Dhalphirdon't you open that trapdooryou're a fool if you dareRegistered Userregular
honestly, it would be pretty cool if they found a way to put an actual flying mechanic in the game. Simulate gliding and banking and turning and require you to add power in the form of flapping wings.
The reason why flying mounts are bad for the game while ground mounts aren't is twofold: the first is the speed difference and the second is that flying can be used to bypass content ground mounts can't.
If flying mounts were the same speed as ground mounts then there wouldn't be any difference in world size. As it is top level flying is twice the speed of top level ground mounts which are twice the speed of running. Vanilla, TBC, and WoD were designed around the assumption of an epic mount which means when you get a flying mount everything would be extremely close to each other. Every other expansion was designed around the assumption of an epic flying mount which leads to everything being too far away until you got the ability to fly due to the design of the world needing to trend to having huge landmasses with giant expanses of nothing between the patches of content. And yes, they could theoretically remove ground mounts in a future expansion as long as they designed the world around the lack of them properly, meaning the distance to get to places would need to be halved at a minimum. And while many games already function perfectly well with no ability to increase your speed by a huge amount, I don't see Blizzard ever doing that to WoW.
The difference in how stealth allows you to bypass content and how flying allows you to do it is the former is active while the latter is passive. In content matching your level you can't stealth and just beeline to your objective, you have to avoid mobs (which is even harder if there are anti-stealth mobs around) or else they can see you and then to take your objective you have to come out and engage with whatever's in the area before you can stealth again. With flying you can just beeline there, maybe have to kill some mobs, and beeline out. It's impossible for full unrestrained flying as it is now to ever be as active in bypassing content as stealth is, there would need to be limitations put onto it that people would hate. Stuff like limiting the flight ceiling so it's impossible to get out of range of someone attacking you from the ground, making it possible for mobs to aggro you from the ground, making it so if you take damage/enter combat while flying you're no longer able to maintain altitude and thus are forced to glide to the ground, making mounting up on a flying mount take twice (or more) as long as mounting up on a ground mount, making you have to run a bit on the ground while out of combat the entire time before you can take off and fly, making you have to jump constantly to remain in the air while flying so you can't afk, adding in a mount fatigue meter so you can only fly for so long before your mount gets too tired to continue flying, locating more content underground/underwater/inside so you can't fly at all, surrounding questing areas with anti-air turrets, filling the world with flying npcs that can attack you but you can't attack (since you can't fight while mounted), introducing npcs that can net you and drag you to the ground, peppering dismounting debuffs everywhere, giving players spells that limit people's ability to mount and/or their max mounted speed, and the end of my list but definitely not the end of potential ideas: introducing more items like the dismounting turtle shell.
There's a reason I hated Blade's Edge Mountains while I was leveling up back in TBC, and it's the same reason I hate Gorgorond (not actually sure it's Gorgorond, it's the one with the centaur lookin green guy fighting a rock dude as you're doing the entry questline into the zone) in WoD - the god damn pathing of the zone feels like it was designed by someone having a fucking seizure. Needing to constantly double back or find the "correct" pathway up the side of a mountain so I can get to the quest marker on my map wasn't ever fun, it was annoying and frustrating. God forbid I see a mining node or herb node not right on the main path, I might spend the next 20 minutes trying to figure out how to finangle myself over there so I can collect it.
And apologies about the class nerfs comment, I wasn't talking about stealth at all. It was more about the "passive" mobility of those classes. Though the stealth issue that you bring up is a very interesting one.
There's a ton of ways that can incorporate or limit flying for areas or whole zones without completely removing it. And it could all tie right into the story of the zone, too. For example, in Talador, there's a very strong Iron Horde presence in small pockets and bases throughout as you quest. You make strikes against them in super powered vehicles and so forth, breaking down their forts and attacking their armies. Imagine if the reason for "no flying in talador" was because of the anti air weaponry that was present in those zones. You quest to break the forces down, and with extra quests to take out the heavy anti air weaponry that makes flying in the zone basically a no-go. As the final part of the zone, it could then be a quest that involves you diving down on your mount (now that you've finished off the anti air weapons) and blasting the last strong hold to smithereens with all of the explosives you collected from questing to take down those bases. And maybe as another quest the tables turn, where you actually take control of the anti air weaponry yourself and shoot down a squadron of Iron Horde dudes coming to do what you just did to them as revenge. Maybe a few of those enemies gets through the hail of fire and blast your anti air weaponry apart, and now you've gotta take to the skies yourself and take down the last ELITE IRON HORDE SKYCAPTAIN as the capstone quest to the whole series.
But nah, because that would all require actually trying to do all of that stuff in a quest line. Even though every single part of that has been done at one point or another in a different zone in WoW.
