I think it’s now just a button to swap between the two, but the sheer resistance towards implementing it was … frustrating.
Dragon/Dynamic Flying was so much faster than normal flying, so fair enough, there’d be precious little need to use the older version, but I can see why Blizzard would want to push the Shiny New Toy of the expansion.
That said, it caused a lot of hell for folks with visual issues, hand and forearm issues, and when people were complaining about motion sickness, vertigo, migraines and other issues with the visual side of things, there was a lot of glossing over from Blizzard. Including ‘just get your friend to fly you around!’ like, no, I want to be able to do this myself, please. I don’t care if I don’t get the shinies, I want to be autonomous as much as possible.
The hand/forearm issue I get, my primary hand got crushed by some heavy machinery and while I was able to keep the hand, it took months of physio and some expensive plastic surgery to keep the tendons functional enough to maintain a useable hand. I don’t even want to think about how difficult it would be with missing fingers and long-term pain on that level.
Just let people have normal flying. It costs nothing and it makes the game more accessible, which helps everyone.
Why did they fight us so hard on this?
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Swim Flying should have been available from the get-go. No exceptions. If Blizzard wants to hide something behind their BS Pathfinder achievement, maybe it could have been a customization pack of parts or a themed skin for that airship mount we’re getting.
I am absolutely hyped for my Earthen lad.
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It should have been one of those Bakar mounts, or something cool like your drake being able to breathe fire as a Non-GCD ability, trails of smoke and flames leaking from the mount’s mouth and nostrils, and the colour depends upon the color of your dragon mount.
Blue, snow-flakes and mist.
Bronze, sand and yellow mist.
Black and red, fire and black smoke.
Green, flowers and green mist.
Infinite, black sand and white mist.
White, blue flames and grey smoke.
I apologize for apparently radicalizing the forums against arachnophobes.
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So I’ll toss my two cents into the ring.
WarCraft has had a spider race since 2003. Over 20 years the Nerubians have been part of the franchise, and it wasn’t long into WoW’s lifespan we got them as a major part of what is widely regarded to be WoW’s shining era.
So Arachnophobes have been dealing with this for over 20 years. They’ve been dealing with it in more than just PvE content. I’ve been a Hunter for forever - I remember the strategy guides suggesting using Spider Pets in PvP specifically to unnerve Arachnophobes. It’s not some non-condition. It’s real, it exists.
My problem with the implementation is it’s half-assed. Those goofy Lobster-people models replacing everything. Those aren’t quality models. If you’re going to do a mode to make it more comfortable for people to play, Blizzard could have put in the effort to make the models not be upscaled Vanilla-era rigs.
That’s right. I’m arguing the Arachnophobe mode doesn’t go far enough.
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Which is a more fair and considerate opinion to have than “Lol, this is dumb or why isn’t there mode for X”
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This is the issue, isn’t it? Blizzard doing what Blizzard always does–implement a shoddy, half-thought-out premise and then tack on a lazy fix before doing a victory lap for cheap applauds by less critical voices while ignoring the numerous other trash fires they’ve set?
As they’ve done for lore, as they’ve done for gameplay, as they do for accessibility.
I don’t feel anyone’s saying arachnophobia mode is dumb. I feel a lot of people are wary that the way Blizzard does arachnophobia mode is dumb. But this forum seems to struggle a lot with nuance lately.
To my understanding, in order to implement arachnophobia mode in the game, a dedicated dev had to explore every inch of the game and manually mark spider mobs that needed replaced. Apparently the backend doesn’t have some sort of marker that designates a mob as a “spider” that can be found and replaced in an instant. This is very spaghetti code but we’re talking about a 20-year-old game with several teams of developers and project managers touching it over the years and the tech debt is likely massive. But TL;DR this isn’t as lazy as it seems on the outside.
This isn’t an excuse for any half-arsed effort but a reminder that making an ancient game more accessible can be a bizarrely monumental effort and the team has to start somewhere. I’m glad it’s in and if it’s not ideal for folks, hopefully it’s updated to a better standard. I won’t be using the mode except for a chuckle because I love the idea of the giant Fireland spider boss being a comically large lobster and it’ll be something to chuckle at while farming transmog. I hope the mode is actually helpful to the people it’s meant for.
As for other accessibility options, they’ve slowly but surely been adding them since after the lawsuit and the new team has settled in. But sometimes I get a sense of “all or nothing” from folks demanding change — that if every checkbox isn’t ticked on implementation (i.e., offering more phobia modes than just spiders) that none of it is worth the effort. But it is because it will help people and having it out there in an early iteration means they can get feedback to make it better.
If we really got all the much-needed accessibility changes in one go, it’d easily be an expansion’s worth of content updates. But instead, we’re going to get it piecemeal and we need to encourage as much as constructively criticize it. So this thread and its nuance or lack thereof is great, but I’m not exactly sure what it is we’re fighting for anymore other than for the sake of semantics.
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I don’t view it as “all or nothing.” I view it as “you could have tried harder.”
I’ll admit, though, I’ve always been puzzled why Blizzard commands this level of loyalty that people are eager to defend them. Even if you like their games, they’re still a ruthlessly profit-driven corporation with worse practices than a lot of places. That warrants mistrust just on a definitive level, I feel.
What feels more “all or nothing” is the belief that criticizing Blizzard means you super hate them or hate what they’re doing. That’s simple dishonesty. You can remain sober and impartial in your dislike of a company.
Honestly, I just can’t bring myself to be angry enough to be either a super fan or anti-fan of any company because they don’t give a crap about me or most others at the end of the day. That, and I’ve been the beleaguered developer with incompetent managers and a crap load of tech debt to tackle and no time or compensation to ever meaningfully do so, so my perspectives generally come from that.
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I don’t even know where the anger is coming from, to be honest. “Blizzard does bad work sometimes” is not a controversial, passionate or untrue statement in the least.
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I feel like a dev had a weekend off and decided to make this a project.
Which is honestly fun and great.
This is an optional thing.
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You’re just trying to backwards walk into a fun beach episode expansion where crab mode turns the whole world into a lovingly rendered custom sun-kissed tropical paradise where our characters frolic in the waves and, yes, fight crabs instead of spiders
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I feel like Dragonflight was our beach episode and it was not a very good beach episode.
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It is now, in the current zones. Regular flying in the new zones is gated unless they changed it from all the feedback – which I hope they did, but I don’t think they did?
Oh, God.
The War Within is the expansion where Blizzard gave us crabs.
Why is my brain like this?
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There are times I like dragonriding and there are times I do not. Flying through Elwynn? Nope. Too many trees. It’s the opposite of fun there. I also like to hover on a mount when I’m in Org because I don’t like people running up and booping me or casting multiple heals on me. Go find a training dummy for that.
I honestly don’t know why they’re gating regular flying at all. It’s like punishment for anyone who might want it. How dare we still want the old flying when they worked sooooo hard on new flying.
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And you have every right to be.
I just don’t believe this mode is being implemented out of pure altruism. Not for one second, largely due to things like the flying issue.
“SPIDER! BURN THE WHOLE HOUSE DOWN!” is a pop culture thing, they’re doing this and promoting it because it latches a meme. I don’t believe they’d be doing this and promoting it if there was no perceived marketing ROI. I’ve seen SO MANY ads on social media about this.
Their accessibility options aren’t great. Their colorblind modes are reportedly bad – from me, that’s anecdotal because I don’t experience it but had 2 raiders from the Shadowlands raid group who did, and they said it was poorly done in WoW. I have no idea what ‘good’ would be or take, though.
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