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

[l33t]

I personally feel the Legion approach has been a happy medium for flight.

No, it wasn't. There is absolutely no in-game logic by locking flight behind moronic achievement. Tell me, why all of a sudden your flying mount forgets how to fly after 10 years of being able to fly, and why all of a sudden it remembers how to do it as soon as your character completes exactly 86 quests in a location. Why? No logic at all. I'd be more happier if blizz just got rid of flying alltogether, than them creating this moronic absurdity.
Also, "compromise" never makes people happy, because it is like both sides lose instead of one side getting what they want.

[Costa]

I agree, every expansion since flying introduced has basically been "Yeah but when do we unlock flying in this expansion" rinse and repeat the idiot masses who want to fly as quick as possible from A-B to loot a quest/world quest and do same again.

The game is stupidly easy when you can fly, plain and simple. Removing it or keeping it at BC levels where ground mounts out pace flying would be better which imo they should revert too thus keeping every side happy.

[Deleted]

I agree, every expansion since flying introduced has basically been "Yeah but when do we unlock flying in this expansion" rinse and repeat the idiot masses who want to fly as quick as possible from A-B to loot a quest/world quest and do same again.

That's why WotLK was such a bust.

[Deleted]

That's why WotLK was such a bust.

conclusion: flying was one of the things that destroyed wow

[klaps_05]

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.

hahaa i also have to call massive BS on this. the only real interaction in the world in vanilla was in the small quest hubs and in the areas where you complete the quests. if anyone actually did all you said, they were the tiny majority.

i leveled 2 characters to 60 and a few to 20-40 during the entirety of vanilla on the biggest EU realms and this has absolutely never happened while running between quest hubs/questing. and grouping for quests only happened for the really cluster fuck locations like the ZG gong mace in hinterlands, STV, Arathi, etc.

[Aehl]

There's a reason games don't do flight like WoWs (because it's designed badly and wreaks havoc on game design).

FF14 says hi there.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

Pretty obvious the Hazzicostas and crew doesn't want to step up and use it. That's not the same thing as Blizzard "regretting" it as a whole.

None of this bullshit about flight being bad for the game started until WoD. Flight was not a problem until they made it into one.

But what they made it into is what we have. If they made it into a problem than it is what we have than it is a problem. You can point fingers to reasons why but what we have is what we have. So it is a problem. They regret the problem. I know it doesn't go along with your opinion in all likelihood but that doesn't really matter.

[Sansnom]

That can be said for every post in these threads.
And only half of it's a "claim", the other half is just fact, that most games don't do flight like WoWs.

Oh I agree that many games do not do flight. But we do not know why they do not.

Also many of these games are not as successful as Wow. So I could claim that flight made WoW more successful than these games, can I not?

[Deleted]

Realm communities killed themselves.
Look now at how willing a player is to actually help someone out, when they have flying and numerous other tools to make that far easier to do.
They are less willing than ever.

So in your world, the more tools Blizzard added and the easier Blizzard made it to build a community the worse the community became.

Clearly you should take the time to reassess your argument because your current one is bollocks.

[SirCowdog]

I agree, every expansion since flying introduced has basically been "Yeah but when do we unlock flying in this expansion" rinse and repeat the idiot masses who want to fly as quick as possible from A-B to loot a quest/world quest and do same again.

The game is stupidly easy when you can fly, plain and simple. Removing it or keeping it at BC levels where ground mounts out pace flying would be better which imo they should revert too thus keeping every side happy.

The game is "stupidly easy" because it's not really designed to be challenging in the first place. Flying has little to no impact on that. You're blaming flight for something it doesn't cause. Go into the game right now, and I guarandamntee you that you'll find players doing their damnedest to ride past things they don't care about, as quickly as possible. And when they're done, do you know what they do? Hearth/port/whistle away.


Reverting flying to being slower than ground mounts won't change the problem you described. It will just make things slower. Instead, Blizzard should be making the world with actual challenges instead of filling it with annoying daze-happy mobs that and terrain that only exists to be annoying.

But what they made it into is what we have. If they made it into a problem than it is what we have than it is a problem. You can point fingers to reasons why but what we have is what we have. So it is a problem. They regret the problem. I know it doesn't go along with your opinion in all likelihood but that doesn't really matter.