Blade's Edge definitely had that problem which is why most people skipped as much of it as they could back in TBC and only came back to do it with flying. It had a giant gorge going through the entire zone and there were only a few ramps up or down and a few bridges across which meant you had to travel near half the zone to get to the opposite side or back up from the gorge. Gorgrond most definitely does NOT have that problem. The pathways between content locations in Gorgrond are extremely straightforward and the few places that have cliffs (like the area to the east of the outpost) have multiple spots for you to get up onto the higher cliff without having to double back all the way to the start. If you're spending 20 minutes to figure out a path to collect a single herb node (especially with how devalued trade goods are in WoD) then you've got a personal problem that's external to the game's design.
And again, your description of a quest that uses flying is not something that'd require flying to be unrestricted worldwide to happen. They could easily implement that questline if they wanted to and keep flying unavailable for the world at large. Having flying in quests does not require having it in the world.
Blade's Edge definitely had that problem which is why most people skipped as much of it as they could back in TBC and only came back to do it with flying. It had a giant gorge going through the entire zone and there were only a few ramps up or down and a few bridges across which meant you had to travel near half the zone to get to the opposite side or back up from the gorge. Gorgrond most definitely does NOT have that problem. The pathways between content locations in Gorgrond are extremely straightforward and the few places that have cliffs (like the area to the east of the outpost) have multiple spots for you to get up onto the higher cliff without having to double back all the way to the start. If you're spending 20 minutes to figure out a path to collect a single herb node (especially with how devalued trade goods are in WoD) then you've got a personal problem that's external to the game's design.
And again, your description of a quest that uses flying is not something that'd require flying to be unrestricted worldwide to happen. They could easily implement that questline if they wanted to and keep flying unavailable for the world at large. Having flying in quests does not require having it in the world.
Of course not. Not with how flying works right now within the game. But that doesn't mean that it has to be that way. There's a ton of stuff they could do with it and tie it into the quests and zones and such. You also don't require ground mounts right now beyond traveling between questing hubs, which is what you're saying that flying was really only used for. There's 0 reason to keep ground mounts in the game using that logic. Just slap a flight path every 100 yards and be done with it.
Or. Do quests that benefit from having mounts or from being able to fly. Sure there are tricks that could be done to mimic the same thing (the 'on rails' bombing runs, or the dragon dailies out in coldara, as examples), but it does not have the same feel as mounting up on your own mount (ROCKET POWERED DRAGONS) and doing it that way. What's more badass? Your DK riding along on a faedragon throwing bombs down at the enemy army, or doing the bombing runs on a massive frost wyrm that you stole from the very pits of the Ice Crown Citadel after defeating the Lich King himself?
Transmogging proves that people enjoy having their characters look cool by using item models they spent time getting or that have special sentimental value to them. Why not do cool shit with mounts, too? Nope, just make them look fucking dumb as shit hopping around on the ground. (After getting the news of "no flying forever", I've opened a ticket to get a refund on this dumb ass dragon that can only fucking hop around on the ground.)
With the shear amount of comments on the wow forum, twitter, facebook and such with the lack of replies from blizzard I feel Tuesday they are going to have a meeting since sticking fingers in both ears and going la la la is not working
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AegisFear My DanceOvershot Toronto, Landed in OttawaRegistered Userregular
Ghostcrawler amuses me:
What are you thoughts on blizzard's decision about Flying?
With the shear amount of comments on the wow forum, twitter, facebook and such with the lack of replies from blizzard I feel Tuesday they are going to have a meeting since sticking fingers in both ears and going la la la is not working
Too bad that is the exact defense all the "important people" will be employing in said meeting.
Things don't get to this point when management is actually in touch with the people in touch with the players.
Blade's Edge definitely had that problem which is why most people skipped as much of it as they could back in TBC and only came back to do it with flying. It had a giant gorge going through the entire zone and there were only a few ramps up or down and a few bridges across which meant you had to travel near half the zone to get to the opposite side or back up from the gorge. Gorgrond most definitely does NOT have that problem. The pathways between content locations in Gorgrond are extremely straightforward and the few places that have cliffs (like the area to the east of the outpost) have multiple spots for you to get up onto the higher cliff without having to double back all the way to the start. If you're spending 20 minutes to figure out a path to collect a single herb node (especially with how devalued trade goods are in WoD) then you've got a personal problem that's external to the game's design.
And again, your description of a quest that uses flying is not something that'd require flying to be unrestricted worldwide to happen. They could easily implement that questline if they wanted to and keep flying unavailable for the world at large. Having flying in quests does not require having it in the world.
Of course not. Not with how flying works right now within the game. But that doesn't mean that it has to be that way. There's a ton of stuff they could do with it and tie it into the quests and zones and such. You also don't require ground mounts right now beyond traveling between questing hubs, which is what you're saying that flying was really only used for. There's 0 reason to keep ground mounts in the game using that logic. Just slap a flight path every 100 yards and be done with it.
Or. Do quests that benefit from having mounts or from being able to fly. Sure there are tricks that could be done to mimic the same thing (the 'on rails' bombing runs, or the dragon dailies out in coldara, as examples), but it does not have the same feel as mounting up on your own mount (ROCKET POWERED DRAGONS) and doing it that way. What's more badass? Your DK riding along on a faedragon throwing bombs down at the enemy army, or doing the bombing runs on a massive frost wyrm that you stole from the very pits of the Ice Crown Citadel after defeating the Lich King himself?
