Pathfinder exists because they don’t want flying in the game at all and consider it mistake, even for Burning Crusade, but they can’t get away with removing it because when they talked about that for WoD, players didn’t just threaten to quit. They quit in large enough numbers to get them to scramble to put it back in the game.
Pathfinder in WoD was well-received enough(it stopped the bleeding) that they’ve leaned on that since. Developers want flying out of the game to save cost in development. The nonsense about “trivializing content” was a smokescreen. You can’t trivialize content that’s already trivial. They also tried to say it ruined WPVP, but this isn’t backed up by facts. WPVP had it’s biggest drop with BGs and DHKs impacting PVP ranking. Without flying until now in this expansion, complaints were endless about WPVP and how not enough players engaged in it, namely Alliance. So we can rule flying out in that.
a true compromise would be Blizzard inviting a group of players as representatives or their proxies to discuss the matter send out a mass email for suggestions or taking a poll and seeing how many players respond
but no Blizzard did none of that they basically decided no one loves flight and wanted to remove it
I know most do not like the way they do this, but OP, you are most likely correct on why they did it this way. Back in WoD, they didn’t even want to put flying back in and they were pretty persistent with saying they were not going to do this, but over time people provided feedback ((aka whined about it)) till the Devs caved and decided to give it to people at a price which was Pathfinder. This was to be a reward to those who were committed to playing the game to reward them with flying.
So in this case making it Pathfinder right now makes sense, since it rewards those who are willing to put the time into playing the game to obtain it while giving them time to create new content because I can promise you this and mark my words. If they made it very simple without the rep and etc, people would get to max level, then get flying and then do the raids and do all that within maybe 3-4 weeks of the expansion release and then people will stop playing and complain about a lack in content. This would only give them 4 weeks to create new content while creating new content requires like 4-5 months.
I think the way they did it here was right and rewarding, even though it is annoying to login every single day to do 15mins of World Quest.
Exactly. When they made Cata, they had to go back and redesign huge chunks of the old world because until that point there were gaps of land you could not reach except by exploiting a glitch.
So these gaps of land had no textures. And in some cases they didn’t even have a proper ‘surface’ to walk on.
When they added flying to the entire world they had to add textures to everything as well as make sure everything had a ‘surface’ (not sure the proper term here) for characters to walk on.
A fully realized 3D world where you can go anywhere DOES take more time to create than a world where you can look up the mountain but its effectively a “magic wall” you can’t get past. It’s just a pretty and nice way of doing the map barriers as compared to “i run into the horizon and run into an unseen wall”
Waiting 8-10 months to be rewarded pretty much kills the joy of the reward. By that point, there’s ZERO reason to fly in the old content because you’ve done it all, you’ve burned it out.
I mean, right now, on my toons, the only reason I do content outside of NAzjatar/mechagon is because of AP rewards or if the emissary offers me something like a boatload of resources or the like.
But otherwise, Ive burned through all the Kul Tiras / Zandalar content that I can stomach.
Yea I’m sure the players would quit within weeks because flying was available. Just like what happened in the wildly unsuccessful Wrath expansion right?
Or BC where player controlled flying was first unveiled. No mass exodus.
Or Wrath, Or Cata, or Mists …
All had flying available from the get go. They survived and thrived. The only issues they may have had were due to poor design decisions that had nothing to do with flying.
uh no they didn’t have to Blizzard could’ve merely added in more FPs to reach the new areas the choice to revise the old world was made by Blizz and they had 100 times more land mass than any other more current expansions
the only difference is the current team are not the same people that designed Cata it comes down to one simple fact they either lack the ability or its the lack of passion to handle the creation of content which balances out the immersion quality as well as flying
You are right on the part of being burnt out, however what Blizzard is going to see this happen if they made it very simple to get flying or not have it at all.
Not have it at all.
People will cancel and unsub and never come back at all
If they made it easy
People will obtain it though those easy methods and get bored within maybe 3 weeks after obtaining it knowing there isn’t much more content to explore and then cancel their sub and possibly come back later when new content comes out which again will result in playing that content and then stopping and unsubbing because they are bored of the new stuff.
Leave it as it is as Pathfinder
Keep people playing the game and subbed to the game since people really want to get that so they are keeping people playing the game every day which adding the rep gain requirements keeps players logging in every day for a longer period of time to make money from that.
It’s a business practice to try and keep people subbed to the game and as sad as this is going to say, there is nothing wrong with that since Blizzard is a business to make money and money obviously grow on trees so they need it to keep things running and to continue to push content out because I can promise you this… If there is no money coming in, you can expect content patches to be very sparse and longer to get which is going to cause people to get bored of the current content and then unsub and leave the game.
I only say that because I have seen it happen many times and also people have posted on the forums in the past that they are unsubbing due to a lack of content.
That’s not due to flying. That’s due to them trying to be cheap and provide less content and drag it out.
Remember Broken Shores? Remember how it was padded out over what, two months? And the “story” of broken shores amounted to a single quest every week that you finished in probably less than an hour. And it wasn’t even really a story just a series of missions.
They’re getting worse and worse about trying to stretch out content, and finding any means to do so.
well considering the majority of the current dev team came from D3 is no surprise so many parts of it are incorporated into WoW
im sure they are good at designing a 2D world like diablo but this is an MMO its an entirely different experience
after all just because a man can rebuild a V8 hemi doesn’t make him qualified to work on an F-16 turbine jet engine sure he might understand the basics but I wouldn’t risk piloting it until someone with actual aviation mechanical skill has inspected it
That is what it appears to be happening, however to turn this from a negative to a positive feedback for the Devs, what can they do to make it so it does not feel that way instead of saying… “Make better content?” I am not trying to make an argument, but more try to get more positive and constructive feedback from those believe it is getting worse.