(gliding, really) more than this game. It’s different and fun. I didn’t mind spending weeks getting the dragon mount or the griffon because they’re so crazy fun to use.
There might be validity to that, but that was a debate for 2006. Once it’s in the game, it’s in the game.
On top of that, even if there wasn’t flying the social aspect is dead anyway. As you say, just the nature of things like dungeon finder and the hub design of the game: sit in a city and queue for various things. And when you do go out in the world what do you see? Players from all other servers. CRZ destroyed communities. If you’re on the ground with a bunch of strangers that you’ll never see or hear from again, what good is that doing? There’s no reason to interact with people. There’s no reason to communicate or form friendships. And that will NEVER change. Blizzard isn’t going to remove those conveniences. They’re not going to merge servers. They’re not getting rid of dungeon finders and cross-realm technology.
But they’ll put flying on the chopping block. There’s no logic to this. I actually interacted with players a lot more flying around than running to flight paths (or using the whistle) to afk fly somewhere.
If your argument is for suspension of disbelief, then why are you okay with essentially anything else in the game that’s involving high fantasy. And flying is completely fine within the context of WoW’s universe. There’s nothing in the lore or otherwise that suggests we can’t freely fly on our own mounts.