The walking challenge

Community General Discussion
1

Hello Alll,

There are a lot of threads discussing whether or not we should be able to fly in WoW, and if so, when. Lots of heated debate from people on both sides of the fence.

One thing that I noticed from all this is nobody really mentions or considers the quality of life increase we have from ground mounts. I feel like this suggests they are taken for granted as a baseline instead of the more baseline of walking (and even more base - slow walking, if we really wanna go there).

And it makes me wonder whether or not this skews a lot of players’ opinions about whether or not flying is something necessary, or even to be desired at all.

So, in an effort to help bring back some proper perspective about movement in WoW, I would like to propose a challenge.

I Challenge you, the player, to spend the day not using any of your mounts to travel anywhere. No flying OR ground mounts for any purpose to physically move you from one location to the other, provide access to a place you could not otherwise reach on foot, circumvent or “outrun” mobs, etc.

If you are mounted, you do not move.

Some details / exceptions:

  • Using vendor mounts for the purpose of using the vendor is okay, but you must not travel on the mount.
    .
  • Classes that have faster travel forms (druid travel form, shaman ghost wolf) should not use these forms to travel.
    .
  • +movement speed % inherent to the class other than the travel forms is okay. For example, many of the classes such as druids (kitty form) or rogues have + movement speed % built into them. All Night Elves also have a +movement speed % racial. Things of this nature are okay.
    .
  • +movement speed % spells/skills (not including “travel form” stuff mentioned above) are okay. For example, Druid Dash, DK Wraith Walk, and Rogue Sprint are all acceptable. Skills/spells of this nature that provide temporary speed boosts and have a CD are okay.
    .
  • Temporary speed buffs from food, pots, trinkets, or other items are okay.
    .
  • Using flight paths and portals is okay.

Spend the day leveling up your 110+ doing quests only on foot. If you are 120, spend the day doing world quests, exploring, pvp in general on foot. Do your normal daily game play routines, but only on foot.

The overall spirit / goal of this challenge is for you to get a feel for what the game is like if mounts, even ground mounts, were not part of your average gameplay experience. More specifically, to get a feel for this in current content.

I challenge you, the player, to do this until you feel you have an accurate picture in your head, feels in your heart or whatever, about life playing WoW without any mounts.

And I invite you to share your experiences in this thread!

And I want to note that isn’t necessarily supposed to some negative thing to open your eyes and suddenly agree that flying is okay. Maybe some of you will find it actually immerses you even more, and will shift from pro-flying to anti-flying, or double down on the no-fly and never even ground mount it again.

I invite you all to share your experiences with this challenge; what you liked about it, what you didn’t like about it. If it changed your opinions about flying, or even ground mounts.

EDIT: I really don’t want this to wholesale turn into yet another thread about whether or not flying should be allowed, and if so, what hoops we should have to jump through for it. There are already plenty of threads for that.

There are already threads arguing pro/anti flying. The primary purpose of this thread is to engage in an in-game challenge, and then talk about it. Yes, it is related to those other threads, but I do not want this to devolve into nobody actually taking part in the challenge and instead just turn it into another one of those threads.

4 Likes
2

Its 2019, you’re not going to change anyones opinion on anything.

3

Sounds like an absolute nightmare

4 Likes
4

I’ll do it! Just not now, waiting for Classic to come out!

1 Like
5

I already do this running around stealthed on the two islands :sweat_smile:

6

People who don’t want to fly/ use a mount at all…can at all times do that.

People who want to fly must wait until they are allowed to permission to do so.

I say blizz just removes the run function and puts it behind a $13,284 pay wall, that way people who really want to have an improved land speed without a mount can shine at all times.

7

This. I am going to spend a ton of time on foot in Classic. But that does not really bother me, at least it will be easier to kill someone when they are on foot for a while.

8

So you are looking to redefine misery?

0% of this happening, ever.

Why would anyone put up with this? You seem to imply that the playerbase should be thankful that the devs did not just outright remove all mounts from the game making everyone walk/run to their destinations instead… the problem with that is that some of those are paid from the store and I am pretty sure a lot of players would have an issue with an item for which they paid RL money or the equivalent in tokens/gold was removed from the inventory at the whims of some beancounters looking to pad metrics.

9

I challenge you to walk from the very northern tip of Kalimdor to its very southern shores down south in Tanaris. Only because I am genuinely curious about how long this would take and do not have the time to do it myself :thinking:

10

Not a chance.

