Adding flying mounts was the worst thing Blizzard ever did with WoW

[Queen of Hamsters]

So you're saying trade chat isn't just as toxic on Live? What a load of hypocrisy. Judging a community based on trade chat and then comparing it to guilds and friends lol.

Yeah, but I don't see people sit around pretending that Live is one big happy MLP:FIM-Carebear cross-over where everyone makes friends for life with everyone they manually group up with.

As for Guilds and friends: Those are also things Classic zealots like to pretend are no longer part of the game for a fact as they lament the days "when this game had a community feel!", so I'd say it's entirely appropriate to bring those up.

[Vlaid]

You are reaching, and you know it. Ground mounts never amounted to shit, expect how fast you could get to dungeons and summon peeps to your location. While that might be an incentive to group someone that had 100%, it was NEVER a requirement.

But to say that ground mounts forced groups is a plain lie. Flying was required to farm end game content in TBC, and certain quests. While, the TBC was a bit softer on the required group quests, it still had them.

I never said ground mounts forced groups. If I did I misspoke. I said it encouraged community. As in you see people you know regularly, if you see them doing a quest on the ground you're doing you might offer an invite (this happens all the time on private servers so it is hardly made up).

I referred to the OTHER systems which contributed more to the destruction of the feeling of server identity and community (and has been ackowledged by Blizzard). LFR, LFD, crossrealm phasing primarily.

[callipygoustp]

Of course it does because you don't have to spend 40mins on a flgiht path that takes the most retarded route, you can just fly straight from point A-B.

Flight paths have actually been greatly improved since classic, back then they were far more spread out and flew slower, and because the flight path has to fly between all intermediate nodes, it took hell of a long time to get anywhere, especially if you needed to fly from say Tanaris to Orgrimmar.
I like flying, but i think they should keep it how theyve done it in legion and wod, only let us fly once we've completed the content.

Yeah, my statement was a bit too obvious of a comment. I should have stated:
The addition of flying to the game reduced the level of immersion I experienced in WoW by making the game world feel smaller.

... maybe that's too obvious of a statement as well.

[Coffeexbean]

flying, crossrealm, your status in lore, I dont think LFG would be bad if it was only for dungeons/raids but it kills group world questing and the world in general is also tuned waaaaaaaaaaaay too easy. Also no real time travel anymore. Even in Legion without flying it doesnt really matter they added some stupid whistle, flight paths fucking EVERYWHERE and the maps are already tiny.. like seriously?

[Vlaid]

Yeah, but I don't see people sit around pretending that Live is one big happy MLP:FIM-Carebear cross-over where everyone makes friends for life with everyone they manually group up with.

As for Guilds and friends: Those are also things Classic zealots like to pretend are no longer part of the game for a fact as they lament the days "when this game had a community feel!", so I'd say it's entirely appropriate to bring those up.

Most people liked the feeling of a community that existed beyond the scope of your own personal circle of guildies/friends. Seeing people you recognize, having a server reputation. I've been on the same server since BC and I barely recognize anyone outside my guild anymore because most of the time it is cross realm phased people I don't care about and they don't care about me. Just nameless players I'll probably never see again.

[Queen of Hamsters]

Yeah, they changed their minds in regards to allowing people to fly (for content after it's most relevant) but not what they think of flying. They'd still have preferred it remained unavailable, and for content such as Argus it's clear they relish keeping flying away.

Giving Pathfinder was more like handing out cookies to quiet down the children—nothing more really. Because anyone honest about the flying debacle is the pro-flyers did not provide much in terms of constructive criticism beyond "give me flying or I quit forever"—which is the cause of my disdain as well.

Yeah no, adults and young people gave heart-felt examples on why flying has been good to them and this game in droves on Social media.
If they'd listened to the "Give me flying or I quit!"-crowd, they'd have implemented flying as it was. The Pathfinder compromise, drove many of those people away all the same.

They've also said numerous times that developers have different opinions on flying too, there's not some "hive mind" where everyone believes that WoW made it to 13 years of age despite that horrid feature called flying...

Legion introduced actual designs meant to promote people being in the world and grouping up, with more demanding content in areas ensuring that people will group rather than go it solo, designs that remained just fine even once flying was allowed. I for one am glad that this is the model going forward.

