The issue isn’t flight, agreed. The issue however I have is different from yours.
The game is poorly designed for flight. When BC launched you could see they were working in ideas for flight being integrated into the exploration and combat section of the game. Some places you needed flight to reach at max level and some camps would shoot you out of the sky if you flew over. I imagine people complained so much that they rolled back those implementations in future content and THAT was the problem.
Ideally being mounted in flight or on the ground should carry some risk in the world and some destinations should be preferable based on ground, sea or air.
I also think the game is long overdue for mounted combat. Again it has to be designed, the terrain and all to favor different mounts and even no mounts in specific locations.
What I can say is this current system of flight is poorly designed. Wait till halfway through the expansion to fly in basically immortality mode. This is just poorly done and not integrated into the game well at all.
I’ve got Legion and BfA flying. WoD is the one I don’t have. I’m not asking them to remove WoD Pathfinder completely but it would be nice if they drastically reduced the requirements.
It’s because of Legion Pathfinder. I don’t even have BfA and will not buy it. It is 100% because of Legion Pathfinder. It should not be required this long after the expansion is irrelevant.
I hate pathfinder, mostly because of Nazjatar. I’ve never seen a more ground travel unfriendly zone. I can only take it for at most an hour. Who is the sadistic person that came up with this nonsense?
The game sucks now because you don’t want to put time and effort into unlocking rewards that every one else had to do at the time? You can unlock Draenor flying in a single day, not that laborious.
Thousands have left because the game is fifteen years old. That tends to happen when a game is as old as this one is. The fact that it’s the most subscribed to MMORPG in the world still speaks huge volumes.
It’s about time vs reward. Time gated reps (Tanaan Jungle) and horrendous ground travel zones (Suramar) do absolutely suck. They are ways for Blizzard to artificially extend play time. I’ve played the tons and tons of content. I’ve played this game almost continuously since I first started in 2008. I have done literally everything in this game to some degree. Whether that’s dungeons, raiding, pvp (ranked and unranked), pet battles, brawlers guild, collecting mounts, every profession including Archaeology on multiple characters. I’ve played every class and race in multiple combinations. I’ve raided in server first guilds and played as a filthy casual.
This game irrefutably sucks now. It is artificial, time gated, rng BS. The reward does NOT match the effort as it has in the past.
I did Draenor flying and it takes at least 2 weeks. If i want to grind rep for many hours in one day that should be an option. This is what I did with Saberstalker rep. But the other 2 factions were time gated, requiring login each day to get flying as soon as possible. This is artificially extending content.
This has nothing to do with not wanting to do the requirements. I’ve done way more insane grinds than Pathfinder in this game. But I did them because they were fun or the reward was worth it. Flying is such a basic part of the game at this point that it is not worth a huge grind. It is not a reward, it is a concession and a big middle finger.
The idea of pathfinder is fine, it’s implementation is idiocy of the highest order. Don’t even get me started on the real reason pathfinder came about!
I won’t disagree that pathfinder is fine. I will however disagree that standing up against something because it’s been in place for a long time and has become the norm is wrong. If everyone sat down just because something was the normal for a long period of time the world would be in a terrible state.
But feel free to get in a time machine and go back to the dark ages.
And no I don’t have Pathfinder II yet myself. At the rate I’m going it will be another 4-6 weeks before I’m flying in BFA.
… and that’s ok. I’m fine with having to spend a lot of time on the ground before I can fly. When I finally do get flight, I will feel that I’ve earned it. That I’ve achieved something!
Pathfinder in of itself is fine. While I’m not a fan of grinding reps, its whatever. The problem is the massive gate between part 1 and 2. Why? What purpose does it serve? There is no benefit to the players so what is it?
Personally, I think they should make it much easier to get flying for prior, obsolete expansions.
Going through a giant rep grind to get flight on current content is fine. Doing the same for content that went obsolete 2 or more years ago is not. They should add a shortcut to get flight for older expansions. They used to do this. Don’t know why they stopped.
Admittedly, Blizzard could have required Pathfinder I to fly in the 2 starting continents and then have Pathfinder 2 to enable flight in Nazjatar/Mechagon. But they chose not to do that.
I think the logic is that being forced to spend the first half of the expansion on the ground really makes players appreciate the second half where they can fly. And also marks a major demarcation where players can feel like they got a lot stronger (by being able to fly) as the expansion progressed.
I wouldn’t disagree with you if the content they provided actually was interesting enough to warrant not being able to fly over it as quickly as possible. People complain about not having flying because the content they want to fly over is boring and pointless. It’s preferable to get it over with as quickly as possible. If Blizzard would actually make the world alive and have content that matters, we probably would see a lot less complaining about not having flight.
![:us:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/us.png?v=6" ":us:")