I played WoW when walking is what you did, until you reached level thirty. There was no such thing as a chauffeured mount…and in a way, I was lucky to have started in BC rather than Vanilla, because you had to be level FORTY to ride a mount in those days. Further, you had to be level SIXTY before you could buy the riding skill to go from +60% to +100%.

In other words…I clearly remember the obnoxious tedium of traveling about on foot, and will never willingly subject myself to it again.

11

I already stated the purpose of this challenge. It is to hopefully provide some more perspective / insight into traveling in the game.

If you don’t want to participate in the challenge, then don’t. Nobody is forcing you to do this.

12

But! the main thing is you have to actually toggle on walk mode so you don’t run

13

I actually did do this a long time ago, back in BC content. Sort of. My bro and I walked the coast (on foot) from top of both Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms down to bottom. It was a long time ago so I don’t recall exactly how long it took, but it took quite a while!

14

I’m logging on in a few minutes. I will not use my mount (frostsabre) during my online session and update this message with my experiences after I log off.

Two hours later…

Okay, so I went to Darkshire to run some quests to try to ding level 50. I didn’t use my mount. I didn’t even use the griffin taxis to get around Darkshire.

My questing really took a hit! Some of the quests (see map attached below):

https://prnt.sc/m8kq8y

are spaced fairly far apart so getting to my objectives was a test of my patience. I remembered how often I would use my mount to return to my questgiver after completing the objective, even when s/he was close by.

When I rode my mount I normally would barrel through a mob getting to and from a quest objective. Especially when the objective was in a cave. Without my mount, I had two choices, neither of which I liked.

  • stick to the main road which is never a straight line from point A to point B
  • travel in a straight line but fight off any mobs I encountered.

I found I used my cooking skill a lot more. I’m not a tank so fighting all those mobs hurt me more so I needed to eat to heal. Since I know recipes to cook spiders and wolves, I sometimes would stop to make pies from dropped mob loot.

I used my crowd control powers more because I encountered more mobs walking. Sweeping strike was something I hardly used because I would barrel through or run around mobs with my mount.

My perception of the world felt bigger. A lot bigger. When I finally finished the challenge and rode on my mount after two hours, I swear it felt like it got a speed boost. I know it doesn’t really run any faster, I just took it for granted.

Some nice things came out of it. Because I encountered more mobs, I received more usable dropped loot, like rings. Selling the extra loot also fattened up my gold supply … something I will definitely need when I hit 60 and can’t wait to reach because I would hate having to walk to far away destinations through mountains and canyons!

Thanks for posting this thread, @Legiondary . It was an educational experience.

1 Like
15

My guess would be around 2-3 hours? But i could be way off

16

Well… thing is, we were mostly doing it for exploration. So we’d spend a fair amount of time occasionally dipping into the zones because something cool caught our eye. And at the time, we weren’t very high level, so we ran into a fair amount of mobs that made us soil ourselves trying to run from them. So I mean it was definitely an all-day experience for us, and again it was a long time ago (like 10 years) so it’s hard for me to give a good estimate on how much of that time was pure travel.

But now I too am curious, so now it’s going to be an itch I have to scratch, and I will likely scratch it sooner rather than later :stuck_out_tongue:

17

What ‘insight’ are you expecting anyone to gain out of this? That ground mounts make getting from point A to point B faster than walking? You don’t need to spend 1 minute to figure this one out, even less an entire day of walking to know that mounts make this easier.

I was not planning to. This is not a challenge but rather a pointless exercise to make players ‘appreciate ground mounts more in the name of immersion to hopefully make them no-flyers’. There is no new insights or experiences out of this (other than increasing that misery XP and the desire to logoff earlier than usual I guess), we all experienced this “immersion” when we leveled from 1 to 20.

18

You are quite wrong about my intentions. I am actually in the pro-flyer camp, wishing it were already already unlocked for BfA, and in general, wishing it were not gated so much, especially the time gating crap.

If you see no value in any of this, that’s okay. Move along.

19

For some of us, it’s not the speed increase that we miss. It’s the actual act of flying in itself. Total freedom of movement. I also like to scuba, which is kinda like flying… underwater.

You can clip our wings, but we will always remember what it was like to fly.

20

Really? From your own OP:

I mean, I did not make it up… you wrote it in the OP. Your “challenge” is a thinly veiled anti-flying post.