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

[Witchblade77]

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.

Infracted.

huh. interesting. I started in BC and some of my best social interactions happened in BC and early wrath. even when dungeon finder was introduced, it wasn't until it became cross server that community started to deteriorate. but hey what do I know, its my personal experience against your personal experience.

[Deleted]

I've been playing since Vanilla...I don't see how traveling faster really diminishes community...

I never made a single friend while fighting for spawns...stop pulling things out of your butt. It really amazes me how people can take terrible experiences and claim they're community building...I've made more friends in one expansion RP'ing then I ever did leveling up in Vanilla and Pre-flying BC.

Flying mounts made things easier...maybe you're a masochist or something...but for the average person pain /= fun

Highly doubtful you played vanilla from what you've written. But if you made no connections while out in the world during vanilla, perhaps you did play back then and you were just part of a tiny minority that didn't interact at all.

Before flying, you were so more likely to stop and buff / ress / help someone out who was fighting near the side of the road and that usually sparked up so many conversations when I played.

Maybe they were on the way to the same quest as you and you party up, on the friends list they go.

Maybe you come across a pair of lowbies being camped by a ganker and you help them out, before you know it you've spent the last 2 hours playing guard / guide and you've made 2 friends.

So very many interactions were lost when people can fly in absolute safety from quest to quest, more than they realise.

You get the point, flying removed so much and gave almost nothing that I honestly can't even comprehend how people think it's a good idea and whinge when it's gone.

But please, tell me how flying didn't decimate the community. How even before they introduced cross realms the TBC community was a shadow of what vanilla was. And also tell me how you can justify losing so much for pitiful trinket of being able to fly.

[SirCowdog]

For sure, adding mounted combat would need some serious fix to make it work and the ground and ai needs to adjust to it aswell. Like you said, AI on the ground will have to have range attack and ground attack. Also we need environment design for this. Clouds and mist that limit visibility for flyers(go close to the ground for visibility = you take a risk). Forest that collide with your flying mount making it hard to reach ground and thus more safe for ground players. All mounts should have damage models too, that needs reload time to use again if it dies completely(doesnt have to be long).
Maybe need new engine for this i dont know.

Hmm...I don't necessarily think mounts need to be killable, or have hitpoints. But I do really like the idea of reduced visibility or higher fatigue cost the higher you go from the ground, making it a risk/reward choice when flying. I think it should also be possible for monster AI to use different abilities against grounded players than are used against flying ones.

I just think there's a LOT of wasted potential here because Blizzard is fixating on the ground-only design.

[kakihara]

I just wish there would be some physics for the flying. There is no "weight" to the mounts. Doesn't feel good at all.

[Arkura]

Ok, so now we got the number 32 anti-flight thread of 2017 out of the way. Getting closer and closer to the 54 anti-flight thread of year 2014.

[SirCowdog]

Before flying, you were so more likely to stop and buff / ress / help someone out who was fighting near the side of the road and that usually sparked up so many conversations when I played.

Maybe they were on the way to the same quest as you and you party up, on the friends list they go.

Maybe you come across a pair of lowbies being camped by a ganker and you help them out, before you know it you've spent the last 2 hours playing guard / guide and you've made 2 friends.

So very many interactions were lost when people can fly in absolute safety from quest to quest, more than they realise.

You get the point, flying removed so much and gave almost nothing that I honestly can't even comprehend how people think it's a good idea and whinge when it's gone.

But please, tell me how flying didn't decimate the community. How even before they introduced cross realms the TBC community was a shadow of what vanilla was. And also tell me how you can justify losing so much for pitiful trinket of being able to fly.

This was NEVER my experience, and I've been playing since mid-vanilla. You didn't stop doing what you were doing just because someone else was nearby. In many cases someone else questing or farming near you meant you had to compete for kills or gathering nodes. You send an invite or a PM to ask if they wanted to team up and they either ignored you or told you to go away because "This is my farm".

Flying doesn't change or alter how people react. Your example is a pure, unadulterated example of "correlation does not imply causation".

