No flying in 7.0 confirmed

[Drekmar]

No fly = guaranteed buy.

[jasdasm]

That it's not clear at all. Actually all examples that you gave show that they are listening to player feedback, which i think it's a good thing.

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And because they said that the biggest part of the achievement will be do-able at legion's launch.

yeah they listen to feedback... thats why for example surival hunter were the biggest pile of shit possible in WoD

listen to feedback... dont make me fucking laugh, all they listen to is when enough People get mad

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I'm surprised that others are surprised.. it's always been this way and I hope they don't allow flying for the rest of the expansion. It's great for world PVP.

oh world pvp again. cool whats that ?? ah right that thing that died back in 2005 when battlegrounds were introduced

oh wait it actually never lived outside of tarren mill.

[Sluvs]

yeah they listen to feedback... thats why for example surival hunter were the biggest pile of shit possible in WoD

listen to feedback... dont make me fucking laugh, all they listen to is when enough People get mad

Well, the examples that he gave showed blizzard listening to his players. So, yeah, they do listen.

[jasdasm]

Blizz you and I know that no flight is better for the game. Keep up the good fight.

said the guy only doing instance content where flying is disabled anyway

[MoanaLisa]

Yeah, yeah, blame the customer not the service.

Sometimes the customer can't be satisfied. That happens. I don't remember you being such a strong fan of the game at any rate so perhaps it's for the best. The point is that not everyone gets a game tailored to themselves and when a player insists on that then sure, they're part of the problem.

[Elim Garak]

Sometimes the customer can't be satisfied. That happens. I don't remember you being such a strong fan of the game at any rate so perhaps it's for the best. The point is that not everyone gets a game tailored to themselves and when a player insists on that then sure, they're part of the problem.

Yeah, yeah I suffered thru this game since 2005. It wasn't tailored for me but I kept playing it for whatever reason. Listen to yourself.

The only thing that prevents my satisfaction is "no flying". The only thing. That was available for 8 years and then removed. That's my fault I guess.

[bufferunderrun]

Except they spent all that time trying to include silly little jump puzzles and hidden objects. Couldn't they have spent that time improving and integrating flight instead? Granted, flight effects almost every outdoor encounter far more than simply dropping a stupid jump puzzle in the middle of nowhere. But they've clearly built Legion around the ability of Demon Hunters to double jump and glide. So I don't see that it would be THAT much more of a stretch to include a progressing version of flight as well(except it would infringe on demon hunters' appeal, and god forbid they detract from the poster child of the expansion).

All in all, maybe it's just my optimistic mind, but all I see are chances where Blizzard could have improved the situation instead of simply removing it. I mean, think about all the little things they've put in the game instead of flying. The flight path whistle, goblin gliders, demon hunter jump+glide, the aviana's feather type toy, etc. What if they'd just incorporated all those little things into a single system of mounts and put it into a progressing tree of abilities similar to the artifact trees? Then given it context it with story and lore.

because they need bigger zones for flying, and they need to put in said zones more mobs and quest hubs, they also need to design quest carefully to discourage players zerging them with flying mount; world quests for example with flying mount you can farm more and more efficiently zipping from zone to zone the moment they pop etc.

[Connll]

I have serious doubts about any particular inclusion or removal of a feature or features being what cost WoW millions of subs. WoW has very predictably followed the product life cycle of all games. And as much as people roll their eyes, you look at past curves of MMOs, current MMOs, and online games and their active player base follows a curve of an almost identical nature, just of different amounts/time periods.

Some people quit and they say it is because of a particular feature, but I'm more inclined to believe that they're just bored with a game they've been playing for a very long time. If they were having fun with the rest of the game, the number of people who would have left simply over flying would be very small. If they're not having fun with other features and are bored, have no friends, then flying might have just been that straw that broke the camel's back.

Are you suggesting that WoD´S sub loss was "normal"?

[Dhrizzle]

Are you suggesting that WoD´S sub loss was "normal"?

Pretty much, barring spikes for releases of expansions the subs have been dropping at a rate of ~100k a month since the end of WotLK.

[SirCowdog]

because they need bigger zones for flying, and they need to put in said zones more mobs and quest hubs, they also need to design quest carefully to discourage players zerging them with flying mount; world quests for example with flying mount you can farm more and more efficiently zipping from zone to zone the moment they pop etc.

Why do they need bigger zones? Has that ever been fully explained? Is it simply because the players move faster? Broken Isles already has almost every square inch packed with stuff. The quest and content density is pretty good. So is it just that players moving more efficiently is the problem? Why is the efficiency of quest completion even an issue in the first place?

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Are you suggesting that WoD´S sub loss was "normal"?

