Your personal argument is not under investigation. You have an opinion. It seems to be genuine. I have a different opinion. I am no longer interested in indulging others who’s opinions stopped being genuine nearly 10 years ago.
Blizzard was very detailed on what the negative impact they felt flying had on the world experience. There are players for flying and others against flying. There are players that don’t care either way. PF is a compromise that was made.
Dragon riding was a way to implement flying that addressed the majority of the asks from the pro flying crowd. But the concerns the devs had 10 years ago are still valid. So the compromise is still valid.
We have already talked about players with disabilities. There is not a way to design the game for everyone all the time. Look at the game’s available. How is wow supposed to compete with VR or armored core 6 if we are still static flying like 2006?
I started working on the zones I am missing Loremaster from, figured I would see if I could mostly do it from the ground. And the quests dont even give rep. Wtf is this nonsense? I cant fly across the map to get all the wq so yeah… dont see how I can get this done.
Which ones, quote their blue posts. Pathfinder was to make sure people explored the world of whatever, turns out that was a lie with dragonriding. About the world feeling dangerous? Also a lie, none of that is there with dragonriding.
I just completed a pet battle daily quest and got rep for it. Dunno about those other things, cuz I don’t really pay attention. But there are definitely options.
Nope because I don’t care for the ‘new’ world quest design, getting loremaster doesn’t give you the necessary rep. Doing raids, M+, reg dungeons, or any PvP don’t give you 15 renown. It’s also a time-gated slog for returning or new players.
The second paragraph contradicts the first. The concerns Blizzard has stated with flying are with players being able to skip over the experiences they intend for us to have. Creating dragon riding allows us to skip over those experiences the same as static flying allowed us to in TBC, Wrath, Cataclysm, and Mists. While I can’t confirm no Blizzard representative ever stated the problem was the implementation of flying, the rationale for pathfinder in WoD and beyond has been a desire to compel players to experience the expansions on the ground until the devs felt there truly was nothing else to be gained.
To reiterate, my issue isn’t that pathfinder is gating static flying by itself. It’s that pathfinder is gating static flying in the expansion where Blizzard introduced a complete alternative to flying that totally invalidates the previously stated reasons why Blizzard wanted pathfinder to begin with. If Blizzard updates this reason to something that addresses why pathfinder is good for the game when we also have dragon riding, perhaps I would feel differently. But going off what they’ve said on the topic so far, the current explanation truly does not fit because of dragon riding.
I actually do agree with this premise. It’s impossible to design a game that suits all preferences and abilities. If Blizzard took the direction they seem to have initially intended where dragon riding would fully replace static flying, I would be on the opposite side of this discussion. While I would still be empathetic to those who couldn’t dragon ride, I would be in support of Blizzard being able to design the game they wanted.
But Blizzard didn’t go this direction. Blizzard announced within a few months of the launch of Dragonflight that static flying would be available. That was probably in response to feedback from those who can’t or really dislike dragon riding, and that’s where I would have supported the position of Blizzard being able to design what they want. Once they made the decision to implement static flight, that changed the situation in an important way.
From that point, it was a given that static flight will be in Dragonflight. This entire post is under the premise that static flight will be made available. With dragon riding making static flight obsolete for a lot of players, and with that making the original stated purpose of pathfinder obsolete, I think it’s bad for the game to have that gate.
Oh. They just still go by the /played now which is DAU. That’s why they have all these pointless grinds, to keep you grinding to show a better /played report.
Then you don’t care about pathfinder and about flying.
How many expansions this happened already. Since WoD.
Your choice. Take responsibility for it. You purposefully ignored the whole aspect of the game that was required to allow you use the “normal” old boring flying.
We subvert their quest designs in the exact same ways with both forms of flight.
The specific questing content example they gave prior to WoD was that if they put a boss in a tower, we can hop on our flying mounts, bypass all of the lower-value mobs, pop through a window, and kill the boss, and then bug out, again without engaging in stuff we don’t consider worth engaging in. Does that sound like something you can’t do with dragonriding?
At the time, they acknowledged they could come up with something to make flying more challenging, like the packs of birds that, at one point, were pretty aggro-happy in the Valley of the Four Winds, but didn’t want to spend the effort on it. They wanted to focus on making the game world more interesting (and we all have opinions how that worked out). Designing a tower with barred windows, or that has some aerial defenses that auto-dismount flying players, or making trash mobs more worthwhile to kill, or simply not putting the boss in the most predictable spot in the base and then clearly marking his location on the map were not the design challenges they wanted to undertake at the time.
Now, ten years later, they’ve gone from not wanting to support flight at all in future content except in specific instances, to spending the energy they wanted to use on creating other things on making a ton more work for themselves by creating a new flying system, replicating 99% of the problems of the old one and punting on elements of world design (like DI’s caves: Compare your average DI cave to the barrow from the night elf heritage quest. DI’s caves are tiny for the speed at which we’re able to divebomb them.). Plus, the new system requires 300-something old mounts to be retrofitted to work with it, and it’s available at day one with no cost and no Pathfinder.
Whatever Blizzard’s creative vision was 10 years ago, it’s hard for anybody to claim that what they’re doing today is consistent with it.
Yes. Rollo does a pretty good job describing their take.
Not really. Dragon riding is, once again, a compromise. One of the responses in the first mega-thread to blizzard’s concerns about static flying was to add mechanics to make it more engaging. Including adding races.
And like I mentioned before, many of these same posters upvoted those suggestions. Yet, now they have changed their tune.
Truer words were rarely spoken. That sentence sums up my feelings on Pathfinder and its relevance. If they can introduce flight immediately once, they can do it anytime. And if they can and choose not to, it isn’t for a game reason, its for a time-metric reason. At the start having dragonriding got people into the game. Introducing standard flight and putting in PF keeps people in the game who want to get it. Its all about the $$$.