Transmogging proves that people enjoy having their characters look cool by using item models they spent time getting or that have special sentimental value to them. Why not do cool shit with mounts, too? Nope, just make them look fucking dumb as shit hopping around on the ground. (After getting the news of "no flying forever", I've opened a ticket to get a refund on this dumb ass dragon that can only fucking hop around on the ground.)
The cosmetic aspect of mounts is seperate from the gameplay mechanics of mounts, don't confuse the two. Mounts have always been cosmetic: you could easily replace them with a spell just like with Worgen and Druids. Functionally they're all the same, it doesn't matter if you have your class mount that you summoned from the depths of hell, your racial mount you bought the second you could scrape up the gold, a mount you wrested from underneath the dead corpse of your foe, or something you bought with real world cash. They all do the same thing.
The gameplay mechanics of flying are what's broken. They seem to not care about the cosmetic part of flying because they view the gameplay mechanics to be so destructive that it's not worth trying to salvage. There are things they could do to salvage it, but not only would it take a much more steady hand than Blizzard has shown to wield in the past, whatever solution they'd come up with would never satisfy the people who want flight as it is.
And again, regardless if you can fly in the world at large if a quest says "they can fly on their mount for this quest" then you could mount up on whatever flying mount you wanted for it. Quest mechanics using a flying mount doesn't require flying mounts to be available everywhere.
There's no confusion on my part. The cosmetic aspect of mounts -is- separate from the mechanics of it, but don't try and make it seem like it doesn't matter at all. People invest time, effort, and money into obtaining stuff that's only cosmetic, so it should most definitely be a consideration, and it should also be a massive incentive for Blizzard to make sure that those things are utilized. People will get to enjoy their reward for their time/effort/money, and will want to keep playing to do more such things, maybe farming up more mounts, or buy up some gold to purchase a rare mount off the AH, or level up a new profession that they never bothered with before for a new mount.
Edit - Removed snark.
And my main reason for not being a fan of flying being removed - it's fun being able to do barrel rolls on a two headed dragon with rockets strapped to the saddle. It's not fun watching that same dragon hop around like a rabbit while the massive rocket engines sit idle the whole time. I didn't pay $25 for hopping, I paid $25 for barrel rolls.
With the shear amount of comments on the wow forum, twitter, facebook and such with the lack of replies from blizzard I feel Tuesday they are going to have a meeting since sticking fingers in both ears and going la la la is not working
Too bad that is the exact defense all the "important people" will be employing in said meeting.
Things don't get to this point when management is actually in touch with the people in touch with the players.
It's their silent damage control which I am curious of
obiviously they did not expect this or the level of this
I would every bet they did. It's why they made the annoucement in the evening, on the friday of a long weekend. Lovers of the West Wing are familiar with 'taking out the trash' and it seems to apply here, too
With the shear amount of comments on the wow forum, twitter, facebook and such with the lack of replies from blizzard I feel Tuesday they are going to have a meeting since sticking fingers in both ears and going la la la is not working
Too bad that is the exact defense all the "important people" will be employing in said meeting.
Things don't get to this point when management is actually in touch with the people in touch with the players.
It's their silent damage control which I am curious of
obiviously they did not expect this or the level of this
I think they did. That's why this was revealed on the Friday before a holiday weekend, like bad political news.
They already watched 3 million + subs walk out the door and didn't blink. They aren't changing course now.
I never go anywhere outside my garrison without my Aviana's feather. If its still on CD then I simply go afk for 10 min. Navigating the WoD zones on a ground mount is just too frustrating and tedious.
I'm not saying that flying should be available during questing but once you finish those and reach the endgame, the only thing no-flying is good for is to persuade people to stay away from what open world content still remains.
I never go anywhere outside my garrison without my Aviana's feather. If its still on CD then I simply go afk for 10 min. Navigating the WoD zones on a ground mount is just too frustrating and tedious.
I'm not saying that flying should be available during questing but once you finish those and reach the endgame, the only thing no-flying is good for is to persuade people to stay away from what open world content still remains.
Flying is a thing that exists in the warcraft world, there is really no good reason to take it away at any point other than wanting to be lazy and cut corners with your mission design / pad out your game time with less content.
Regardless of how you feel about personally being able to fly, you should be worried when they start taking out long lived features from their game for no reason that actually benefits the player.
There's plenty of gameplay reasons why removing flight benefits the player in the long run. People are attached to the overpowered gameplay elements flying has granted them as well as the cosmetic aspects which is why it's such a hard tooth to pull. It's like an FPS giving you NoClip at some point then taking it away later. The powers you were granted were overpowered and ruined the game but the lack of them leaves a huge hole in your gameplay experience.
For the people who are mainly interested in the fact they're losing the cosmetic aspects of flying mounts with this change there's a bunch of things they could do to lessen the blow. Stuff like making flying mounts still fly but only a little bit above the ground and mechanically the game acts like you're on the ground or allowing you to "Spirit of the Beast"/"Eye of Kilrogg" your flying mount and fly anywhere with it but not actually go anywhere.