The only thing they regret is not being able to milk players for even more money with worse game design. There's nothing about removing flight except and attempt to stretch content, slow players down, and convince them that it's good for them. Why anyone would defend allowing Blizzard to create a problem like this and their attempts to tell people it's better for the game, is beyond me.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

The only thing they regret is not being able to milk players for even more money with worse game design. There's nothing about removing flight except and attempt to stretch content, slow players down, and convince them that it's good for them. Why anyone would defend allowing Blizzard to create a problem like this and their attempts to tell people it's better for the game, is beyond me.

You are entitled to opinions like this. They make me laugh. Which is why I always post in these threads so I can get reponses from you and get rolling. Thanks.

Infracted.

[SirCowdog]

You are entitled to opinions like this. They make me laugh. Which is why I always post in these threads so I can get reponses from you and get rolling. Thanks.

It only confirms my suspicions that the longer this discussion goes on, the more people who oppose flying reveal themselves as trolls.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

It only confirms my suspicions that the longer this discussion goes on, the more people who oppose flying reveal themselves as trolls.

Again you are allowed to have your opinion. Of course I notice this opinion always seems to blow in the direction of your personal feelings. Also, if only now you have realized I am a troll. Than you sir are denser than even I believed you to be and it was lead.

[Wildpantz]

I've seen people say something like this before, but usually without any accompanying explanation of HOW.

LFR and LFD I can at least sort of understand, even if I disagree. But how flying supposedly causes harm to communities generally escspes definition. Maybe you can expand on this?

I have so many memories. One is the old cauldron quest i met another mage we ended up grouping up doing it was super hard kiting killing mobs. With flying can just fly ober land loot items fly away . I havent really had that feeling since then. Hopefully classic is vanilla and that feeling comes back . We will see about that.

[tacoloco]

Gee. What a new and exciting topic.

[Lumicide]

So in your world, the more tools Blizzard added and the easier Blizzard made it to build a community the worse the community became.

Clearly you should take the time to reassess your argument because your current one is bollocks.

Why would these tools (x-realm, lfd, lfr)help build a community? If the only place you interact with people from your server is in a capital city, or in your guild (even that isn't always anymore)...

This is from a post of mine in 2013:

[...]"In contrast to numerous studies of community structure, we find that the best communities are relatively small with sizes only up to about 100 nodes. We also find that above a size of about 100, the "quality" of communities gets worse and worse and communities more and more "blend into" the graph. Eventually, even the existence of communities (at least when viewed as sets with stronger internal than external connectivity) is rather questionable. This seems to agree with Dunbar who predicted that 150 is the upper limit on the size of the human community." -http://cs.stanford.edu/people/jure/pubs/ncp-www08.pdf

These conveniences cause us to interact with so many people that we don't form a community. There are very little consequences for being rude, incompetent, or afk, when we feel that we'll never see anyone a second time.

All these conveniences(aside from flight) are created by increasing amount of unique interactions between players. This sounds all well and good at a glance. However, the issue is that it actually gets in the way of community building.

It's arguably fine to have an LFD/LFR system (not the difficulty levels, they're another issue). So long as they're tied to the same server, so that you're 'forced' to interact with people on your server; which is bound to be quite low at any given time, which gives you the ability to get to know people. It's quite rare to find the same people, multiple weeks in a row, in the current LFD/LFR/X-Realm systems. The trade off is community or convenience.

Low pop servers should have been merged, factions should have been balanced, content should have been pruned. That would have helped the community, not all this crap.

Realm communities didn't kill themselves, they were inflated until they popped!

[Costa]

The game is "stupidly easy" because it's not really designed to be challenging in the first place. Flying has little to no impact on that. You're blaming flight for something it doesn't cause. Go into the game right now, and I guarandamntee you that you'll find players doing their damnedest to ride past things they don't care about, as quickly as possible. And when they're done, do you know what they do? Hearth/port/whistle away.


Reverting flying to being slower than ground mounts won't change the problem you described. It will just make things slower. Instead, Blizzard should be making the world with actual challenges instead of filling it with annoying daze-happy mobs that and terrain that only exists to be annoying.



The only thing they regret is not being able to milk players for even more money with worse game design. There's nothing about removing flight except and attempt to stretch content, slow players down, and convince them that it's good for them. Why anyone would defend allowing Blizzard to create a problem like this and their attempts to tell people it's better for the game, is beyond me.

