I’d be fine with them removing flight, as long as they removed all PvP at the same time.
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You’re conveniently leaving out a couple of things:
- There are a lot of customers who DON’T want flying, so responding to feedback isn’t as black and white as you’re trying to make it.
- You’re mixing up customers and clients. You’re a Blizzard customer. If you don’t like the product, you don’t buy it. You’re not a Blizzard client. You have not entered into a contract whereby you have demands that they are obligated to fulfill.
Yes, how verrry convenient. 
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People who don’t want to fly can walk on the ground already.
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Clients are customers.
But hey, don’t take my word for it.
Next time you go to your job (you have one, I assume), go ask a customer what they want. Then tell them that you don’t owe them anything because they haven’t signed a contract with you and that you don’t intend to give them what they want. See how much money they place in your hand.
Hell, since you want to be pedantic: a client under contract will have generally already paid and so they can be treated worse than someone who hasn’t decided to give you money yet. You’ll still get fired but hey, you got the cash!
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The game could be better if the design was around flying. Or do you think the developers are just lazy? I don’t think so, they just use the excuse the content is designed around ground mounts then use the art team as a patsy.
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There are no metrics, but going off of:
- Blizzcon; massive amount of boos when Ion said it would be the same (Lore being the one guy in the back clapping for it was hilarious)
- Forums; All the posts on the forums favor flying by a massive amount of likes vs dislike replies
- Logic; No flying has no legs to stand on. It doesn’t… at all. Design? Design the game around flying. wPvP? disable flying with WM on. Prefer ground mounts? You can use them if you don’t like flying.
If you don’t want flying it’s not because you prefer ground mounts. You can use those when flying is available. You want to force others to play the way you want. People that want to fly are not forcing you to fly. They have an unfair advantage? Then tell the developers to design it around flying. It benefits everyone.
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Lol dude… It’s not better. It’s different. I like the beginning of the expansion because I enjoy seeing everything they created that you really do miss while flying.
Pathfinder part two could go for me but I won’t complain. Blizzard gave us flying back. Just he happy man.
Yes, because they wanted to. That faction had something they wanted, or they wanted access to that area, or they wanted as many exalted reps as possible. Everyone didn’t grind every reputation available to exalted, only the ones they wanted (or were easy).
Gating Pathfinder behind every reputation available is why we complain. My enchanter is happy to get the recipes Tortollans offer, but hasn’t found anything useful in the Honorbound or Unshackled but must grind them anyway. The tailor might just want Unshackled rep, but by then, I’m going to be even more sick of the zone with the same quests and superpowered naga.
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Is flying not something you want? Make sure to do the emissaries they give a bunch of extra rep.
I want it, yes, but I also want to play with people. I’ve been working towards Pathfinder with another person, trying not to get too far ahead of him. Pathfinder also has a bad connection because a friend who played the game and who took me on the initial steps to get Pathfinder (apparently it needs the shipyard) is now dead and I miss her every time I think about Pathfinder.
If it could be split up among characters I wouldn’t be as angry about the reputations. If I had all the reps exalted but split among three or four characters who each needed a recipe from the faction, I’d be happier and feel more immersed in the world. As it is, my tailor needs a faction that the enchanter doesn’t, but will have to grind out all the same quests and wq yet again (twice as long for me, the player) for what she needs.
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There is one other, darker (for the player/consumer), more sinister possibility:
I think we have a real culture of thrift. And I think the goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks that we brought in to Activision 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games."
“I think we definitely have been able to instill the culture, the skepticism and pessimism and fear that you should have in an economy like we are in today. And so, while generally people talk about the recession, we are pretty good at keeping people focused on the deep depression.” Activision CEO Bobby Kotick Deutsche Bank Securities Technology Conference San Francisco CA 2009
If the only thing the developers are allowed to focus on, if the only things the developers are allowed to experience culturally at their shop are profit and fear (for their jobs) then that is what will be transmitted to the customer as end product. GIGO
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Posts like this really make me miss the downvote button.
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Ion has already admitted he’s not a fan of flying and thinks it should never have been put into the game to begin with. I have no idea why you’re putting the blame on upper management.
