It still comes off as incredibly tone deaf, and I will speak out against that crap anywhere I see it. Intent doesn’t matter nearly as much as results. And the result is an abled person telling a disabled person how to try harder when that disabled person is saying they need an accommodation. Everything the disabled person said they can’t do was countered by the abled person. It may not seem like much to you, but to any disabled person seeing that, it’s frustrating and it gives the message that our needs and concerns don’t matter.
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I definitely agree that this shouldn’t be gated behind an achievement. I get that the original pathfinder was gated behind reaching max level because they wanted people to experience the expansion on the ground, and that’s totally fine. But this expansion is built around flying. Why would you gate a certain mode of flying behind anything now? That makes no sense.
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Politely offering suggestions for different hardware/configurations is not this.
This reads like you’re looking for a reason to be upset with someone trying to be helpful, which is quite odd. Maybe let Halandor decide if they are bothered by the suggestions and they can work it out amongst themselves.
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I have a disability myself so don’t assume things
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That’s more of a bandaid than a solution. It requires additional work from testers to find and catch these instances, additional work from devs to implement these workarounds, and still needlessly limits players. Inevitably, some things are going to be missed/not work properly etc.
None of that would be necessary if static flying was just made available.
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That’s how they handled things in Dragonflight and for the parts of War Within I have done so far. They don’t want static flight when levelling up for reasons I am not really clear on but I suspect it has to do with people can skip mobs a lot easier than they can with dragonflying
I was thinking about long-term solution, as in forever going forward. But I realize it doesn’t help with testing right now. 
Yes, it’s in the longer term that implementing taxis and NPC’s is not a long-term solution and won’t be effective going forward. It means a constant amount of work to keep implementing them, or identifying them, and then dealing with bugs or issues that come up on every new quest, new patch, new update to a quest, etc. etc.
That’s why enabling Static Flying is an actual solution. It’ll also actually carry forward to future patches and content, without requiring additional work to create additional workarounds.
You can test this yourself if you’d like. Take an alt to Icecrown or something. Do you feel it’s somehow harder to fly to a quest NPC In the middle of a camp and assassinate them? Because it’s literally the same thing to me. Hitting 2 or 1 once before I aim my character on their face doesn’t really change anything as far as “skipping mobs”.
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That was blizzard’s reason to remove flying from the game entirely back in WoD times. They hated people just picking up quest items on skyrange for the tillers dailies and avoiding the mobs. They even put a delay on mounting up again they hated it so much.
Combatting bot farmers
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We don’t really need a time machine to take us back to 2014-era arguments on the topic because we knew they were being silly then, and we have the benefit of hindsight to know they’ll full of it now. This also isn’t a thing that Blizzard have actually claimed in recent times; one of the big crowning announces of a change in philosophy with Dragonflight (and Khaz Modan going forward) is the idea that they’re building content and zones with flying in mind. If they choose to put a quest NPC in an exposed spot in an outdoor camp, that’s … a choice. One they don’t have to make.
It’s certainly not a reason to gate away an accessibility solution for players for whom Steady Flying is more effective than anything else they’ve tried implementing.
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you told me to test this for myself - I agree it does let people skip over mobs because I used to do exactly as they claimed. So I think you really did need a history lesson.
Did you … not understand what was being said?
The ability to “skip mobs” has nothing to do with whether static flying is enabled right now or not.
If someone makes a quest where there’s a lieutenant mob out in the open by a campfire, with Dragonriding enabled, I fly on top of their face, kill them, mount up, hit spacebar twice, and fly out. With static flying, I fly on top of their face, kill them, mount up, hit spacebar once, and fly out. There’s no material difference there. I said that you’re welcome to test this yourself and report back if you somehow think there’s a magical difference.
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According to you. If you can show me something that says why blizzard is doing that it would be helpful. Other than that, you have a just trust me thing going.
And that isn’t the only type of quest they have in the game. There are a lot of loot this or collect this or click on this type of thing that I used to do a lot on my druid in flight form and you just can’t do that with dragon flying.