Cross server technology did more harm to each server's community than anything. It made it convenient and easy to find groups, but also filled the pool of available players with utter randoms that you'd never see again, meaning you could be as big of an A-hole as you wanted without consequence.

Real class balance also damaged the community feeling on a server, since your ability to stand out as "that badass healer" or "that super good tank" because suddenly EVERYONE could do well instead of just the people playing warriors or priests. The ability to prove yourself and build a reputation was drowned as the pool of people who were doing the same thing increased tenfold.

Then there were websites like WoWhead which started giving players easy access to anything and everything they needed to know. DPS meters popped up. Gearscore became a thing. All of these contributed towards not having to rely on other PEOPLE to figure things out. You could just go to a website or an addon instead of asking a friend or guildy. No one had to teach you how to play because you could watch a strategy video or fire up a DPS meter. You didn't have to go into general chat and ask where Mankirk's wife is, or hit up a friend who'd done a quest before because it's right there at your fingertips on google.

People like you REALLY want a scapegoat, and so turn to blaming flight for all the problems of WoW. So let me repeat this for you, and every other person who likes to hate on flight:

FLYING WASN'T A PROBLEM UNTIL BLIZZARD MADE IT INTO ONE.

[Planetdune]

No it was not, removing flying from expansion launch was close however.

[Sansnom]

Maybe you come across a pair of lowbies being camped by a ganker and you help them out, before you know it you've spent the last 2 hours playing guard / guide and you've made 2 friends.

So very many interactions were lost when people can fly in absolute safety from quest to quest, more than they realise.

You get the point, flying removed so much and gave almost nothing that I honestly can't even comprehend how people think it's a good idea and whinge when it's gone.

I personally think you are over estimate the occurrence of people stopping by to help a complete stranger. In all the expansion, flying was available near the end of the expansion. So people still had to level on the ground. And from my experience, this stopping and helping a stranger rarely happened. And hardly anyone stopped to strike conversation except to complete some group quest.

By your assertion that flying was the cause, at the start of WoD and Legion, before flying was enabled, did you experience this renewal of social interaction now that people are on the ground? If so, I would have expected you say how great it is now levelling because more people are talking, rather than continue with the complain that flying destroyed the game.

[Namalia]

No it wasn't..

Restricting flight after it was implemented, was the worst thing Blizzard ever did.

This 100%. You win the thread.

[Aehl]

Flight was never an issue until Blizzard made it one.

/thread.

[Wingspan]

Highly doubtful you played vanilla from what you've written. But if you made no connections while out in the world during vanilla, perhaps you did play back then and you were just part of a tiny minority that didn't interact at all.

Before flying, you were so more likely to stop and buff / ress / help someone out who was fighting near the side of the road and that usually sparked up so many conversations when I played.

Maybe they were on the way to the same quest as you and you party up, on the friends list they go.

Maybe you come across a pair of lowbies being camped by a ganker and you help them out, before you know it you've spent the last 2 hours playing guard / guide and you've made 2 friends.

So very many interactions were lost when people can fly in absolute safety from quest to quest, more than they realise.

I played vanilla for a year or so (and hung around for an eight year stretch) and I really never had many experiences like this. Oh, I teamed up for an afternoon with a stranger every once in a while, but it never sparked any friendships or anything. If I saw the person on again (at all) then we were likely pursuing completely different goals, so nothing ever mattered in any sort of long term.

As a side note, this makes me wonder if a lot of people are reading WAY too much into this "making friends" thing. Most team ups in my experience were just people using each other for a common goal (often that could not be attained alone) and not some budding friendship.

This was evidenced when raiding got easier. In old school WoW, you had to depend on good players to the point of sometimes tolerating absolute jerks that you would never play with normally, but you did because they made it easier to reach raiding goals. When raiding got easier, those guys were dropped like hot rocks... And that was a very good thing.

[Heladys]

No it wasn't..

Restricting flight after it was implemented, was the worst thing Blizzard ever did.

Not quite. Restricting it later by content completion instead of doing so immediately when introduced was what they did wrong. It's not that "pathfinder" is wrong now, it's that the old methods of hit level cap + gold was wrong.