WoD's spike in subs, and the subsequent drop, were almost entirely due to the massive hype train that Blizzard ran, followed by the failure to live up to that hype. That part of it was not normal. However, as Dhrizzle correctly points out, the longer trend of bleeding subs remained more or less consistent with previous xpacks. However, having said that, the real shame here is that Blizzard could have retained many of the subscriptions generated by the hype campaign at the beginning of the xpack if they'd actually followed up with high-quality content.


So, whereas the trend for previous xpacks was continued, WoD still failed to capitalize on the potential. And that's almost as bad. Could flight have been part of that capitalization? Almost certainly. It's lack contributed to that missed opportunity just as much as the lack of everything else in WoD.

[Grimnakh]

I'd like to see them design around flying instead of withholding it and gating it every xpac. Have dangerous areas to fly with mobs that shoot you down or fly and attack you, underbrush areas that are hard to land in. Underground areas, ect. I like the fantasy of flying, and their lack of adequately explaining in the setting why we cant fly is pure lazy storytelling, and design.

[MoanaLisa]

Are you suggesting that WoD´S sub loss was "normal"?

Several million came back that had already quit once before unless you want to sell me the idea that most of the increase to ten million at launch was new players. So it was weighted somewhat toward those that weren't worried about leaving. That has something to do with it. Lots of other problems with the expansion that have been explored at length here and elsewhere the last couple of years. Except for raiding there wasn't much there there after leveling which very likely had more to do with it than anything. Legion's primary content focus changes would seem to indicate that as well.

Pretty difficult to try and say that most of them came back and then left because of flying which is the only reason I can think of that would be on-topic in this thread. No, not normal historically but could be how it's going to go from now on. MMO's aren't all that any longer and paying $15+/month (more in U.K. I think) is definitely not the business model for games currently. Not that it matters much, Blizzard made plenty on box sales and will again. Subscriptions are gravy.

@SirCowdog : Every expansion is hyped. There wasn't much of anything extraordinary about Warlords compared to how they've promoted previous expansions. It's nonsense to say that somehow the hype for Warlords was much different than normal. What was quite different was that there was a year-long ongoing discussion about flying and the lack thereof prior to launch. I'm sure that had some effect on first adopters but you would never know it from how the expansion sold. Probably won't be much different this time around. It's somewhat non-intuitive to expect the MMO market to be the same now as it was six or ten years ago. It's not.

[Mafic]

I've wanted to see this, start it out as gliding (such as with the feather) where you get pushed up then glide down. Then unlock 150% flight, then finally the ultimate flight. I'd love to see flight used as an actual mechanic in questing, since back in BC they were EXCITED to showcase this new thing and incorporated it into accessing dungeons and parts of quests.

As it is, they've just gotten lazy, but I never really "missed" it and was enjoying all of the stuff they were making on the ground.

At least this time, we've known about no flight for a long time, so there won't be as much whining about flip flopping.

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How does flying impede on WoW being a self-sustaining MMO? This seems like some silly conspiracy theory.

They can''t put WoW on maintenance mode if they have to design new continents with flying in mind or patch it in on the backend, because it requires more work and time. Things get scaled back in all MMO's in their twilight.

You expose your inexperience with MMO's by calling it a silly conspiracy theory.

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WoD was massively hyped compared to previous expansions. The problem is they said they could deliver world content and by holding off flying it was part of that "plan".

When a game is near maintenance mode or ready to turn that corner you better believe it they will cut corners. Trying to remove flying in WoD was trying to cut corners..not an "artistic design decision".

[SirCowdog]

@SirCowdog : Every expansion is hyped. There wasn't much of anything extraordinary about Warlords compared to how they've promoted previous expansions.

I must strongly disagree with you on this. How would you explain the dramatic increase in subs for the time period surrounding the launch of WoD? And let me clarify here: This is a side topic that I don't believe has much to do with the flying discussion. I'm not using this as evidence for or against flight.

[Elim Garak]

During MoP subs plunged deeper than in previous expansion after the release of Timeless Isle. It has no flying.
Nearly the same amount of subs that dropped in MoP - resubbed for WoD, in hopes of better experience and HYPE. With a false promise of the epic quest to unlock flying.
WoD lost half of new subs by the time 6.kinda.1 dropped, and continued to lose subs even more than in MoP.

And the biggest mistake you are making is you treat "flying" as an isolated feature that is not connected to other features thus you make a wrong conclusion that no flying alone could not be responsible for the sub loss that big. But guess what flying is connected to all other features, except instanced content. And by the looks of it instanced content was fine in WoD.

It's the world content that gets chastised right? The very same content that gets improved with flying tremendously - as proven by ALL previous expansions that didn't have such a big sub loss during content droughts. Guess what? You could fly - so you could entertain yourself by doing stuff you wouldn't normally do if you had to use ground travel to get to it. Flying extends the life of world content for casual (majority) players who don't have time to waste on cruising the boring roads of Azeroth.

