I’m just curious because I wasn’t around for whenever the big arguments and dev decisions went down in regards to making regular flying obsolete or whatever.
How did that come about, and who was responsible, and why? What was the problem with regular flying that it needed to be replaced so bad?
Don’t get my wrong, I like Dynamic flying (especially as a Dracthyr), I’m just asking from sheer curiosity.
didn’t hate it, dragonriding is just infinitely more fun and efficient.
I was there. Ion was the public face of the change, but I think it came down from above.
It was claimed that flight ruined the game, that you could just zip in and ignore everything, without exploring or appreciating the sights.
There was almost nobody against it before Ion came out against it, anyone that said they didn’t like flying or wanted it removed because of world PvP or whatever would just get down-voted into oblivion lol
It really did take a long time and a lot of nonsense statements about the “damage” flying does to the game and how much harder it makes development to finally turn a small percentage of the population against it. Even then, as soon as they tried to pull the trigger, WoW immediately bled so many subs that they backtracked right away lol
Interesting. because now we just ZOOM ZOOM over everything without exploring or appreciating the sights.
soooooo… 
A few things to note, First being that Dynamic flying is normal flying now. It is going to be the default.
Secondly, You’re going to get a lot of conflicting answers on this subject. I will try to give as much information as I can going back to when I first started the game in TBC.
Flying was introduced and immediately it started causing grief for devs. Players were able to cheese certain content via flying and then went to forums and chat rooms and complained that there was no content.
Wrath came out, people rushed to get Cold weather flying. Used it to cheese content, then complained again that there was not enough content put out by the devs.
Cata came out and it continued.
MoP was when they first started to try and gate people’s access to flying. Hiding the vendor behind the wall to Veil of Eternal blossoms. People found a way to glitch inside though. And got flying early, then went right back to old Habits.
WoD hit and with it came Blizzard’s hardline response. Pathfinder. Do the content or no flying for you. And fans HATED it. But it continued for pretty much every expansion after that until Dragonflight.
My theory is that One of the Devs played Guild wars 2 and had the idea, hey, if fans hate Pathfinder, and we hate them cheesing content, make a system of flying that’s part of the content. And thus Dynamic flying was born.
I don’t think anyone hated it, but it was definitely time for a change.
I didn’t know how terrible normal flying was until I got a taste of dragonriding. It’s so much better.
Nowadays, I just use my normal mounts and fly up if I want to go AFK someone.
Dragon riding has made it the big empty world. People forget that flying 3 times faster but going 3 times further is pretty much a wash.
Ummm, no.
Everything regarding flying was perfectly fine, the only problems it started causing the devs were years down the track when they were trying to deliver less content, but maintain the same played time or engagement levels from us.
It was always about saving money, why give a zone 100 quests when you can give it awful terrain that’s designed to disorientate you and slow you down, take flying away, then give the zone 50 quests that’ll end up keeping us busy for the same amount of time as the 100 quest version? This is also where we starter seeing serious time gates slowly trickling the content out.
(The amount of quests is just an example, not a real number)
We’re getting both options in the form of a toggle in the war within so both parties can be happy.
Why is this topic being brought up?
What’s funny is after dragonflight got announced and they showed what dragon riding was people claimed it was gonna be gatekeeping and everyone wishing they didn’t add this.
General Discussion HATED the concept of dragonriding before this expansion went live
And now everyone acts like nothing happened
Even the regulars stopped ranting about it
I think theyre just modernizing the game a bit.
I’m sure a lot of people believe that, But I remember the CONSTANT hate towards devs for now ‘giving enough content’ back in TBC. The cries of ‘I finished everything, why isn’t there more?’ Every single day. People want to believe that the Devs are out to get them and ruin their fun. And I’m not saying Blizzard are the best game developers out there…but the playerbase has not been kind to a lot of the devs.
personally, WoW is the only game Ive ever played that literally counts travel time as ‘content’ lmao.
I use dragonflight to cross long distances quickly. and i use regular flying for questing/adventuring in a region. ample room for both
/tencharacters
Im running druid, so the same…instant flight form for shorter trips and DRing for anything thats going to take a bit.
Definitely nice to have both options but Im wondering if that’ll be an issue when they put the toggle in.
I wonder the odds of Dracthyr getting this toggle also.
While i agree there are a lot of times where the devs don’t deserve the crap they get, it kinda goes with the territory of game development, and the key to keeping it under control is having good PR peeps and community managers to control the interactions the company has with the player base. The problem is, Blizzard mostly treats us like mushrooms, they feed us crap and keep us in the dark, not many other companies ignore their player base for months on end and then blame them for the frustrations hitting fever-pitch.