If they were to keep unrestrained flying in the world in due to the backlash, the number one thing I would do is limit flying speed in Draenor or any future expansions to 200% so they can design the world around ground mounts and not worry about blowing up the size to counteract flying. That's the easiest thing they could do since counteracting the other gameplay issues around bypassing content would be much much more time consuming.
I never go anywhere outside my garrison without my Aviana's feather. If its still on CD then I simply go afk for 10 min. Navigating the WoD zones on a ground mount is just too frustrating and tedious.
I'm not saying that flying should be available during questing but once you finish those and reach the endgame, the only thing no-flying is good for is to persuade people to stay away from what open world content still remains.
Flying is a thing that exists in the warcraft world, there is really no good reason to take it away at any point other than wanting to be lazy and cut corners with your mission design / pad out your game time with less content.
Regardless of how you feel about personally being able to fly, you should be worried when they start taking out long lived features from their game for no reason that actually benefits the player.
As someone who canceled their sub and did not purchase WoD at all in part because of the removal of flying, I don't believe that the current situation is the result of laziness.
I think that:
A) They have a very specific vision for how they want the WoW experience to be moving forward and are desperate for the game to be as relevant today as it was in 2008, even if that means shedding portions of the existing player base.
WoW is finally moving towards annualized expansions, and as a result each expansion is going to feel impoverished next to products with longer development cycles. The team has decided that removing flying will help each of these expansions "feel" larger and aid retention by slowing down content consumption.
Personally, I do not share their vision for WoW, but I think they are committed to it for at least one more product cycle. It may already be too late for "Secrets of the Argus" or whatever to have a substantially different progression model than WoD.
I'm interested to see how big the sub bump is for the next expansion, and how well no flying works without garrisons. Some of the garrison functionality was obviously designed to mitigate the removal of flying. If they are removed, forced ground transport could be even worse from a player perspective.
I agree that there could be engaging gameplay only possible with no flying allowed. However I find no such gameplay to actually exist in WoD except for maybe a small handful of jumping puzzles which can be bypassed with the feather anyway.
I find the continent so unsuitable for ground only travel that I almost can't believe they had it in mind when they created it. At least most vanilla zones had main roads spanning them.
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AngryThe glory I had witnessedwas just a sleight of handRegistered Userregular
No no, they have company wide meetings where the only topic they discuss is how they can get away with being 'lazy.'
That's definitely something that happens outside of people's imaginations.
The thing about flying that kind of baffles me with Blizzard is that they are treating it as an Either/Or situation with their world design and there's no reason for it to be like that.
As I mentioned before, I think they got it right with Pandaria. While you're leveling and actually exploring and questing out in the world, no flying. This lets them design their world and do everything they want to with it in a no flying allowed environment.
But once the questing is over, and you're at the level cap, there comes a point where you're pretty much "done" with the world content and your focus is instances, raiding, dailies, whatever. There's no reason to keep flying away at this point. Just as a matter of convenience.
Even if they wanted areas at the level cap like the Timeless Isle with rares and events and shit going on all the time with no flying allowed they could still have that, and those specific zones could prevent flight, but for the areas that were used as leveling content, there is no reason why they shouldn't be fly over for people that are well passed their intended content level.
They could still have non flying level cap areas and if they didn't want "invisible walls" or "dismount auras" around them they could just instance them.
For example, the Apexis Crystal Daily areas. What if instead of those zones being just out in the world and you having to travel to them, they were each instanced and you spoke to the questgiver in your Garrison and you could choose to be taken to any of them and then you were just loaded into a sanctuary qualified starting point in each of those zones where you couldn't be ganked right from the loading screen at least.
Would anyone have a problem with that?
I didn't mind the exclusion of flight in this expansion from a gameplay perspective. I never felt disadvantaged or put upon to get to anywhere in Draenor, but it's not just about that. Flying is just fun. I like my various flying mounts, some of them I went to really bothersome extremes to obtain and it's fun just to fly around on them whether I'm using it to get from point A to point B, farm something, or if I'm just doing fucking loops while waiting on a queue.
They used a WHOLE expansion to introduce flying to vanilla areas.
They sell FLYING mounts in their fucking store.
I can look at my flying mounts in my fucking garrison.
They talk about us not being able to modify the coloring of our armor because it's a slap in the face to the art team. Isn't no flying a slap in the face to the people that design FLYING FUCKING MOUNTS?
I really really have to agree and this has been said before, even though it's rarely the part of the argument that gets the most attention. Flying is fun. I'll agree gliding can be fun too, and maximizing the use of limited flying or gliding buffs/items can be its own kind of fun game.
But flying was a thing that made WoW feel unique to me. Especially on my druid. I can't tell you how many times I geeked out by flipping my night elf off cliffs/buildings just to shift to raven and fly about aimlessly.
