I mean, you’re simply making up things to support your argument. You have zero supporting evidence to inform your claims that:
Arachnophobia affects less people than people with disabilities who are actually affected by dragonflight.
Blizzard doesn’t work to support people with physical disabilities.
Again; you’re making false equivalencies without any supporting evidence or data. Replacing spider models with crab models is extremely low-cost in terms of either development time or game impact. Dragonflying is significantly more impactful on actual game interaction (and equally on bot impact), and while it has some impact on what I assume is a very small number of players, only Blizzard knows just how small that number is. Neither your assumption, nor my assumption, bares any relevance whatsoever in discussion of the breadth of that impact.
It has been extremely clear since they started using pathfinder that Blizzard finds flight in general, and now more specifically normal flight, problematic and undesirable from a design perspective. Dragonflying is their happy medium, and the fact that they left normal flying in at all is the support of physical disability that you claim they aren’t making.
We know more people have physical disabilities than arachnophobia so at this point you refuse to even recognize this universal truth.
DR isn’t more engaging if you zoom across not only an entire map or zones.
Also arachnophobia accessibility isn’t low cost as it takes time and investment to make it happen. Compared to TBC normal flying which already exists it is a flip of the switch.
But not all physical disabilities have anything to do with dynamic flight. Missing a leg is a physical disability, but will not affect your ability to skyride at all. Also some that would have an effect on if someone is able to do dynamic flight, are already solved by the game by default, due to for example key rebinding.
The proportion of the people that are impacted by physical ailments and gated by PF more than likely if we are being honest easily eclipses people that have arachnophobia.
The facts are this…there has been accessibility changes to DR and before then to help people with motion sickness for many, many years. Same with color blind settings as more customers are impacted than arachnophobia.
If arachnophobia was in proportion even close to scale of number of people that deal with that phobia like color blindness and motion sickness BlizZard would have added that feature decades ago!
Not matter how hard you all try to spin this PF gating players with physical ailments is a bad look.
Arachnophobia globally impacts less than 8 percent of the population. Even assuming all 8% play WoW lol that is even close to people with motion sickness, and physical disabilities that do play WoW.
At this point you all lost the narrative because forcing players unable to do PF makes BlizZard look bad.
Where is your number of the people that have these issue to the point of effecting their ability to skyride? E.g. I get motion sickness during games sometimes (low FoV first person games mostly), but not during skyriding. (Not to discount anyone that does get motion sick when skyriding). So where are your numbers for that?
I think the thing that bothers me is the bickering about this topic, heck any topic where people disagree. Instead of staying calm and rationally we resort to name calling and fact checking yada-yada-yada.
I am a player that has a hand disability. Having only three fingers on my mouse hand it is difficult to be accurate with Dragon Riding er, rebranded “Sky Riding”.
For people that don’t know how difficult that is, just try playing with a thumb, pointer finger and middle finger and see how your middle finger now isn’t on a button and your pointer finger has to do double work covering two buttons because your middle finger has to grip the side of the mouse that your ring finger or pinky would normally do.
I don’t dislike or like SR as I had once introduced TBC aka “Steady Flight” mount on my taskbar in addition to the faster mount. Now that was replaced by a toggle switch which in itself is dumb and brought a list of graphic issues and other bugs to the game that some hinted at, but most don’t care as “Speed is king”.
I think one of the main problems is you’re going to lock SF behind a Pathfinder but not SR. That makes those people that prefer SF second rate gamers. Even if they removed Vigor option from SR, you might not get the results you think more people would stop using SF.
I personally took the SR mount off my taskbar and now only have the SF mount. I did it not because I dislike going fast, but the toggle. I also because of my hand issue find doing certain content easier if I am going slower.
To me the toggle was Blizzard coping out on fixing the animations of all the mounts in the game. To re-due all those animations alone would have been years of work for them. Thats why you hear weird sounds and see weird animations of mounts doing things they normally wouldn’t.
The pool of “people who have physical disabilities” is not the same as the pool of “people who have physical disabilities that thus struggle with dragonflight”. The later is an entirely unknown subset of the former. It could be 99%, it could be 0.00001%. I don’t know, and you definitely don’t know. Your false equivalence is between these two categories; you are claiming the entire category of “people with physical disabilities”, when in all likelyhood, the vast majority of those have no more issue with dragonflight than they do with regular flight.
It is definitionally more engaging, in that it requires more direct action and decision making than normal flight does, and disallows passive safety in a way normal flight allows.
It is extremely low cost compared to almost any other designed feature; the vast majority literally requires a single asset flip. TBC flight has no cost for continued existence from a development standpoint in and of itself; the cost is design space and game mechanics. As I said; it is extremely clear that Blizzard wanted to be rid of flight as soon as the pathfinder mechanic was introduced; this is where they have settled. This is the alternative that they have come to be ok with.
Ultimately, neither your opinion nor mine matters at all in this discussion. If Blizzard thought there was a big opportunity or reputational loss to be had by locking regular flight behind pathfinder, they wouldn’t have done it, so your claims that there are “easy wins for Blizzard” are likely true. They have already run the numbers and claimed them. In their minds, regular flight largely limits their design space, and the extremely small amount of people affected by its being limited behind pathfinder is an acceptable trade-off for that design space being open to them. For all the tinsel-town noise on the forum, Blizzard obviously has conflicting data that tells them that you’re vastly over-representing your position.
That is literally the way many people use mice? My fourth and fifth fingers generally glide on the pad, middle and index on buttons, and thumb on mouse side.
I really like skyriding, unless I’m eating something, then I actually have to stop playing or take a flight path if I don’t want to change my flying style.
I preferred it more when I had two mounts, one skyriding and one that was the old style. That was fine. And I’ll adapt to this well enough. Skyriding is more engaging and feels more fun to me anyway.
The actual number of people who like or dislike it is completely unknown because no one here has those statistics; Anecdotal evidence varies and is unreliable.
I like it, until it lags. Dragonriding/Skyriding becomes nearly unplayable when you are lagging. Usually only in dense city’s and now in the prepatch events, but it’s enough to cause frustration.
At least with the old flight if you were lagging you could just stop doing things and give your computer a chance to catch up.
