Terrain, routes, flying, portals, water walking, not water walking, etc. have nothing to do with “time play metric”.
Because why? Because they don’t CARE about time played metric.
In their fantasy world, you have a time played metric of ZERO, but an active sub.
See how that works? The only “time played” metric they care about is you opting in for another month of subscription. “MAU” “Monthly active users.” Keyword being “Monthly”. “Active” meaning you subscribed – not played.
When the beans come home to be counted, that’s all that matters. Heck, if anything they don’t want you playing 24x7, 7 days a week – that costs them power and bandwidth.
I didn’t even say I didn’t want flying. I pointed out why flying is problematic for the game and the developers to design around, and in a roundabout way why Pathfinder works in that regard. And instead of addressing any of the points I made, you made some weird attack/analogy that made no sense, and gave a generic response about deleting mounts that didn’t apply to anything I said. What a dunce.
Not the person being quoted, but I understand what he’s saying. Before WoD I felt like I was not forced to complete the “entire” Xpac. I could pick and choose what I wanted to do, what rewards were important to me. Now with Pathfinder, you have to hit every rep, explore every zone, and complete every zone story. It’s just become a single player game with a finish line rather than an MMORPG.
The ideal situation is that you just wander around and discover things if you want to. Each region has a distinct story that you can miss and it won’t majorly effect you. Whether you go A, B, or C you’ll get something out of it. You don’t need to do A, B, and C to get flying.
It should be A or B or C or D not A and B and C and D.
You’d think they’d realize this after a ton of people complain about pathfinder, but here we are. It is very stupid. It’s even more stupid for people like me who returned after years, and have to farm multiple zones to be able to fly in, with a limited quest log, having to keep up with new content and try to farm that stuff… Bleh.
I liked questing. I loved roving all over doing quests. To ME that was adventure. It was freedom. What freedom do I have now? The freedom to use my free time doing tedious rep grinds instead of questing? Not everybody is here to race to endgame.
I completely agree with this. Before Pathfinder, I wasn’t one to have exalted anything. Or Loremaster, or any of the other “completionist” achievements. I just played the game, notably focused on gear or the few reps I cared about that offered something I might have wanted.
I think PF and this mechanism has made reps “worthless”. I mean, they’re really easy to get, all told. Not like Shaohao rep, of mindlessly grinding WoD world reps at 5pts a mob. Much less any of the old world reps.
Only in MoP did I start pursuing reps. Cuz it was easy. You could “favorite” one to double it, throw on a tabard, and then run mindless instances for Valor and get rep on the side.
In the end, I pursued the Celestials dailies (you had to do each of them, randomly given, over, what, a month or so), Shaohao rep, picked veggies for some of the farmers. You know, that’s about it. But I got a bunch of reps via foraging for Valor – as that led to gear and, for me, mostly, it’s all about gear and whatever I get “for free” with it.
Even now, with PF, when I ding the achieve for a zone – bu-bye, any little yellow ! left behind are…left behind. Why? They don’t get me much. No more than what I can get with a WQ or an emissary. No gear of not. Not that I don’t care about the story, I just don’t have time for it. More gear is more efficient play to get more stuff done, and WQs get me there faster. So, quests fall by the wayside.
Which is too bad, but thats the way it goes.
If the quests had scaled gear drops like WQs, I’d probably chase after them. Or scaled AP, or scaled rep. Simply, if the rewards were more worthwhile, I’d do them. “Just Story” is not worthwhile with my limited time.
Yo blizz where’s the lore reason why the flight whistle works on Zandalar, and Kul fat Tiras, and not on the robot gnome island? You just ruined muh mersion with that one lol.
Pathfinder means I have a job instead of leveling alts and other things I enjoy. At least include account wide rep. I’m done with repeated content being forced beyond what I choose for my playstyle.
Your post was a great take, but to cherry pick this one quote, Blizzard seems to have this idea that everyone has to finish everything. Any content that everyone isn’t seeing is wasted. That’s just not the RPG way. If a player only sees 1/10th of an expansion and still feels like they had a really great time, that is success. That means there is replay-ability and real choice in how you want to play and where you want to go.
I play each class, so have done the ground content multiple times. If you don’t like to fly don’t. I love flying in game. Flying is exhilerating in game, repetition in rep grinds ruins the game for me. I hate it so much, may quit like all my bros and friends. Pathfinder is the worst thing in game. Maybe not to you, but to everyone IRL that I know, it is the worst.
My exact thoughts. Most players don’t want wow to be a second career and also love certain aspects of the game, like flying six months after launch of game, for example, is the perfect scenario, 500,000 gold down is about right. Win win.