For me flying has achieved one thing in this game, made it so you can get around and quest way easier than it should be, from world quests to leveling quests. This isn't how an mmo is right. What other mmo can you straight up skip half the mobs and terrain by flying in the air and going straight, exactly the point you want.
It makes the game easier i don't know how you can't see that. Running on the ground in Antorus from one of the teleports to an invasion or a rare you have to navigate lots of mobs because they designed it to do that. If we could fly on Antorus then we negate all that extra "annoyance" as you call it which is designed by Blizzard to make us feel like the place is dangerous.


With flying now on live you can do emissaries in all but Antorus within like 30 seconds and you Antorus takes you like 1000x longer because that is how the game should be!

[SirCowdog]

I have so many memories. One is the old cauldron quest i met another mage we ended up grouping up doing it was super hard kiting killing mobs. With flying can just fly ober land loot items fly away . I havent really had that feeling since then. Hopefully classic is vanilla and that feeling comes back . We will see about that.

So you're basing your viewpoint on the notion that randomly encountering players while doing quests builds "community", and that somehow flying prevents(or at least mitigates) the chances of that?

I can understand the point, but I disagree. Mostly because I believe what you're describing is merely a symptom of a greater problem: Poorly designed quests that ignore the existence of flight, and fundamentally un-interesting and un-challenging content. The situation you described is also largely mitigated by cross-server technology as well as phasing.

Let me ask you this: In the first eight months of Legion, and during the first year or so of WoD, did you experience the types of encounters you described above? Do you get those kinds of encounters currently, on Argus? Or do people simply ride in, tag the objective, and leave without saying anything or interacting with you? I would wager that it's the latter.

I suspect that the real source of declining random interactions with random people has less to do with flying, and more to do with the introduction of other tools and mechanics to the game. LFG, cross server tech, phasing, better guild tools, and more of a focus on instanced content rather than open world adventure. I wonder what you would think of a single-server design that actually used flying as part of its content design, where monsters were actually threatening, intelligent, and dangerous.

[gushDH]

I wonder if anyone thought of that at the time they added them.

[SirCowdog]

All these conveniences(aside from flight) are created by increasing amount of unique interactions between players. This sounds all well and good at a glance. However, the issue is that it actually gets in the way of community building.

It's arguably fine to have an LFD/LFR system (not the difficulty levels, they're another issue). So long as they're tied to the same server, so that you're 'forced' to interact with people on your server; which is bound to be quite low at any given time, which gives you the ability to get to know people. It's quite rare to find the same people, multiple weeks in a row, in the current LFD/LFR/X-Realm systems. The trade off is community or convenience.

Low pop servers should have been merged, factions should have been balanced, content should have been pruned. That would have helped the community, not all this crap.

Realm communities didn't kill themselves, they were inflated until they popped!

This actually sums up the situation nicely. But we also have to remember that cross server tools like LFD and LFG were a direct response to player requests, and attempts to combat the problems created by the smaller communities of single server communities. There was a LOT of rampant elitism and cliques. Tank/healer shortages, complete denial of certain classes and specs, ostracizing of players who didn't play perfectly, etc, etc, etc.

We like to look back on the advantages of smaller server communities with nostalgia and rose-colored glasses, but things really weren't perfect. But regardless, it sure as hell wasn't flying that had any kind of significant impact on the situation, one way or the other.

- - - Updated - - -

For me flying has achieved one thing in this game, made it so you can get around and quest way easier than it should be, from world quests to leveling quests. This isn't how an mmo is right. What other mmo can you straight up skip half the mobs and terrain by flying in the air and going straight, exactly the point you want.
It makes the game easier i don't know how you can't see that. Running on the ground in Antorus from one of the teleports to an invasion or a rare you have to navigate lots of mobs because they designed it to do that. If we could fly on Antorus then we negate all that extra "annoyance" as you call it which is designed by Blizzard to make us feel like the place is dangerous.


With flying now on live you can do emissaries in all but Antorus within like 30 seconds and you Antorus takes you like 1000x longer because that is how the game should be!

What you're describing is, as I said a couple posts ago, a symptom of a larger problem. Flying only invalidates quest difficulty or challenge when that content is designed as though flying doesn't exist. I've said this countless times before, but: OF COURSE flying is going to break content which wasn't designed for it. That's the nature of the entire argument, after all.

Those of us who really want flying to be part of the game have been repeating this over and over: Flying should be included in the design, not simply dropped in as an afterthought. I really hope you can understand the difference between that and how flight is currently being misused.