Flying wasn't what made you play WoW, but flying was always one reason I kept playing WoW over other things. imho it's always been a balance changer for me. Something more or less that only WoW (in addition to all the fun MMORPG stuff) had in such depth. I want to fly in new zones, because I enjoy it. I don't care if it offers me an advantage, if its practical or useful. It's just a way I enjoyed exploring the world.
I don't know, I really don't have much to contribute here I guess. I just think this is a dumb decision, as there's so much saturation in this market taking something fun and unique away feels like a bad idea no matter what justification you give it.
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They used a WHOLE expansion to introduce flying to vanilla areas.
They sell FLYING mounts in their fucking store.
I can look at my flying mounts in my fucking garrison.
They talk about us not being able to modify the coloring of our armor because it's a slap in the face to the art team. Isn't no flying a slap in the face to the people that design FLYING FUCKING MOUNTS?
These are things that don't make sense to me.
Wait is that a thing they actually said? They said the reason they aren't adding a dye system is because it's insulting to the design team? If so that's got to be one of the silliest things I've heard... People have different ideas of what a good or bad aesthetic is, it's an almost entirely subjective thing. Even if it's the most perfectly designed piece of armor that fits perfectly with the theme, has wonderful color theory applied, and is executed perfectly, you'll STILL have people that don't like it for X or Y reasons. That is perfectly valid to, which is why you typically want to give players the option to change colors around and such so they can customize their character in a manner that makes sense for them.
There are a host of reasons for not allowing players to dye armor, but "It's insulting to the design team" is not among them. I'd be be shocked if they actually came out and said such a thing.
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"slap in the face" is certainly a bit of hyperbole on my part but I have heard numerous times that "it wouldn't be fair to the art team" as a reason for not being able to dye.
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AegisFear My DanceOvershot Toronto, Landed in OttawaRegistered Userregular
"slap in the face" is certainly a bit of hyperbole on my part but I have heard numerous times that "it wouldn't be fair to the art team" as a reason for not being able to dye.
Which is amusing given that how many re-coloured wolf mounts we keep getting.
They also said armor dyes would result in everyone looking the same.
I guess that's exactly what happened with transmog, eh?
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SteevLWhat can I do for you?Registered Userregular
Meanwhile, last night my guild took another stab at Blackhand for the first time in a few weeks. Unfortunately, we were short a few people, so we tried to grab a few randoms from the group finder. It didn't go well, and by our third wipe most of the non-guildies had left, and no one else felt like doing the fight again. There were talks about using OpenRaid in the future to fill out any missing people, although we should be getting some regulars back in a week or two. We'll see!
It'd be nice to take down Blackhand before 6.2, though.
The reason why flying mounts are bad for the game while ground mounts aren't is twofold: the first is the speed difference and the second is that flying can be used to bypass content ground mounts can't.
The problem is both of those are good things, because travel downtime is boring, and being dismounted by low con mobs / dealing with shitty terrain design isn't "content."
Also, again, personal choice. If you don't want to fly, don't. Outside of the exceedingly weak world pvp arguments, it's simply an equally valid personal choice to do either.
Blade's Edge definitely had that problem which is why most people skipped as much of it as they could back in TBC and only came back to do it with flying. It had a giant gorge going through the entire zone and there were only a few ramps up or down and a few bridges across which meant you had to travel near half the zone to get to the opposite side or back up from the gorge. Gorgrond most definitely does NOT have that problem. The pathways between content locations in Gorgrond are extremely straightforward and the few places that have cliffs (like the area to the east of the outpost) have multiple spots for you to get up onto the higher cliff without having to double back all the way to the start. If you're spending 20 minutes to figure out a path to collect a single herb node (especially with how devalued trade goods are in WoD) then you've got a personal problem that's external to the game's design.
And again, your description of a quest that uses flying is not something that'd require flying to be unrestricted worldwide to happen. They could easily implement that questline if they wanted to and keep flying unavailable for the world at large. Having flying in quests does not require having it in the world.
Of course not. Not with how flying works right now within the game. But that doesn't mean that it has to be that way. There's a ton of stuff they could do with it and tie it into the quests and zones and such. You also don't require ground mounts right now beyond traveling between questing hubs, which is what you're saying that flying was really only used for. There's 0 reason to keep ground mounts in the game using that logic. Just slap a flight path every 100 yards and be done with it.
Or. Do quests that benefit from having mounts or from being able to fly. Sure there are tricks that could be done to mimic the same thing (the 'on rails' bombing runs, or the dragon dailies out in coldara, as examples), but it does not have the same feel as mounting up on your own mount (ROCKET POWERED DRAGONS) and doing it that way. What's more badass? Your DK riding along on a faedragon throwing bombs down at the enemy army, or doing the bombing runs on a massive frost wyrm that you stole from the very pits of the Ice Crown Citadel after defeating the Lich King himself?
Transmogging proves that people enjoy having their characters look cool by using item models they spent time getting or that have special sentimental value to them. Why not do cool shit with mounts, too? Nope, just make them look fucking dumb as shit hopping around on the ground. (After getting the news of "no flying forever", I've opened a ticket to get a refund on this dumb ass dragon that can only fucking hop around on the ground.)