[Cthulhu 2020]

They can''t put WoW on maintenance mode if they have to design new continents with flying in mind or patch it in on the backend, because it requires more work and time. Things get scaled back in all MMO's in their twilight.

You expose your inexperience with MMO's by calling it a silly conspiracy theory.

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WoD was massively hyped compared to previous expansions. The problem is they said they could deliver world content and by holding off flying it was part of that "plan".

When a game is near maintenance mode or ready to turn that corner you better believe it they will cut corners. Trying to remove flying in WoD was trying to cut corners..not an "artistic design decision".

There's cheap asian MMOs with flight everywhere and little content ever designed around that feature. With content updates maybe once a year.

An MMO having or not having flight as a mechanic to tailor the world to is in the grand scheme of things, an incredibly minor thing to "build the game around" when you start talking about a game going into "maintenance mode" which mostly involves very infrequent updates, or even none at all. Three expansions which took less time to make than WoD or Legion had flight baked into the world's scheme, with areas only accessible by flight, and questing areas that were really only possible with flight (Storm Peaks, Icecrown).

So yeah, unless you have a better explanation for what you said, flight somehow making the world more difficult and longer to make, and thus being left out for long term maintenance reasons, is a conspiracy theory.

The team has changed so much it really just seems like a design choice direction by the somewhat new team. While the old one enjoyed making content tailored to flying, (BC through Cata, with MoP flying was more or less a bonus with no content directly tied to it) this new one wants the world to be viewed from the ground up, at least for the first few months.

[rebecca191]

Ok getting back to whoever was wondering about the "100 different world quests" and how bad the RNG will be (or not), which is a few pages back and I'm too tired to look for it to quotw. I did the 30 so I could finish my order campaign, which was pretty cool by the way. None of the 30 were repeats. I still need about 10k rep with most of the non-Suramar factions to get revered, except for Highmountain, only need 6k, I think the zone storyline just gave more for that faction because I did less world quests there. This was as a human. I'm not going to bother doing anymore world quests, but a new set has spawned on my map and I only see a couple of repeats so while you can get repeats, it's not going to be that horrible or the most time consuming part. All factions to revered and Suramar loremaster will take the longest.

I'm happy to have seen most of the lore on beta except for Suramar which I couldn't force myself to do and raids since I wasn't on beta yet when they tested LFR. I guess it's time for a long WoW break and I'll be back when flying is finally on the PTR, hopefully it won't be a whole freaking year. There were definitely things I liked about Legion but the no flying sucks too much fun out of the game for me since I'm basically a solo player that does world content like archy, pet battles, etc these days....

[Cthulhu 2020]

During MoP subs plunged deeper than in previous expansion after the release of Timeless Isle. It has no flying.
Nearly the same amount of subs that dropped in MoP - resubbed for WoD, in hopes of better experience and HYPE. With a false promise of the epic quest to unlock flying.
WoD lost half of new subs by the time 6.kinda.1 dropped, and continued to lose subs even more than in MoP.

And the biggest mistake you are making is you treat "flying" as an isolated feature that is not connected to other features thus you make a wrong conclusion that no flying alone could not be responsible for the sub loss that big. But guess what flying is connected to all other features, except instanced content. And by the looks of it instanced content was fine in WoD.

It's the world content that gets chastised right? The very same content that gets improved with flying tremendously - as proven by ALL previous expansions that didn't have such a big sub loss during content droughts. Guess what? You could fly - so you could entertain yourself by doing stuff you wouldn't normally do if you had to use ground travel to get to it. Flying extends the life of world content for casual (majority) players who don't have time to waste on cruising the boring roads of Azeroth.

If you slap the product life cycle curve on top of WoW's population, it fits almost perfectly save for spikes around the last couple, which were almost entirely old players coming back to find that WoW really hadn't received the promised revitalization, and it really was just WoW again. I've seen far more people back on my friend's list than even came back for WoD. I said it back when WoD launched, that tons of people were back that I hadn't seen since vanilla and BC, but even now I'm seeing just about everyone who'd quit from the guilds I was part of in the vanilla through Cata periods.

I'd love to see numbers, but we know Blizzard has said they're not releasing any more, and they probably won't - unless they somehow manage to retain subs with Legion, which might very well happen. I have little doubt that with the inclusion of Demon Hunters, they may very well retain more than with WoD. WoD offered no new race and no new class, which was another feature that I'm sure turned a lot of people off. There was nothing new to their own playable lore.

Meanwhile, Demon Hunters have been a feature long packed away by Blizzard. I said it since people were squawking for demon hunters since BC, that Blizzard would only implement Demon Hunters once WoW was on the major downhill and needed to revitalize the game. And it really came as no surprise to see them come right after WoD, given that I had been predicting that all this time.

