Possibly no flying throughout entire xpac.

[Deleted]

So you mentally prepare and invest time in the group by afking from computer during the flight path. That's rich.

Yup. I look up some mechanics in Dungeon Journal, watch a video on tactics (both nice with second monitor), I make a cup of coffee, I go to the bathroom, I make a phone call which I don't wanna make during raid and then put my phone silent, I do some household things, I talk to the group and greet them or ask about assignments. All stuff you can do as well whilst waiting! Plus so much more... I'll whisper you my secret, don't tell it everywhere though, keep it for yourself! You don't have to stare at your screen whilst waiting.

The "grinds" award zero or next to zero character progression.

Yeah, now they do, in all previous expansions they were mandatory if you wanted to raid right away

4 difficulty levels of the same fucking raid with no god damn variety.

1) There is variety. The easier difficulties introduce you to the basics of the fight. The harder difficulties are far less forgiving. Especially when you're undergeared (= probably when you are sitting in your garrison wondering why there is no content instead of accepting a challenge for once).

2) I have not even set foot on BRF LFR and Normal on my main since there is no drops for me. I only did Highmaul LFR once for the gear upgrades, and then not anymore. Augment Runes yes I did farm them, but that isn't mandatory it is optional. YMMV but I don't think you gotta progress 4 times, and I can recommend if you can progress through Heroic then skip cesspit of LFR. You won't need it.

Tell me how epic that feels. Raid logging because shit nothing else in the game will progress you like the raid and once your save is up that's it. The dungeons may not have been epic for you but for somebody else they represented an alternative means of progression that wasn't raid or you get jack shit this week...

Dungeons get old quickly. The more you grind them, the more boring they become. With high gear its especially unfun. You get to carry bad or undergeared.

The garrison is the ultimate convenience cheat. One could potentially skip the world entirely and still achieve much just by sitting inside the thing and never poking your head out the door. Shit not to mention the convenience of a free lvl 90 and mobs that roll over easier then my last date. The convenience argument just rings fucking hollow and I think that's why their hasn't been as much of a backlash against no flying. Can you imagine if people actually needed to go out into the world?

Some convenience gets removed, some gets added. Your problem is you see convenience as an abstract thing and seem to think I want all convenience removed. How do you envision that, grinding ogres 24/7 from a prison cell in Siberia or what?

[Shamu]

Look, blizzard! A successfull competitor introducing flying! Go, go, and counter it!

With reintroducing flying.

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It's not as if blizzard used this optional content as a reason to remove a core component.

But yes. Some surely like it.

lol yeah. but if anyone here has played FF14 ARR they will soon realise flying wont make much difference in that game with the way the areas are designed, the whole world is gated between areas with loading times between areas though it is minimal you cant just fly everywhere

[Deleted]

It's not as if blizzard used this optional content as a reason to remove a core component.

But yes. Some surely like it.

Which core component got removed?

[Deleted]

Which core component got removed?

Flying from endgame. Lets not start a semantic debate, wont we?

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lol yeah. but if anyone here has played FF14 ARR they will soon realise flying wont make much difference in that game with the way the areas are designed, the whole world is gated between areas with loading times between areas though it is minimal you cant just fly everywhere

As like you could not in WoW. Dungeons, raids, battlegrounds..

[Slant]

While I agree the content is lack luster outside of raiding that isn't an argument contra flying.

Neither is yours an argument pro flying, that's exactly what I'm saying.

- - - Updated - - -

Once again I could accept that if they didn't add the ultimate convenience cheat garrison

And surprisingly, many think the Garrison is too convenient for exactly the same reason. Game design giving us challenges is a good thing. It makes the game more fun in the long run. I can be stubborn and complain about having to ride on the ground or I can embrace the change and enjoy the ride. Either way, I am mindlessly wasting hours of my life in an online game. It's up to me to enjoy it or not.

[Deleted]

It's just one of those examples why people love Spires of Arak that much, you know. Because it's a complete mess of obstacles.

I wonder if that is fun for anyone. And if i take the last poll about the worst leveling up region, the most voices went to Spires of Arak.

If we had flying back, i would believe at least some people would start to play those treasure box jump-a-rope-games where the devlopers tried to introduce their wet dream of what kind of questing content was fun. Up to now, i think they failed to create something that even was remotely popular with introducing that kind of "content".

I heard that the MMO that was the reason the devs thought they had to implement jump and run action, Wildstar, failed so hard that a lot of its devs got fired. So i am not sure if it was a good idea to try to copy quests as we find them in that unsuccessfull implementation.

You call it a mess of obstacles, I call it the start of a challenge and I start to think what tools I have to overcome them.

In WoW, its optional gameplay. If you don't like it, no biggie, then you don't do it. You don't have to do it.