Honestly, that's the best thing to do. Enough refund tickets will either change their minds or at least put a thumbtack in the shoes of the shitty designers who think this is okay.
The reason why flying mounts are bad for the game while ground mounts aren't is twofold: the first is the speed difference and the second is that flying can be used to bypass content ground mounts can't.
The problem is both of those are good things, because travel downtime is boring, and being dismounted by low con mobs / dealing with shitty terrain design isn't "content."
Also, again, personal choice. If you don't want to fly, don't. Outside of the exceedingly weak world pvp arguments, it's simply an equally valid personal choice to do either.
First, downtime is required to make the uptime more poignant, something that's fundamental to all forms of entertainment. If you eliminate all downtime from the game because it's "boring" then you've eliminated the majority of the game. Second, "shitty terrain design" is the root cause of your complaint, it would remain shitty regardless if you're forced to walk over it, mount over it, or fly over it. The solution should be to fix the terrain design rather than to just shrug and let you fly over it. And your want to be able to bypass content without risk is noted, but I disagree with it.
And again, these are game design problems and how people interact with the game they've created. There's a difference between being forced not to fly by the game and choosing not to fly when you could.
The reason why flying mounts are bad for the game while ground mounts aren't is twofold: the first is the speed difference and the second is that flying can be used to bypass content ground mounts can't.
The problem is both of those are good things, because travel downtime is boring, and being dismounted by low con mobs / dealing with shitty terrain design isn't "content."
Also, again, personal choice. If you don't want to fly, don't. Outside of the exceedingly weak world pvp arguments, it's simply an equally valid personal choice to do either.
First, downtime is required to make the uptime more poignant, something that's fundamental to all forms of entertainment. If you eliminate all downtime from the game because it's "boring" then you've eliminated the majority of the game. Second, "shitty terrain design" is the root cause of your complaint, it would remain shitty regardless if you're forced to walk over it, mount over it, or fly over it. The solution should be to fix the terrain design rather than to just shrug and let you fly over it. And your want to be able to bypass content without risk is noted, but I disagree with it.
And again, these are game design problems and how people interact with the game they've created. There's a difference between being forced not to fly by the game and choosing not to fly when you could.
This is what I call BEM syndrome. Because that zone is fucking annoying no matter what you're doing there. Which is odd that my favorite flying related quest is out there.
They also said armor dyes would result in everyone looking the same.
I guess that's exactly what happened with transmog, eh?
It actually hasn't, there's some seriously cool stuff out there. Sure, you get the odd guy who just has Warrior T6 with Bulwark of Azzinoth like everybody else loves, but most people do a lot of really cool stuff.
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There's a reason I hated Blade's Edge Mountains while I was leveling up back in TBC, and it's the same reason I hate Gorgorond (not actually sure it's Gorgorond, it's the one with the centaur lookin green guy fighting a rock dude as you're doing the entry questline into the zone) in WoD - the god damn pathing of the zone feels like it was designed by someone having a fucking seizure. Needing to constantly double back or find the "correct" pathway up the side of a mountain so I can get to the quest marker on my map wasn't ever fun, it was annoying and frustrating. God forbid I see a mining node or herb node not right on the main path, I might spend the next 20 minutes trying to figure out how to finangle myself over there so I can collect it.
And apologies about the class nerfs comment, I wasn't talking about stealth at all. It was more about the "passive" mobility of those classes. Though the stealth issue that you bring up is a very interesting one.
There's a ton of ways that can incorporate or limit flying for areas or whole zones without completely removing it. And it could all tie right into the story of the zone, too. For example, in Talador, there's a very strong Iron Horde presence in small pockets and bases throughout as you quest. You make strikes against them in super powered vehicles and so forth, breaking down their forts and attacking their armies. Imagine if the reason for "no flying in talador" was because of the anti air weaponry that was present in those zones. You quest to break the forces down, and with extra quests to take out the heavy anti air weaponry that makes flying in the zone basically a no-go. As the final part of the zone, it could then be a quest that involves you diving down on your mount (now that you've finished off the anti air weapons) and blasting the last strong hold to smithereens with all of the explosives you collected from questing to take down those bases. And maybe as another quest the tables turn, where you actually take control of the anti air weaponry yourself and shoot down a squadron of Iron Horde dudes coming to do what you just did to them as revenge. Maybe a few of those enemies gets through the hail of fire and blast your anti air weaponry apart, and now you've gotta take to the skies yourself and take down the last ELITE IRON HORDE SKYCAPTAIN as the capstone quest to the whole series.
But nah, because that would all require actually trying to do all of that stuff in a quest line. Even though every single part of that has been done at one point or another in a different zone in WoW.
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And again, your description of a quest that uses flying is not something that'd require flying to be unrestricted worldwide to happen. They could easily implement that questline if they wanted to and keep flying unavailable for the world at large. Having flying in quests does not require having it in the world.
