Pathfinder? Again? Lession not learned

Community General Discussion
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I’m disabled, and I struggle with dragonriding. Even slow glide mode (lol 800% is slow, but whatever) is often too much for me. Yes, some skill issues are at hand - for one, I never use my mouse (which is a laptop touchpad, not an actual mouse) to move. I use the arrow keys. Dragonriding requires a lot of rightclick and drag, which just doesn’t always work well on a touchpad for whatever reason. So my dragon is drunk and needs to go home more often than not. It is extremely frustrating to dragonride for me, I don’t have those issues with normal flight. I recently came back to the game after the tail end of Legion - and I pretty much try to avoid the Dragon Isles as much as possible, due to needing to dragonride. I did Waking Shores, Azure Span and the Plains on foot for 90% of it, but Thal is where that changes a LOT. And yes, the main campaign was blocked for me until I did the initial dragon riding tutorial.

Personally, I don’t disagree with Pathfinder as an achieve with a cool reward - but unlocking normal flying in an expansion that already has flying unlocked AND is designed for flight is ridiculous. I haven’t even unlocked WQs yet, because I now can’t stand to be in the Isles for very long - a quest here or a Dreamsurge there, and I’m gone. The frustration around dragonriding has ruined it for me. Yes, that’s a me problem - but I doubt I’m the only one. I heavily use all available tools to get from point A to B - flight paths, ground mounts and even my own feet, but if you aren’t dragonriding, there are places you can’t get to. Which is why I think normal flying should just be unlocked for everyone.

My highest renown is 5. Cause I did the main campaign with a few sidequests. There are some quests still available, sure - but not enough to get me to 15.

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That’s entirely possible. You have a good point. Thank you. :dracthyr_heart:

Arguing with you isn’t gaslighting.

I never once claimed that you didn’t want people with disabilities to fly. I said it would keep them from being able to fly, because you want it removed. Not that you personally want to stop disabled people from playing the game.

Everyone’s different. I have a friend where their brain can comprehend what happens on the ground while playing as a caster. They can go at slower speeds (or could until they updated flying and now they can’t) with normal flying. But their brain can’t process dragonriding speeds or angles or anything.

For me, my neurological issues came into play due to the speed and also due to the buttons. Spacebar didn’t do what spacebar used to do. I couldn’t land and hit different abilities, because my bars were taken up by dragonriding abilities. I had to completely revamp it all and then relearn buttons, because my brain just couldn’t figure it out in the moment.

Much like I had to stand around and continually push buttons on my mouse for an hour each day to learn Healbot. Only this was worse.

Also, normal flying has been around for over a decade. It’s muscle memory. Dragonriding isn’t. And with my inability to multitask at times or how I my brain immediately stresses out if I miss my mark when trying to land someplace… suddenly, everything I knew is gone. My brain shuts down completely. I’m staring blankly at a screen and can’t remember what I was doing or what I should be doing. The “hit spacebar” or “hit number 2” does not compute.

You should see me try to cook now. And it’s why I can’t go back to work. :pensive:

It’s oftentimes difficult to fully explain the problems. Even when I try, they don’t come out quite right.

Then I apologize.

We don’t all have friends on at the same time nor do we want to be a burden. And the intro can’t be done with a whelp.

I mean… you literally said I was calling people “ableist” and claimed I was gaslighting you. So… there’s a lot of miscommunication going on.

Maybe we need to stick to less wordage and more to the point? It might help. I don’t know.

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I never really understood why the devs were trying to remove flying in the first place so it’s hard for me to rationalize why they want want to keep pathfinder.

Design inertia/dogma? A practical need for a speed bump to slow down bots opening new accounts? Hard data about player behavior/engagement? I simply don’t have any sense where the idea is coming from.

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check this article out.

https://www.polygon.com/2015/5/22/8645293/world-of-warcraft-no-flying-tanaan-jungle-warlords-of-draenor-mmo-pc-blizzard

Read Ions comments on it.