[FreaknRhinos]

Yeah, they changed their minds in regards to allowing people to fly (for content after it's most relevant) but not what they think of flying. They'd still have preferred it remained unavailable, and for content such as Argus it's clear they relish keeping flying away.

Giving Pathfinder was more like handing out cookies to quiet down the children—nothing more really. Because anyone honest about the flying debacle is the pro-flyers did not provide much in terms of constructive criticism beyond "give me flying or I quit forever"—which is the cause of my disdain as well.

Not true, flying is far superior and content was designed around it. Flying gives a 3D environment with capacity, while ground mounts are a 2D environment. Flying was considered frontier content, and was up for flying combat at one point. Even the box art on WOTLK box mentions air combat.

Flying was slated to be a crowning achievement in gaming but shelved due to being resource and time intense, as you have to think in 3D(meaning designing in 3D) rather than 2D.

Are you going to honestly tell me a 2D environment is superior to a 3D one?

[Queen of Hamsters]

Most people liked the feeling of a community that existed beyond the scope of your own personal circle of guildies/friends. Seeing people you recognize, having a server reputation. I've been on the same server since BC and I barely recognize anyone outside my guild anymore because most of the time it is cross realm phased people I don't care about and they don't care about me. Just nameless players I'll probably never see again.

I can't name a single person that I used to see on my servers before automated grouping tools and cross-realms and all that jazz. I can however name the people I shared guilds with, had in my friendlist and still know to this day as a result.

I do also remember the sensation of "Raiding guilds" having their own little clique and refusing to mingle with non-raiding plebs. The raiders were big fish in small ponds, and it got to their heads...

[Tiwack]

It's the reason i decided to get into wow as every time my cousin tried to show how awesome it was he'd be riding or running in some destitute region hunting for dragons. Seemed stupid to spend so much time just travelling in a videogame from A to B so when i saw flying was there to at-least look forward to i decided to finally give it a chance if only to try it out with my cousin and find out if it was anything for me.

[Lumicide]

No.

Worst things to ever happen to WoW:

[01](x-realm): killed on-sever community. duelotar became a mess of corpses and nobodies.
[02](lfd/lfr): no more necessary talking to people in open chat
[03](armory/achievements): may sound funny. but, can't lie to get into guilds. liars were fun to deal with, and often better than people who had only been carried
[03](difficulty settings): horrible decision that allowed content to be made trivial, and unrewarding. If bads want to see content, watch it on yt, or get gud.
[04](no more hardmodes): one of the dumbest decisions ever. HM's were glorious.
[05](ptr testing raids): raids shouldn't be tested on ptr prior to release. there's nothing wrong with not having addons initially. content should be kept underwraps until its live-release.
[06](universal spec viability): screwed up balancing specs for pve and pvp. they should have been left as viable/non-viable, rather than optimal/sub-optimal.
[07](wow esports): wow doesn't lend itself to esports, I don't understand their attempts to push it. balance is retarded, dueling is ruined. specs/damage isn't even constant between pve/pvp. it's just dumb.
[08](mage perma frost pet): screwed up every classes mobility balancing
[09](spell rank removal): screwed up mage control balancing (result of 5/6, mages no longer fun to duel as)
[10](resil{glad its gone...}): required massive timesink to get geared for both pve and pvp
[11](gear stat glut): no longer able to dick around and wear old gear in duels, and still get people(read: bads) to complain about how I was a "geared" rogue in wotlk wearing t2. gear needs to be a boost above base stats, not to be so absurd as to utterly nullify them.
[12](trasmog): no longer means anything to wear ancient gear, because it's your actual gear. Should have been a dying system instead.
[13](damage glut): absolutely nothing was gained, aside from visual noise. big numbers are just annoying to read.
[14](legion monk update): monk healing/taking was fun in WoD. Then it went to dogshit overnight.
[15](caving to fanbase too often): no fanservice is good to service plot/gameplay/style. removal of racial class distinctions
[16]: wotlk was the best expansion, and I'm not sure why people are so obsessed with vanilla
[17]: removing nighttime was lame
[18]: flying mounts are pointless and add nothing (but hurt little)

[FreaknRhinos]

I can't name a single person that I used to see on my servers before automated grouping tools and cross-realms and all that jazz. I can however name the people I shared guilds with, had in my friendlist and still know to this day as a result.