Of course not. Not with how flying works right now within the game. But that doesn't mean that it has to be that way. There's a ton of stuff they could do with it and tie it into the quests and zones and such. You also don't require ground mounts right now beyond traveling between questing hubs, which is what you're saying that flying was really only used for. There's 0 reason to keep ground mounts in the game using that logic. Just slap a flight path every 100 yards and be done with it.
Or. Do quests that benefit from having mounts or from being able to fly. Sure there are tricks that could be done to mimic the same thing (the 'on rails' bombing runs, or the dragon dailies out in coldara, as examples), but it does not have the same feel as mounting up on your own mount (ROCKET POWERED DRAGONS) and doing it that way. What's more badass? Your DK riding along on a faedragon throwing bombs down at the enemy army, or doing the bombing runs on a massive frost wyrm that you stole from the very pits of the Ice Crown Citadel after defeating the Lich King himself?
Transmogging proves that people enjoy having their characters look cool by using item models they spent time getting or that have special sentimental value to them. Why not do cool shit with mounts, too? Nope, just make them look fucking dumb as shit hopping around on the ground. (After getting the news of "no flying forever", I've opened a ticket to get a refund on this dumb ass dragon that can only fucking hop around on the ground.)
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Getting that transmog itch again...
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Too bad that is the exact defense all the "important people" will be employing in said meeting.
Things don't get to this point when management is actually in touch with the people in touch with the players.
The cosmetic aspect of mounts is seperate from the gameplay mechanics of mounts, don't confuse the two. Mounts have always been cosmetic: you could easily replace them with a spell just like with Worgen and Druids. Functionally they're all the same, it doesn't matter if you have your class mount that you summoned from the depths of hell, your racial mount you bought the second you could scrape up the gold, a mount you wrested from underneath the dead corpse of your foe, or something you bought with real world cash. They all do the same thing.
The gameplay mechanics of flying are what's broken. They seem to not care about the cosmetic part of flying because they view the gameplay mechanics to be so destructive that it's not worth trying to salvage. There are things they could do to salvage it, but not only would it take a much more steady hand than Blizzard has shown to wield in the past, whatever solution they'd come up with would never satisfy the people who want flight as it is.
And again, regardless if you can fly in the world at large if a quest says "they can fly on their mount for this quest" then you could mount up on whatever flying mount you wanted for it. Quest mechanics using a flying mount doesn't require flying mounts to be available everywhere.
There's no confusion on my part. The cosmetic aspect of mounts -is- separate from the mechanics of it, but don't try and make it seem like it doesn't matter at all. People invest time, effort, and money into obtaining stuff that's only cosmetic, so it should most definitely be a consideration, and it should also be a massive incentive for Blizzard to make sure that those things are utilized. People will get to enjoy their reward for their time/effort/money, and will want to keep playing to do more such things, maybe farming up more mounts, or buy up some gold to purchase a rare mount off the AH, or level up a new profession that they never bothered with before for a new mount.
Edit - Removed snark.
And my main reason for not being a fan of flying being removed - it's fun being able to do barrel rolls on a two headed dragon with rockets strapped to the saddle. It's not fun watching that same dragon hop around like a rabbit while the massive rocket engines sit idle the whole time. I didn't pay $25 for hopping, I paid $25 for barrel rolls.
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It's their silent damage control which I am curious of
obiviously they did not expect this or the level of this
I think they did. That's why this was revealed on the Friday before a holiday weekend, like bad political news.
They already watched 3 million + subs walk out the door and didn't blink. They aren't changing course now.
I'm not saying that flying should be available during questing but once you finish those and reach the endgame, the only thing no-flying is good for is to persuade people to stay away from what open world content still remains.
Flying is a thing that exists in the warcraft world, there is really no good reason to take it away at any point other than wanting to be lazy and cut corners with your mission design / pad out your game time with less content.
Regardless of how you feel about personally being able to fly, you should be worried when they start taking out long lived features from their game for no reason that actually benefits the player.
For the people who are mainly interested in the fact they're losing the cosmetic aspects of flying mounts with this change there's a bunch of things they could do to lessen the blow. Stuff like making flying mounts still fly but only a little bit above the ground and mechanically the game acts like you're on the ground or allowing you to "Spirit of the Beast"/"Eye of Kilrogg" your flying mount and fly anywhere with it but not actually go anywhere.
If they were to keep unrestrained flying in the world in due to the backlash, the number one thing I would do is limit flying speed in Draenor or any future expansions to 200% so they can design the world around ground mounts and not worry about blowing up the size to counteract flying. That's the easiest thing they could do since counteracting the other gameplay issues around bypassing content would be much much more time consuming.
As someone who canceled their sub and did not purchase WoD at all in part because of the removal of flying, I don't believe that the current situation is the result of laziness.
I think that:
A) They have a very specific vision for how they want the WoW experience to be moving forward and are desperate for the game to be as relevant today as it was in 2008, even if that means shedding portions of the existing player base.