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Honestly, I think its an aesthetics issue; they don’t like the way “sky swimming” works at its core.

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The difference between pathfinder here and previous iterations is that you can fly. So you don’t need this in order to fly, just to hover and to go slower.

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“”“”"Originally, Blizzard took out flying in Warlords of Draenor as an experiment, and Hazzikostas says he would have bet “slightly better than even money at the time” that they were going to bring it back eventually. But as they played the expansion and watched others play it, they discovered that they liked the game better without flying.

“The world feels larger, feels more dangerous,” he says. “There’s more room for exploration, for secrets, for discovery and overall immersion in the world. At this point, we feel that outdoor gameplay in World of Warcraft is ultimately better without flying. We’re not going to be reintroducing the ability to fly in Draenor, and that’s kind of where we’re at going forward.”“”“”“”“”" (End of Quote)

Everyone playing at the time knows “Ion Has Cost Us” has made flight his personal man-baby-rage war ever since he got forced by the CEO’s to reverse his decision (he purged over 70% of the playerbvase before the money people rolled up the newspaper, (YES THEY DID RELEASE SUB NUMBERS THEN, DON’T @ ME ABOUT SUB NUMBER) . The devs are the only ones that wanted it gone (and WPVP TROLLS but warmode eliminated that argument, have no flight in warmode for all I care)

Now Ion Has Cost Us is attacking the disabled players since he has nobody else he can get away with unloading his poison onto.

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i’m just not going to do it

why would i spend hours on rep grind so i can fly slower???

:thinking:

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why though do you need to? It should be enough for a person to say simply “because of my disability x is difficult” and you should take that at face value, rather than try to dissect it so you can come back and tell them why it isn’t actually difficult. :woman_shrugging:

idk. I’m not disabled in a manner that affects dragonriding, and I too find it hard to understand why exactly someone might have a problem with it, but if someone tells me “I can’t do this due to my disability” then… they can’t do it and in my opinion it’s absolutely none of my business beyond that.

At the end of the day - it matters not if regular flying is in the game when we can also dragonride, and frankly it should have been in the game a long time ago.

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Thank you for explaining and here’s why this is kinda important to me, because I have been trying to understand what the issues are as I want to understand things so one can look towards potential solutions (as I’m a solutions-driven individual)
What if one were to remove Surge Forward from the hotbars and just used the dragon as essentially a leapfrog mount?

Because that would free up slots for abilities to go back onto the action bar and would remove a lot of the components that increase speeds to a degree that was too much?

I’m not saying this as a “Just do this”, because I know how it is like to not be able to do stuff at all - getting both mental and physical fatigue just from thinking wasn’t exactly a great experience from when I hadn’t had my surgery yet, but this is the sort of stuff I look at
Can one get Dragonriding to work for you, not can one get dragonriding to work because it clearly doesn’t for folks - and that’s what I was trying to get at this entire time

Again though at this point it probably doesn’t matter but this is largely how I operate and deal with topics like this to try to get things to work for others because its a game its supposed to be fun for everyone involved and I want folks to enjoy it
Which has been my entire point the entire time (even if I will get snarky with folks who try to insinuate or claim stuff about me that just ain’t true or purposefully mischaracterising what I have said)

Which makes me want to explain why I kept saying that you gaslit me:

You never called me an ableist that’s true (and I apologize because that wasn’t directed towards you, but largely just others who kept responding as well), doesn’t really matter but what does matter is this; I NEVER said that I wanted them to remove traditional flying and I will never argue for its removal but I will advocate for replacing, improving, and adapting (with disabilities in mind)

Because I still stand that traditional flying is bad for the game and we as players need to be grounded a whole lot more (an example of this is the pillars around the time rift and how often folks complain about folks afking on those - traditional flying is like having those pillars everywhere)

That was the entire point

Hopefully I have made myself more clear because, again, I actually agree with you in like 90% of what you have been saying this entire time (which considering I actually value your takes on stuff made things exceedingly frustrating for me, and I will apologize for my part in that but hopefully you get what I have been trying to say at this point)

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Vigor does become an issue to keep up with for some when that happens. I think it may also just another layer of movement that might cause problems too. I’m not sure.