Lack of flight was just one of the many things that really turned people off of WoD. Overall it was poorly designed, and even with my defenses of many of its features, I would always mention that WoD was lacking in many ways. If WoD had managed to be a year-long expansion, a mini-expansion, as the dev team had originally said it would be, then it would have been a whole lot better. The fact is that it gave the returning player very little to make them stick around. Once you hit level 100 and got your level 3 garrison, your character itself went into maintenance mode. There was nothing to grind, no carrot on a stick to run after. You logged in once a day to do garrison stuff and then you were done. Your garrison gave your character all they needed to make money and buy your weekly seals.

In past expansions there was at least weekly gated currency to grind that kept people active, but that feature was also absent from MoP, and I think that was a huge mistake. That was another feature that was removed as a "design choice" just like flying, something that kept players playing. It was one of many things removed that provided a carrot on a stick for players to chase.

I saw far more complaints about there being nothing to do ultimately than I ever saw for not being able to fly. What was the point of flying if there was no reason to fly? When the patch finally came out that granted flying, there was an uproarious cheer for a couple of weeks, of people taking screenshots and posting them to prove that "HEY LOOK FLYING REALLY IS THE ONE FEATURE I ENJOY ABOUT WOW" then a surge of "there's nothing to do" complaints began rolling in again, as people hovered above their garrison instead of sitting in it. Another thing I predicted as well.

I hopped on to Final Fantasy part way through WoD, and once I beat heroic Archi, I didn't see much of a reason to stick around, I was done with the game as mythic didn't have any allure for me. I was finished with most of the casual content like leveling all of my pets. So I pretty much began playing Final Fantasy full time before hopping back onto WoW recently. During that time playing Final Fantasy, it was shortly after 6.2 that I saw a huge influx of other players from WoW joining the game, who were gone temporarily for 6.3 then came back once again and became full time, a lot like me. FF's latest expansion offers flight, but I never really saw any conversations about flying either in FF or as it compared to evil Blizzard removing it from WoW. There were a fuck ton of comparisons about the two games, and how FF pretty much does everything right, offering players something to keep chasing - even if it is repetitive. But very little mention of flight, and mostly none at all. The relic weapon system? Yeah... that's more or less xerox'd from FF, with some improvements tacked on.

With there being once again a carrot to chase, dangling from an even longer stick than ever before (So much to grind!) we'll see how well that attracts and keeps players playing. Although as pointed out in another thread, we'll probably see huge amounts of burn out from people who feel compelled to continuously grind artifact power with there being no weekly cap on it from dungeons apparently. "If I don't grind artifacts 16 hours a day, I'll fall behind and my guild will kick me!"

So basically, while to some people flight was the only major feature removed for them, looking at it objectively one can find a lot more that WoD failed to deliver to keep people around.

[Elim Garak]

If you slap the product life cycle curve on top of WoW's population, it fits almost perfectly save for spikes around the last couple, which were almost entirely old players coming back to find that WoW

The answer right there. The last couple involves no flying hence it's different. Old players are coming to wow with every expansion. Your anecdotal experience doesn't conclusion make. Because old players are different in each expansion. Just because this time around it were old players from your friend list, doesn't mean it's an exclusive instance of old players coming and going. They were coming and going with each expansion. HENCE THE CYCLE CURVE you are talking about. 'Cept for the last couple of spikes, right? RIGHT? What's different about the last couple of spikes that separates them from the CYCLE? What's similar between the two? They introduced no flying.

[Cthulhu 2020]

The answer right there. The last couple involves no flying hence it's different. Old players are coming to wow with every expansion. Your anecdotal experience doesn't conclusion make. Because old players are different in each expansion. Just because this time around it were old players from your friend list, doesn't mean it's an exclusive instance of old players coming and going. They were coming and going with each expansion. HENCE THE CYCLE CURVE you are talking about. 'Cept for the last couple of spikes, right? RIGHT? What's different about the last couple of spikes that separates them from the CYCLE? What's similar between the two? They introduced no flying.

MoP and Cata didn't have flying? What? The fuck am I reading? Subs started dropping at the end of Wrath but not noticeably, and saw a spike for Cata, which then started dropping throughout Cata's life. Guess what Cata had from the beginning even for leveling?

MoP once again had flight, and the drop began long before Timeless Isle.

Seriously, I get that you want to paint flying as the only reason people quit, but it's failing pretty badly.

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WoW lost over 2.5m subs in cata, and from Cata's end, ignoring the spike for MoP, dropped another 2.5m. Going from the end of Cata and removing the spike for WoD, the line of sub loss continued at its previous rates.

Who knows, maybe WoW is back up to 10m for legion, and by the end of Legion they will have "lost" (big emphasis on quotes there) 7m subs when it goes down to 3m.