I haven’t unlocked a single Pathfinder. Still love the game. I honestly forget about flying most of the time. I did enjoy it in BC and Wrath, but I realized that the game had become about teleporting from quest objective to quest objective at one point. Flying around in these newer zones would be fun, and I’ll probably get there in the end, but I really don’t feel it affects the game that much for me. I’m just not in that much of a rush.
We actually have that in Blade’s Edge Mountains BC. It is glorious.
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Yea he shows up for pretty much every thread he don’t like to provoke people.
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O Really?
This isn’t you then?
Since the poster you quoted and responded to was almost certainly speaking of Executive level leadership positions, then by extension you had no choice but to be speaking of the same.
I will ignore the fact that you failed to mention that this was part of an edit to your original post and point out to you that the OP was in FACT referencing someone above the level of Lead Game Designer or Game Director. In other words someone with the authority to tell Ion what he must do (or more relevantly undo (with respect to Flying)) to get the IP back on track. The only people that I am aware of that have that kind of influence over Ion would be folks that have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. AKA Executive Leadership. Therefore you are either incorrect on your first response to Bizzix or you are incorrect in your response to me. Since both Bizzix and I share the same side of the debate then that just makes your responses look a bit silly and as I said woefully inaccurate.
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Cata was the only expansion that was designed to have flying right off the bat.
They absolutely did have a choice in Cata since it was in Cata that they opened flight to all of old Azeroth. They could have restricted flying in low level zones until max level, they chose not to, instead allowing flight at 60.
I do agree though that was because Blizz was a different company then. That changed though starting with the development of MoP. It wasn’t as far along as later xpacs but you can see the influence starting.
I disagree with you on this point. I believe Pathfinder was the plan the whole time and the announcement that they weren’t allowing flying was their way of getting us to accept Pathfinder. It’s a tactic that just recently they have admitted to using many times in the past. Give us the thing they know we won’t like and dial it back to where they actually want it so that we will accept it.
Look at the way they did it. At BlizzCon for the announcement they just said they hadn’t decided how they were going to implement flying. That they weren’t happy with just making it purchasable at max level and that it wouldn’t be in the game until at least the first major patch. Then after weeks of silence they mention it offhand in the interview you quote that there will be no flying.
Then after a while of the feces hitting the fan they dial it back and say ok, you can fly but you will have to jump through all these hoops and just cause we are nice all your characters can fly after.
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Considering the OP did not explicitly state that they were speaking of executive-level management, and considering Ion himself is not a dev, I would say it’s pretty fair to assume that the OP was not speaking of executives. Also considering that we’re speaking of a game mechanic unique to one particular IP, I would say it’s fair to assume that Ion would be considered upper management in the scope of this discussion. But without a clarification either way it’s possible that I misinterpreted the context of upper management, in which case you would be correct.
As for failing to mention it was part of an edit - the third portion you quoted was from the edit itself, so I would think that fact is pretty irrelevant. As for the OP in fact referencing someone above Game Director, the exact level of upper management they were referring to was nowhere in the OP. I will say again that it’s pretty far-fetched to think someone in an executive position would micro-manage gameplay mechanics in one of multiple IPs, hence why Ion would be considered upper management in the context of a discussion specifically about WoW.
If the exact level of upper management was clarified in a later post to mean executive-level, then of course my statement was incorrect. However, at the time of my post, the exact meaning was vague enough that my point was valid. Either way, I’m not going to read through 150 posts to see if that’s the case. With that being the case, I have nothing else to add to this discussion. Have a nice day 
Exactly what I been saying! So many anti fliers suddenly come out and act as if people always hated it, and it’s not like the forums are all shy people, anyone who has a problem will say it. Just came after it.
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I bet you say that to all the pretty girls at the Lions Pride Inn.
The middle ground is current location. Will be interesting to see where this goes to past expansions. See post with ion @ Blizzcon answer Taliesin.
They designed a theme park on rails. Modern zone design is atrocious. You can really see the Diablo design philosophy at work.
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Ya, I member, dem fel cannons… dem gryphons over alliance camps.
I think blizzard phone in a lot of the games design… Ions response to sockets on benthic gear was proof of that… “yeah we really should of caught that before it went out” – Translation yeah no one really paid attention to that, we don’t have a ghostcrawler making sure things like that don’t happen anymore,we all too busy with other things.
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Seems like flying has nothing to do with good game design.
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Listen to Armin Shimerman, here!
Do you wanna do the rides on Troll Island or on Pirate Island today?
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it’s not better in retail.
Vocal Minority? When Blizzard tried to remove flying in WoD, they nearly killed WoW. WoW went from 12 million subs to under 4 million in less than 6 months and Blizzard took a massive turn about. The numbers got so bad they had to stop reporting them.
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I think the argument is it restricts design not that it outright makes good design impossible… basically they have to innovate and it takes them longer so they don’t want to do it.
LOL No. I’ve been playing since March 2005 and I remember first hand the outcry for flying in the first place. Why do you think they added it in BC?
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You call it “innovate”, I call it “actually come up with GOOD game play”.
Their poster-child quest that flying trivializes is an npc boss for a fortress in an open area, surrounded by pats, and you can just fly in, kill him, and fly out.
That’s the single laziest quest design after “collect 14 zhevra hooves” I can think of! Put him in a building! Put pats closer! Have him call nearby guards, so you have to clear out the area before you pull him! Put him in a crowd and come up with a decoy to distract his guards and have them leave him unattended! Put up a freaking anti-air turret!
Flight is VERY common in Azeroth. No fortress or encampment should EVER be without flying defenses. And being in flight should INCREASE your threat radius, not make it zero.
Mount mechanics in this game have literally not changed since BC, and it’s really pathetic. In fact, BC actually had anti-air mechanics that restricted when and where it was smart to go around on a flying mount.
THAT is why flight-gating bothers me so much. They said it would allow them to make better content, but it’s actually a crutch so they can churn out BAD, repetitive content.
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