Personally, I do not share their vision for WoW, but I think they are committed to it for at least one more product cycle. It may already be too late for "Secrets of the Argus" or whatever to have a substantially different progression model than WoD.
I'm interested to see how big the sub bump is for the next expansion, and how well no flying works without garrisons. Some of the garrison functionality was obviously designed to mitigate the removal of flying. If they are removed, forced ground transport could be even worse from a player perspective.
I find the continent so unsuitable for ground only travel that I almost can't believe they had it in mind when they created it. At least most vanilla zones had main roads spanning them.
That's definitely something that happens outside of people's imaginations.
In the sense the meeting is actually, "How can we spend less effort and money on our content that we will be charging the same price for", yes.
But from what I hear, this is happening to better guild than ours, so I guess it wasn't unexpected.
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As I mentioned before, I think they got it right with Pandaria. While you're leveling and actually exploring and questing out in the world, no flying. This lets them design their world and do everything they want to with it in a no flying allowed environment.
But once the questing is over, and you're at the level cap, there comes a point where you're pretty much "done" with the world content and your focus is instances, raiding, dailies, whatever. There's no reason to keep flying away at this point. Just as a matter of convenience.
Even if they wanted areas at the level cap like the Timeless Isle with rares and events and shit going on all the time with no flying allowed they could still have that, and those specific zones could prevent flight, but for the areas that were used as leveling content, there is no reason why they shouldn't be fly over for people that are well passed their intended content level.
They could still have non flying level cap areas and if they didn't want "invisible walls" or "dismount auras" around them they could just instance them.
For example, the Apexis Crystal Daily areas. What if instead of those zones being just out in the world and you having to travel to them, they were each instanced and you spoke to the questgiver in your Garrison and you could choose to be taken to any of them and then you were just loaded into a sanctuary qualified starting point in each of those zones where you couldn't be ganked right from the loading screen at least.
Would anyone have a problem with that?
I didn't mind the exclusion of flight in this expansion from a gameplay perspective. I never felt disadvantaged or put upon to get to anywhere in Draenor, but it's not just about that. Flying is just fun. I like my various flying mounts, some of them I went to really bothersome extremes to obtain and it's fun just to fly around on them whether I'm using it to get from point A to point B, farm something, or if I'm just doing fucking loops while waiting on a queue.
They sell FLYING mounts in their fucking store.
I can look at my flying mounts in my fucking garrison.
They talk about us not being able to modify the coloring of our armor because it's a slap in the face to the art team. Isn't no flying a slap in the face to the people that design FLYING FUCKING MOUNTS?
These are things that don't make sense to me.
But flying was a thing that made WoW feel unique to me. Especially on my druid. I can't tell you how many times I geeked out by flipping my night elf off cliffs/buildings just to shift to raven and fly about aimlessly.
Flying wasn't what made you play WoW, but flying was always one reason I kept playing WoW over other things. imho it's always been a balance changer for me. Something more or less that only WoW (in addition to all the fun MMORPG stuff) had in such depth. I want to fly in new zones, because I enjoy it. I don't care if it offers me an advantage, if its practical or useful. It's just a way I enjoyed exploring the world.
I don't know, I really don't have much to contribute here I guess. I just think this is a dumb decision, as there's so much saturation in this market taking something fun and unique away feels like a bad idea no matter what justification you give it.
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Wait is that a thing they actually said? They said the reason they aren't adding a dye system is because it's insulting to the design team? If so that's got to be one of the silliest things I've heard... People have different ideas of what a good or bad aesthetic is, it's an almost entirely subjective thing. Even if it's the most perfectly designed piece of armor that fits perfectly with the theme, has wonderful color theory applied, and is executed perfectly, you'll STILL have people that don't like it for X or Y reasons. That is perfectly valid to, which is why you typically want to give players the option to change colors around and such so they can customize their character in a manner that makes sense for them.
There are a host of reasons for not allowing players to dye armor, but "It's insulting to the design team" is not among them. I'd be be shocked if they actually came out and said such a thing.
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Which is amusing given that how many re-coloured wolf mounts we keep getting.
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I guess that's exactly what happened with transmog, eh?
It'd be nice to take down Blackhand before 6.2, though.
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The problem is both of those are good things, because travel downtime is boring, and being dismounted by low con mobs / dealing with shitty terrain design isn't "content."
Also, again, personal choice. If you don't want to fly, don't. Outside of the exceedingly weak world pvp arguments, it's simply an equally valid personal choice to do either.
Honestly, that's the best thing to do. Enough refund tickets will either change their minds or at least put a thumbtack in the shoes of the shitty designers who think this is okay.
And again, these are game design problems and how people interact with the game they've created. There's a difference between being forced not to fly by the game and choosing not to fly when you could.
This is what I call BEM syndrome. Because that zone is fucking annoying no matter what you're doing there. Which is odd that my favorite flying related quest is out there.
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It actually hasn't, there's some seriously cool stuff out there. Sure, you get the odd guy who just has Warrior T6 with Bulwark of Azzinoth like everybody else loves, but most people do a lot of really cool stuff.