If anything, upper management got involved when the announcement of removing flight in WoD turned into a mass exodus that cost huge dollars and the game still hasn’t recovered from, not before.
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I find it funny that despite the fact these losses occured on Ions watch how he still has his position with Blizzard
In most professions losing so many customers and the money that came with them would often be a career ending move or is Blizzard making so much $$ that WoW dropping from 12 million active subs to probably less than 5 million isnt an issue to them?
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Excellent post. People need to be aware that World of Warcraft is a product and not a work of art. It isn’t like a talented but bizarre director being called in to make a superhero movie, who “compromises” on his artistic vision in order to make something fun for a mass audience. It’s designed from the ground up to be packaged and sold.
World of Warcraft’s fundamental value is in the monopoly Blizzard has on World of Warcraft. If I want a jetpack in Fallout 4, I just mod it in. Bethesda and Zenimax can’t dictate what I do with the software they sold me. If I make a World of Warcraft server where I can use the Mechagon antigrav pack in any part of the world from level 1, Blizzard can and will use state violence (copyright law enforcement) to stop me.
Can I do anything about that? No, I don’t have the power to take on the United States’s monopoly on force. But video game players should demand to be treated as hobbyists, not drug addicts, by those they patronize.
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That’s the funny thing since Bethesda has gone on record they do in fact not only endorse mods theyve went the extra mile and added OFFICIAL modding support tools to their website and a direct downloading interface to their entire franchise
They even created a subsection on their own game launcher which links to 3rd party mod sites for easier access whether you play on PCs or consoles
If it was a drop over a extended period of time then yes Ion would of been canned. However the plummet was fast, very fast over about 6 months. They lied about it for the first month and made it worse then they got a stuck up attitude that basically was “you don’t like it then leave”. Blizzard public relations side of the company crashed and burned and they couldn’t nail it on just one person.
Hes talking about no longer seeing that many players in the world (ground) where it matters for pvp.
Wpvp participation was reduced with the introduction of Bgs yess (which btw there is no release date yet in Classic since many think it could mean redoing the same mistake again for the second time).
But it did not die, it was cool yes and it was fresh and new but the ganks the hooligan fights outdoors did not die at all.
Something else was holding people interested in wpvp and it is clear that at least for me it was the Honor system with the titles and everything (which btw it is being released tomorrow, you will see tomorrow how pvp will increase million %s just because of those titles)
What definitely killed all wpvp enthusiasm is the ARENASs and Bgs NEW RATING system. It completely replaced destroyed the Honor system Pvp ranks.
Your new ranks were gained in Arenas not even Bgs, but you could still farm honor in Bgs to get your pvp vear. Did people farm that honor in wpvp? Not anymore as everyone is instanced in Bgs where it was more efficient to farm the honor and then challenge yourself in Arenas.
The people who think Flying is the sole wpvp killer are severely mistaken.
People no longer had the interest to hunt prey outdoors when the new titles and fame was in Arenas participation with brand new leaderboards and exclusive Vanity rewards and everything. Esports was also born around that time.
If you guys have to blame the death of wpvp, blame Arenas rating not flying.
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I think subscription money isn’t an issue to them. They must be making most of their profit off of the store and services. They hand out $60 boosts every xpac–that tells me they’re making bank from WoW despite the massive sub loss.
Imo, what makes a world feel “big” is your field of view - the whole map size compared to your focus size. If you’re playing the old Army Men game, a kitchen counter feels enormous. If you’re playing an interstellar colonization game, a single solar system feels small and cramped. The size of the area you’re focused on becomes “1 map” in your brain. So that kitchen counter is dozens of “maps” big, while that solar system is a single point in the corner of a map.
The problem with World Quests is that when they’re spread so evenly across the map, your field of view expands to the whole map. The world is literally “one map” wide. That’s a small world. The Goose Game feels bigger than all of BfA. Take the Barrens. While levelling, especially pre-Cata, the Barrens felt ENORMOUS! It’s the biggest-feeling zone WoW has ever had, by orders of magnitude. However, during the MoP 5.3 Kor’krun assaults, the maps suddenly felt like a normal-sized map because your focus and the gameplay was spread across the entire area. There were a four Kor’krun areas, so the Barrens was suddenly only four “maps” big. This is also why Feralas feels several times larger than Desolace, and Tanaris feels MANY times larger than Silithus or even Un’Goro.