I’ll be interested to see what sorts of solutions Blizz is working on.

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It was always about control.

The more they can control our experience, the less work they have to do to keep us from going off-script in the least valuable content in the game.

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Panic would be if they decide to use the old Pathfinders per expansion to allow Dragon Riding in those zones.

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I don’t think they’d do that, but who knows?

I have them all done anyways so I wouldn’t complain lol. Dragonriding is the superior version, so I wouldn’t be opposed to having to earn it.

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Because I am a solutions driven individual - I want to help folks and to have a constructive conversation about stuff because this stuff does matter

I take people at face value but it ain’t about “prove it to me” but because I want to try to understand what it is that’s making things difficult so one can understand it from a different perspective
Unless folks start behaving in a way that is similar to a trollish behaviour I will take folks at face value because there’s nothing else to read into or the like, but it still matters because the game needs to be built in such a way to facilitate people of all walks

How we travel from point A to point B and what we do, if anything, along the way influences how the world is designed and what elements are good or bad and how things can be abused, improved, or more

If one makes a public post in a public forum that deals with a particular issue and one wants to have a conversation about it, then yes asking “Can you elaborate further” (which this question is at its core) is a perfectly sensible question in order to get to a more fundamental problem or to figure out what in a conversation is more relevant

Taking things at face value doesn’t mean blindly accepting things at face value, and looking for solutions or problems that can be a more fundamental core aspect of it is part of that conversation - if one doesn’t want to do that then one says “No don’t want to do that”, but to blindly just talk about things in the absolute isn’t helpful either

This isn’t a topic in which ambiguity is helpful or in any way shape or form reasonable
If one has a disability one has to understand the underlying problem in order to properly talk about how to solve it, either with a temporary personal fix or fundamentally and systematically in the future

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Good lord…I dont want to give him an ideas, lol…but if DRing had been a little harder Id have been fine with it personally.
I kinda thought the glyphs in the beginning were just too fast to get.
It would have been cool if we’d have gotten them maybe one per daily reset in the first few weeks there to make it feel more like we were actually working with and learning to ride the mount, rather than slamming the whole batch in one sitting.

Just me, I spose.
But yeah, not to give him any ideas that’ll just agitate everyone else.

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Even though I fundamentally disagree with the need to further question people who state they can’t do something because of their disability, I respect your clarity in communication.

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To be fair, I’m assuming that you, like most everyone, used TomTom or something to pin them on your map.

Someone playing without addons or third-party information would have had to spend a fair bit of time hunting for them all.

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some of those stupid glyphs required a lot of sitting around on mountain ledges while my vigor recharged, so I could hop further up. maybe I did it wrong but I’m glad it wasn’t more difficult!

I wonder about their intentions. did they anticipate that we’d go grab all the glyphs first thing upon hitting the island, or did they think we would perhaps encounter them naturally as we made our way through the campaign.

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I think the two of us will just have to agree to disagre on this one, but I did want to add one thing; because if stuff like speed is an issue, instituting a speed limiter of some kind could help, but if stuff that I had to deal with when just thinking on something for 5-10 minutes caused physical and mental fatigue then that’s not really something one can do something about

Regardless though, talking about disabilities and how they affect us that should be normalized (when folks are comfortable doing so, which I would assume folks are if one is talking about it on a public forum - but that’s probably me not understanding social norms)
One can’t make meaningful changes unless one has an idea of where to look for problems - Blizzard probably has way more data about this but still, it should be something that’s normalized that one can talk about, at least in my opinion

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