I do however remember the sensation of "Raiding guilds" having their own little clique and refusing to mingle with non-raiding plebs. The raiders were big fish in small ponds, and it got to their heads...

Now you are reaching, because it's no different than todays Mythic and Heroic difficult crowd. Raiding in Vanilla showed a fundamental understanding and time commitment to the game, no different than today standards with the Higher difficulty raids.

You both are trying to bait each other. Yall need a room.

[SoulForge]

I agree. The whole concept of flying mounts is a failure

Doesn't really matter at this point. Its not going anywhere.

[araine]

Yes, flying was one of the worst things Blizzard ever done. Like LFD killed realm communities almost over night, flying removed a massive social aspect from the game. I said it at the time, this was a slippery slope but no one listened.

You can see Blizzard trying to backtrack over their mistake by not allowing people to fly until mid-way through expansions now. Sadly Pandora's box is open and you can't stuff the drooling morons back in the box.

Easy fix if you dont like flying like the rest of us do, just dont use it you know, kinda like your own fault if you are still flying

[Queen of Hamsters]

Now you are reaching, because it's no different than todays Mythic and Heroic difficult crowd. Raiding in Vanilla showed a fundamental understanding and time commitment to the game, no different than today standards with the Higher difficulty raids.

You both are trying to bait each other. Yall need a room.

Um, no. We're discussing each-others points.

And again, I never see Live-players proclaim that the game is an amped up version of MLP:FiM. Toxic players always existed, always will, and they sure as fuck did and do on Classic servers and will on the Official server. And at the same time, communities always existed, always will. Socially inept people wanting to blame game features for their own lack of meaningful social ties and interaction, always did and always will exist as well...

[Cheze]

it's kinda too bad we're stuck with completely free-form flight, because there's probably lots of other actually fun ways they could implement it

like, aviana's feather in WoD was helpful in a lot of the same circumstances flying mounts were and was actually pretty fun to use. I'd rather have a lot more 'limited flight' sorts of features than no flight, then eventually unlocked unlimited flying.

[FreaknRhinos]

Um, no. We're discussing each-others points.

And again, I never see Live-players proclaim that the game is an amped up version of MLP:FiM. Toxic players always existed, always will, and they sure as fuck did and do on Classic servers and will on the Official server. And at the same time, communities always existed, always will.

I have seen plenty of Live players proclaim such, you are being intellectually dishonest. Sadly, you know it. You both are border line baiting each other, and it's fricken sad.

[Chuckadoodle]

Reading some of these posts, one could assume making WoW at all was the worst thing Blizzard ever did.

[God Save The King]

That feel when you have been playing since first days of vanilla and you LOVE flying, LOVE restricted flying in new content, ABSOLUTELY LOVE cross server, LOVE LFD and LFG system and sharding.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I am there with you. All those were huge improvements for me.

[Queen of Hamsters]

I have seen plenty of Live players proclaim such, you are being intellectually dishonest. Sadly, you know it. You both are border line baiting each other, and it's fricken sad.

Point me to the Live player proclaiming that, I'd like to see their reasoning for myself. Whenever I see someone go on about "superior Community" and "everyone made friends!", it's about Classic.

I'm not being "intellectually dishonest", you saying that "I know it" won't change that fact.

- - - Updated - - -

Reading some of these posts, one could assume making WoW at all was the worst thing Blizzard ever did.

It was.

According to players of other MMORPGs at that time, WoW was an insult to the genre.

[kneehidude]

So I was a few months late, enough time for most players to hit 70 and get their mounts. When I started questing is was horrid. I was getting ganked left and right. No one really corpse camped me but it didn't matter because I had no way of escaping - I was helpless.

Except it's not correct. Beginning level flying (which most people had, even long throughout the expansion) was only 60%. It was slow as hell. You could easily get away from someone like that. Yeah, they could take you by surprise and have a class that was hard to get away from. But to act as if everyone was much faster than you and you were helpless is not true. If you got away from someone they more than likely wouldn't hop on their flying mount unless they had max flying otherwise they wouldn't catch you.