[Deleted]

No. I just think that pet battles were worse idea than flying mounts.
For me updating 'this feature' every patch is waste of resources and do not care about others having fun with it or not. Just MY point of view.

But you just learly stated what I said before just here: you dont like others having FUN with something YAOU dont like.

http://www.wowhead.com/quest=32849

So? thats a BRAWLERS guild fight not a pet battle you silly. If you hate the game thats fine but dont compare tomatoes with onions.

- - - Updated - - -

And yet it's still better than the current mount system.

no its not. plus tell me how druids work then?

[SirCowdog]

no its not. plus tell me how druids work then?

I'm assuming you mean "How would a druid's shapeshift flight form work under the vehicle system"?

That would probably need a rework, to be honest. Druid flight form has NEVER been fair, even under the existing system. Instantaneous flight, often combined with instantaneous stealth for Nelfs, is outright OP and broken.

I'm starting to wonder if you guys really understand what I meant when I was talking about the vehicle system. I'm not saying LITERAL vehicles, but the underlying mechanics. Every time you pick up a quest object, or go into a mode where your hotbar changes, that's the vehicle system. It doesn't necessarily have to change how the mounts look or feel.

Realistically speaking, druid flight form could almost certainly be made to work EXACTLY like it does right now, using the vehicle mechanics. As soon as you activated the ability you'd turn into a bird and your hotbar would change. Otherwise it would pilot the same.

Not that I think that's how it SHOULD work, mind you. Just saying that it could be done. By using the vehicle system instead of the current mount mechanics, it would open up a lot of possibilities for how mounts interact with the rest of the world.

[Moxal]

Completely disagree.

[Lumicide]

This was evidenced when raiding got easier. In old school WoW, you had to depend on good players to the point of sometimes tolerating absolute jerks that you would never play with normally, but you did because they made it easier to reach raiding goals. When raiding got easier, those guys were dropped like hot rocks... And that was a very good thing.

I don't agree that losing those "jerks" was good. I always found jerks, scammers, liars, and trolls to be quite amusing.

Highly doubtful you played vanilla from what you've written. But if you made no connections while out in the world during vanilla, perhaps you did play back then and you were just part of a tiny minority that didn't interact at all.

Before flying, you were so more likely to stop and buff / ress / help someone out who was fighting near the side of the road and that usually sparked up so many conversations when I played.

Maybe they were on the way to the same quest as you and you party up, on the friends list they go.

Maybe you come across a pair of lowbies being camped by a ganker and you help them out, before you know it you've spent the last 2 hours playing guard / guide and you've made 2 friends.

So very many interactions were lost when people can fly in absolute safety from quest to quest, more than they realise.

You get the point, flying removed so much and gave almost nothing that I honestly can't even comprehend how people think it's a good idea and whinge when it's gone.

But please, tell me how flying didn't decimate the community. How even before they introduced cross realms the TBC community was a shadow of what vanilla was. And also tell me how you can justify losing so much for pitiful trinket of being able to fly.

I feel this is pretty wrong. The people who became my friends, I met from joining guilds and dueling in Duelotar™, and pugging dungeons/raids. And I started playing ~a year after release. (I played a fair bit ealier, but only 'til lvl 8 on an undead mage. didn't enjoy it, and quit promptly. )

You make it sound like everyone was some sort of Rexxar wannabe marauding the leveling zones and talking to every unsuspecting passerby. Maybe flight killed your segment in the community, the glorified NPC segment, but it certainly didn't effect me much (aside from lessening world pvp).

The community had certainly been slowly chipped away at, but even WotLK had some community.

Battlegrounds
Dungeon Finder
Flight though? Maybe a little. I didn't even have flight on my main until Ulduar; I just made people summon my ass through Naxx.
X-realm? Overnight death of the entire community.

(I don't care for flying at all.)

[Blood Raven]

WoD was the worst thing Blizzard ever did with WoW let's be realistic here.

I'd also go with this too.

[Super Kami Dende]

To me, Balancing based on PvP is one of the few things Blizzard ever did bad with WoW.