This is why BfA maps feel so small. Even Vol’dun is just, what, six “maps” around the outside with a bit of sand in the middle? That will never feel “big” in a world-building sense. That feels about the size of the Caravan escort questlines when you first start in the Barrens. And it gets far, far worse once you start doing World Quests.
One way to make the world feel big again would be to compress World Quests into smaller areas. They could easily make Vol’dun feel like around 14 “maps” big if they only had 14 small zones and each day world quests only appeared in one of those zones, maybe with the occasional Tortollan outlier. And because it IS an outlier, that would make that one World Quest feel like it’s much further away.
Basically, you can’t make a map feel big if the player has to regularly transverse the whole thing. You have to have the vast majority of your content establish small sections of the map as the default size in the player’s brain, and only THEN can you send them across the whole zone and make them feel like they’re doing something massive and epic.
Current WoW zone design works on the assumption that players already think “the zone is big” and then tries to make everything feel epic in scale. But when everything is epic, nothing is. All they do is make players think “this zone is only one map wide”.
You and I know different people. And Arathi is one of my least-favourite old-world zones. The mobs are just evenly spaced it’s boring! It’s like maximum mob entropy. Every 30 feet in every direction: mob. No grouping or areas, just an even distribution of mobs everywhere.
It was a little… soft. Definitely an improvement, but after the first day or so, I literally never changed my behaviour for those flying mobs. It takes so long to get 10 stacks that you just keep flying to where you’re going and you never have a problem with them. Especially because landing drops all your flight aggro. The jetpack, though, was AMAZING! No delay, no pathfinder, easy controls, even fly in caves… I hope that’s not a mechanic we just never see again like the Nagrand War Mounts.
If Blizz didn’t insist on Patchfinder for every expansion, and gave us things like that more liberally- when they made sense mechanically and thematically, then I think they could get away with taking more away from time to time when that also made sense. Like Argus. No flying in Argus makes perfect sense. In fact, flying there would feel awful and destroy the mood of the place. But after the HUGE Patchfinder delay, people were too upset to care about that and complained anyway.
Uhh, WoD was one of the best levelling expansions ever. Each zone had a unique and engaging story with a different clan. The problem with WoD was they cut basically ALL max-level content besides Tanaan and Trashcan and that once you’d levelled, your garrison could give you literally EVERYTHING you needed, so why ever go back into the world?
It’s Diablo design. Diablo zones are one-dimensional with a start, middle, and end point. The top-down 2D nature of their maps is only used to add a bit of flavour to a game path that’s every bit as linear and one dimensional as Super Mario Bros. They’re still using 8-bit map design, just with really nice graphics.
Now take those designers and tell them to make a 3D world. A completely open world with no rails to force players to go a certain way. They don’t even know what that is. They’re trying to collapse 3D zones into 1D linear paths. That’s why the new zone design is hyper-crowded switchback mountain trails with barriers everywhere. That’s why they don’t like flight. They’re side-scroller designers trying to make a sandbox game and they haven’t adapted their perspective yet.
They’re getting better. Flying above some points of WoD made the 8-bit zone design really apparent, whereas Boralus and Naz’mir actually have a lot of openness and freedom in movement. But they still need their Pathfinder crutch to feel “safe”. I think it’s like a security blanket to them.
I think their experience is with a different kind of game. A strict, rail-driven game. And I think designing around completely freeform movement and player autonomy is something they have no experience with.
Which is ridiculous because the art looks so AMAZING from atop a flying mount!
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Still youd think it wouldve had enough of an impact for his bosses to tell him to leave the older systems in place after all flight for gold was NEVER a problem ever since it was added
In fact it only started becoming a problem once the WoW team was replaced by most of the staff from Diablo 3
D3 was an entirely different concept after all as a matter of context for example im sure an F-14 Tomcat has a fuel injection system too but i wouldnt assign an automotive technician to rebuild it despite the fact he could understand the basics I’d feel better knowing a person with aviation expertise does the work it would actually work the way its meant to
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