this is interesting because I understand where you’re coming from, but I disagree purely on my own personal bias.
I love boralus and it’s design specifically because it is labyrinthine and takes some thought to explore it and get to my destination.
I also love it when I figure out a shortcut, like the well worn plank near the boat that everyone jumps onto from the step. that one is not hard to figure out, but I think there are other shortcuts in lots of areas of the game lately.
I also found boralus to be utterly boring once I could fly. my main priority is to get to places quickly so my natural inclination is to fly, but I was aware I had also lost the old paths I used to tread and the clever shortcuts.
I guess what this boils down to is… blizzard are trying to make a game to suit everyone and that results in nobody being truly happy because it’s just a great big set of compromises.
There’s nothing pessimistic about it. It’s people being people. If they can’t have their cake and eat it too, they will complain until they can.
So if you refuse to see where people will take offense to choosing either greater rewards or flight, I can not convince you that these complaints WILL happen. There are better ways to go about rewarding players that choose to hoof it around on foot, and a good start would be making the general trash more worth the trouble.
They can’t really do that though with the way we blitz through any content that comes out. There would need to be a major patch every month to keep up with content locusts.
They tried that in WoD. Turns out players like having something to do, even if it is repetitious.
Players demanded flying back in Classic, back before daily quests even existed. And it was such a large demand that Blizzard added it in TBC.
But flying also used to be something that would unlock additional content. This changed through each expansion, but you’d generally need flying in order to do some daily quests, access new areas, or even dungeons and raids.
Which is part of the problem with Pathfinder. Now you need to jump through a bunch of hoops to get flying, and you don’t get anything extra for doing so. They’ve increased the cost of getting flight and reduced the reward for having flight.
And if that is not enough now as of 8.2 they implemented a flying death machine mechanic that kills you if you fly too much. As of 8.3 the great worm from beyond slows and kills people. They keep adding ways to take this feature of flying away from the players. The joy of being suspended in mid air and enjoying the scenery has been totally removed.
It sounds like the problem is more with Pathfinder than with flying itself. No, flying doesn’t feel very rewarding when you feel like you’ve been in a dog show for days and days, and then you don’t get your treat until after the next dog show, which isn’t for months.
because shortcuts require finding and sometimes require skill.
For example, the plank and steps next to the ship in boralus. The many times I have hit jump at the wrong time or got the wrong angle, I have lost count. if I get it perfect first time, I feel satisfaction, if I miss it, I feel a slight of frustration, but it is easy to run back up the steps again and try again.
This is gameplay and is a far cry from getting in the air and holding forwards.
It’s still just locomotion. And if you prefer ground locomotion, just use a ground mount. Flight capability doesn’t prevent you from still enjoying that.
As a human being, I have human instincts.
I can choose to fight my instincts, but as I already said: cognitive dissonance.
It’s very uncomfortable, you should try it some time.
It’s not human instinct to be efficient all the time when it’s not required. But even if it was instinct, human beings can go beyond that.
And I do that all the time when I don’t need to be efficient. Right now, I’m leveling a character in DPS spec. If I want to be efficient, I would be questing or doing other things while queueing for dungeons. Instead, I have my character just stand still while on a DPS queue while I “waste” my time and just relax. It’s slow and inefficient, but I find it more fun than doing quests or anything else.
“Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game”
This has been well known in game design for years, it sounds easy to “just not fly” but we’re not wired that way, it’s amplified in a multiplayer setting too.
That’s why developers have the task of designing the game around that.