PvP should always be an afterthought unless the core gameplay is PvP which WoW's is not.

- - - Updated - - -

I'm assuming you mean "How would a druid's shapeshift flight form work under the vehicle system"?

That would probably need a rework, to be honest. Druid flight form has NEVER been fair, even under the existing system. Instantaneous flight, often combined with instantaneous stealth for Nelfs, is outright OP and broken.

Yeah, better to have all classes act the exact same for "reasons". Also, it is hardly broken or OP. Tell me a situation that isn't World PvP (which by definition has always been broken and OP for several classes.) where it is Broken or OP to have Flight Form?

[ZazuuPriest]

I've thought this for a while but having leveled up through Pandaria it really hit home with me. There were a few times where I was frustrated and wished I could just fly to an area, but it got me thinking that I would never get that feeling if flying was never in the game in the first place. The game is just so much more engaging if you're looking at it from the ground. When leveling to 90 I had to look where I was going, think about my route to a questing area, figure out the best order to do the quests, etc. Once I hit 90, I just picked up a quest, mounted up, point myself in the right direction, and hit num lock. When you're on a regular mount you notice and appreciate the surroundings. When you're flying, you just notice the yellow arrow telling you where to go.

I always played on a pvp server in vanilla. I never even though twice about it. Why would you want to go kill dragons and get a big axe if not to smash some other players with it? But when TBC was released I didn't start right away mostly because my raiding guild had broken up when they added paladin gear to the raids(funny how something so seemingly small could break up a guild). 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. The best part of pvp was random encounters out in the world but that was completely taken away with that one change. Leveling became extremely frustrating and I ended up transferring to a pve server to play with a coworker. Now I'm not some cry baby that whined every time I was killed in pvp. Far from it. I went through the gauntlet of STV and BRM in vanilla and loved it. But the addition of flying mounts just made it.....different....not fun at all.

I think flying mounts are cool and some zones are designed great for them but I just have this overwhelming feeling that adding them was the worst single thing that ever happened to the game. There are plenty of other gripes I have about the game - arenas, the hard separation of pve and pvp(it blows my mind that pvpers complain about being 'forced' to do pve content), cross realm stuff, etc but I thought this was the biggest. I think a huge chunk of the nostalgia people have for vanilla could have been sustained for much longer if flying mounts were never added. When was the last time you were blown away by something in the game that wasn't forced upon you(with some sort of cinematic)? I'm thinking of stuff like entering blackrock mountain for the first time, going to ungoro crater and seeing your first devilsaur, etc. I had countless experiences like that while on a ground mount and maybe one or two on a flying mount.

I didnt level with the pack so i got ganked a few times so an entire feature is garbage

The TLDR version of this fuckbois post. /wrist

[SirCowdog]

To me, Balancing based on PvP is one of the few things Blizzard ever did bad with WoW.

PvP should always be an afterthought unless the core gameplay is PvP which WoW's is not.

- - - Updated - - -



Yeah, better to have all classes act the exact same for "reasons". Also, it is hardly broken or OP. Tell me a situation that isn't World PvP (which by definition has always been broken and OP for several classes.) where it is Broken or OP to have Flight Form?

All classes have access to the exact same flight...except druids. For reasons.

Flight is not a class-specific ability. It's something that everyone has regardless of race/class/faction. If Blizzard really wants to take things up a notch and make each individual class' flying mounts carry different skills and abilities(hello GW2), then I'm all for that. But as long as everyone is going to have flying, then it should work in a consistent manner, especially given the reasons why Blizzard claims flying is harmful to their current content design(it takes you out of the world).

Flying itself, in it's current incarnation, is already pretty broken and OP. That's the entire point of removing it. I believe there are ways to fix that without completely nuking flight, but DRUID flying is the most broken due to its instant-cast nature. And to exacerbate that fact, Shadowmeld+druid flight form makes things even worse, since it allows you to instantly leave combat and fly away in almost any situation that isn't an indoor area.

If anything fits the harmful description of "It takes you out of the game world", it's Shadowmeld+druid instant flight form. I shouldn't even have to argue this point. It should be obvious.