The only thing it has to do with is world design philosophy and saving money on building zones.
The wanted a very controlled and predictable experience. If they have an objective there, they will have to take this route which on average will result in X amount of fights and take this much time. That’s what it’s about, controlling and curating our experience.
Then you can put in windy convoluted paths that not only take more time to travel but can make a smaller world seem larger. And smaller worlds are cheaper to build given equal object densities.
A large open world with same level of detail would be much more expensive to build.
“Lack of Moderation” is possibly the worst and most incorrect way you could have phrased it. SO LET ME EXPLAIN THIS FOR YOU, NEWGEN!
Back in the Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King and EVEN Pandaria, there wasn’t the need to worry about content drought. The expansions were designed with so much content that the players wouldn’t be able to 100% it even if they spent night and day farming EVERYTHING.
Factions had rep grinds without time gating and you WANTED the reputations for silly recipes and fun toys. They weren’t forced on you. You farmed them because you WANTED to.
Dungeons were actually fun to do, instead of the boring trash we’re given these days. I can accidentally pull an extra mob group in Mythic +10 and nobody cares because we just burn through it. If I did the same in BC/Wrath it would be a group/raid wipe.
Content IN those expansions weren’t gated off behind time walls. I bought the expansion? I got to play my new fking races and new fcking classes RIGHT AWAY. The time it took to level them and play them WAS THE REWARD, not the ability to do so. Leveling took time back in the day and was part of the content. You couldn’t afk in Orgimmar/Stormwind and just spam finder to max level with heirlooms.
PvP was fun and engaging. People WANTED to fight in the open world, and many of the quest paths purposefully put the two factions RIGHT next to each other. We weren’t separated on two islands, we were in the same zones fighting over the same monsters. We HAD to kill each other to quest efficiently. Hell, we had quests to kill FLAGGED Npcs right outside major cities. The world was alive.
The community drove the game and the content, not a series of world quests crumbs in your face for your “world building.”
The players who DID burn through everything “without moderation” were the ones who could spend time leveling their professions, which actually DID something. They provided valuable buffs to your gear, created raid-content worthy weapons/armor or outright made you money.
Blizzard doesn’t understand anything about their player-base. I paid 50$ for this Expac and who knows how many months of 15$ a month and I STILL cannot fly OR play any of the allied races. I play casually and don’t have the time to dedicate 4 hours a day to grind out 500 reputation for a worthless faction I don’t like JUST so I can play what I fking paid for. I’m beyond furious. Blizzard turning their MMO into a lootbox-based, mobile-phone-app-styled-garrison-simulator is the worst thing they ever did.
I have this semi-tin foil hat theory that the goal was not to remove flight. Rather it was to get players to accept pathfinder in the future instead of real content.
According to this, the plan was to pretend to remove flight, and then pretend to suddenly come up with a “compromise” that permitted players who did all the required content to get flight on all their alts.
The plan all along would have been to, with each expansion, increase the amount of content required, the distastefulness of that content, and the time gating involved.
According to this theory, the fact that they are so badly out of touch with the playerbase turned a relatively simple ploy into a financial disaster, as players just left rather than stick around and accept the silly lame talking points on the “reasons flight needs to be removed” list.
And really, in the end it is no different whether they intended to remove flight or they just intended to switch to a pathfinder-based game with very little real content.
To this point I would just say – with pathfinder unlocked in 8.2, I have hours of content to do daily currently to the point where my 12 alts are barely being touched, and when I do play them it’s only to try to keep my heart level up-ish via azerite wqs.
So to me it breaks down to:
-being able to fly makes the game feel better
-it doesn’t help me clear daily content quickly when effort was put in to creating content to do
well you have to realize the people running WoW are largely the former crew that was working on D3 and are now slowly turning away from the MMO concept and trying to make this game into an E-sport aimed at attracting more and more players away from competitors like Fortnite etc
Your theory has more credibility than you might think. Blizzard has shown disregard to their playerbase before, with the Diablo mobile fiasco and the original plea for a Vanilla server. They only begin to care when they lose money.
Wrong, Pathfinder exists for one reason and one reason only: to keep players grinding for long enough so that they have to renew their subscription to complete the task.
This is also why campaign tables exist and why the story doesn’t have as much love as it did in Vanilla and BC. All the money is given to staff that make up new ways to make the game grindier espeacially ways that don’t cost Blizz much in other ways. Quests and leveling costs money so campaign tables and world quests are implemented instead repeat the same thing over and over. Recycle reuse annoy the player base but don’t spend any extra money to make money.
… Wut? Do you eat paste or are you trying to make a joke, here? BC, WotLK and Pandaria had nothing locked behind factions or grinds aside from silly cosmetics or epic items you didn’t NEED. When you bought the expansion, you got everything. You could wander into the final zone at the start of Pandaria by mistake if you wanted to. You could get flying just by reaching 80 in WotLK. ETC, ETC, ETC.
Here’s the thing… BC, WotLK and Pandaria had no “main story” quest lines. Each zone had a story. All of those stories added up to be the “main story.”
Actually, the thing is that people remember the mechanics they really liked (mob grinding, tabards) when they think of the new ones they don’t.
The truth is that all factions used to have unique rep requirements. Now they don’t. Now everything is the same.
It saves Blizz a lot of money not having to produce real content when they can force people to grind the same 75 rep quests every day and get away with it because so many people want flight badly.
But the number that have given up is continuing to increase. I know people who finished bfa pathfinder 1 and then said no more. I know people who left over flight before the debacle came down in wod, came back, and left again.
So many people have left the game since the devs decided to change direction.
Posting in a human paladin thread. That is the reason for pathfinder. Was put in to slow people down nothing more nothing less. Every other reason that has been spewed over the last few years has pretty much been debunked. People have been burning through the content of this game since forever regardless of flight. I guess people forget how many times since TBC days how people brag about how quickly they leveled in game, and on these forums. It only took me a two days to get 70. Well it only took me 24 hours lol. Never ends. They will never slow the 24/7 players down. About the only way they can slow those folks down is to start gating other things like when you can use ground mounts. It would be hilarious though, if they announced at the next blizzcon that we have decided that we think being able to use your ground mount should feel like you earned it from now on lol. So we decided that you should be revered with this irrelevant faction over there first, because they don’t like having to clean up horse, yak, whatever mount poop all the time, so you must do all these gather poop quests over, and over a thousand times first before you can travel on that horse lol.
![:joy:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/joy.png?v=6" ":joy:")