Since the original announcement of the new expansion, Blizzard haven’t actually explained their reasoning why Static Flying is being gated until Pathfinder, or why people with accessibility concerns are required to level using Dynamic Flight (or disabling flight entirely and using ground mounts). The only actual thing they said back at Blizzcon was that it would be tied to the campaign that’s available in the opening patch (as opposed to needing to be enabled in a future patch).
For that matter, they didn’t even really explain their rationale for Dragonflight, they just sidestepped the conversation by talking about implementing Motion Sickness improvements, and the Ride Along feature, both of which have inadequacies at actually being helpful for many users.
Blizzard can and have controlled whether Druids in flight form are shapeshifted out when collecting quest items, or interacting with anything in the world in general. Whether static flying is available doesn’t really have much bearing on that.
Hell, it’s usually more annoying than it needs to be because half the time interacting with stuff in Cat Form shifts you out into Caster form now.
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yeah I would rather they keep it the way they have now that restrict druids further - I can live with no flying while leveling up - we did that for 9 months for 3 expansions anyway. Taking away more from druids would probably end up making this the last expansion for me. I have druids and I have human characters and I don’t like them continually being nerfed.
If you’re worried that they’re going to alter anything for Druids in flight form, gating Static Flying has no relevance to that. After all, for anyone whose Druid is their second or later character, they can have Static Flying unlocked, and pick up anything Blizzard has let them pick up from the air.
As far as “living with no flying”, there’s absolutely no reason to have to live with it when everyone can fly around anyway. It’s even more silly if Static Flying is the accessibility solution that works for you, because the only way to unlock Static Flying regardless of whether it’s doable in week 1, week 5, whenever, is to have to struggle through with Dynamic Flying to the point of hitting level cap and finishing the campaign - the parts where you’d most need your accessibility solution in the first place. It doesn’t matter if you choose to wait 9 months, you still won’t get Static Flying without a more painful experience, or just eating a penalty and being ground bound through the levelling process and the requirements for Pathfinder. And asking someone with a disability to eat a penalty when an easy solution is right there is just … petty? spiteful? distateful? Take your pick.
Hence, this thread.
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you are the one who suggested they change druid abilities not them
This is not an accessibility issue you are just trying to make it one. They put in that motion sickness toggle to fix that problem and all they need to do is fix it and they will have no need to change anything further because they did their accommodation thing which most people were happy enough with.
I am muting this thread now because it is tiresome.
1 Like
I’m 82 years old and healthy. Knock on wood!
If there was one thing, that may force me to leave this game for good, it’s being forced to use Dynamic Flying. Never learned it. Constantly crashing into things. This isn’t fun, it is punishment. Please! Really! Is this necessary?
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I saw a post in the Druid forum from all the way back in February requesting that Blizzard not tie flightform to the mount setting because of the negative impact on gameplay. Blizzard ignored that and now here we are at Beta with so many people aggravated by the Beta implementation. There are multiple threads on this in the Beta forum with people voicing their frustration and requesting changes.
In Dragonflight, we have some mounts that support dynamic flight and we have some that only support static flight, so we are not asking for Blizzard to invent new technology here. The flight types co-exist in retail. I’m all for Blizzard inventing new systems to make the game more fun/interesting or to improve quality of life, but this new mount setting does neither of those.
Part of Beta testing is to test these new systems–not just for bugs, but also whether things are clunky or negatively impact gameplay. With this mount implementation, we are actually losing functionality AND are receiving a clunky interface for locking us into one flight type or the other. There is no positive in the way this is implemented nor in the experience for the players. This must change.
And like so many others have stated, this IS NOT JUST A DRUID ISSUE. People like to use their static flying for more controlled, short hops, or just hovering, and dynamic for long-distance. And some suffer from accessibility issues where dynamic flight itself is just not an option to the way they play.
Blizzard, please make the right decision and do something about this sooner than later.
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