The closest boss which has it mandatory is a boss like Hans'gar and Franzok on Mythic but even that isn't difficult once you know the patterns and with some practice (and not even all need to survive), and Mythic isn't designed for the entire playerbase. On easier difficulties its a lot more forgiving and less demanding. I suppose Heroic you don't get one shot anymore when you fail and since the phases are health based its bound to get outgeared eventually. Method just YOLOed the boss and forgot to pop BL, that pretty much describes how easy it is. Plus, you can skip the boss and do another one.

I can't comment on Wildstar. I got to level 20 on beta and had a blast, but I suffer from that syndrome where I buy the game and then CBA to do exactly the same content once again. I had the same with GW2 and other betas. In WoW I get it as well but I pull through, maybe cause I'm part of a guild.

The big queue near the cauldron all day long on the HJ quest-line pretty much showed how popular that content is, and that is with 6.1 being out for a good few weeks...

[Glorious Leader]

Yup. I look up some mechanics in Dungeon Journal, watch a video on tactics (both nice with second monitor), I make a cup of coffee, I go to the bathroom, I make a phone call which I don't wanna make during raid and then put my phone silent, I do some household things, I talk to the group and greet them or ask about assignments. All stuff you can do as well whilst waiting! Plus so much more... I'll whisper you my secret, don't tell it everywhere though, keep it for yourself! You don't have to stare at your screen whilst waiting.

Yeah, now they do, in all previous expansions they were mandatory if you wanted to raid right away

1) There is variety. The easier difficulties introduce you to the basics of the fight. The harder difficulties are far less forgiving. Especially when you're undergeared (= probably when you are sitting in your garrison wondering why there is no content instead of accepting a challenge for once).

2) I have not even set foot on BRF LFR and Normal on my main since there is no drops for me. I only did Highmaul LFR once for the gear upgrades, and then not anymore. Augment Runes yes I did farm them, but that isn't mandatory it is optional. YMMV but I don't think you gotta progress 4 times, and I can recommend if you can progress through Heroic then skip cesspit of LFR. You won't need it.

Dungeons get old quickly. The more you grind them, the more boring they become. With high gear its especially unfun. You get to carry bad or undergeared.

Some convenience gets removed, some gets added. Your problem is you see convenience as an abstract thing and seem to think I want all convenience removed. How do you envision that, grinding ogres 24/7 from a prison cell in Siberia or what?

In other words the "gameplay" (or non gameplay) of the fp has you getting up from the computer investing less actual time with the game. Somehow that's better then an fp. It sounds an awful lot like you ENJOY the convenience of being able to afk and do other shit while on the fp...

Again the mandatory grind for you (that you whined so hard about) was somebody else's content. Now it's gone, their avenue for progression deleted because QQ. Look at you enjoying that convenience..

1) It's not variety. It's the same shit albeit at a diff difficulty. How many times can you farm highmaul before you get sick of fucking highmaul? Especially since normal and heroic don't have any mechanical changes..

2) You don't have to farm 4 diff difficulties but if you don't you get even less gameplay out of the game since it's all invested in raiding now and no other progression worth a damn exists. Again it sounds like you really enjoy the convenience of being able to raid log..

Dungeons didn't get old for me. I liked the fact that if I missed a week of raiding in ICC or through most of Cata my progress wasn't completely gutted because raid or die. Raiding however has gotten real old for me real fast.

It's not my fault neither you nor the developers seem to have any consistency in your arguments. It's okay for you to have the convenience of the garrison or the fp or whatever but flying as convenience well it sucks you got it taken it away...

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Neither is yours an argument pro flying, that's exactly what I'm saying.

- - - Updated - - -



And surprisingly, many think the Garrison is too convenient for exactly the same reason. Game design giving us challenges is a good thing. It makes the game more fun in the long run. I can be stubborn and complain about having to ride on the ground or I can embrace the change and enjoy the ride. Either way, I am mindlessly wasting hours of my life in an online game. It's up to me to enjoy it or not.

Actually it is an argument in favor of the implementation of flying. It might not be arguing it's specific merits or not but the implementation of it. Since it's removal has had zero impact on the game itself (because you're all stuck in a garrison anyway) adding it would cause zero harm and may even encourage people to go out into the world for whatever reason. Completely irrelevant to what they may or may not do out there.

Again it's not my fault the developers don't have a consistent design philosophy. If your only two choices were complain or embrace change the developers wouldn't have to worry a single whit about what the players think. Clearly players have other options.

[Slant]

Actually it is an argument in favor of the implementation of flying. It might not be arguing it's specific merits or not but the implementation of it. Since it's removal has had zero impact on the game itself (because you're all stuck in a garrison anyway) adding it would cause zero harm and may even encourage people to go out into the world for whatever reason. Completely irrelevant to what they may or may not do out there.

Again it's not my fault the developers don't have a consistent design philosophy. If your only two choices were complain or embrace change the developers wouldn't have to worry a single whit about what the players think. Clearly players have other options.

I read that argument so often here. I let it slide, because essentially it's not about that, but in this context I feel the need to interject that I'm meandering around Draenor more than I ever have in MoP. So what you're saying is factually false. The removal did impact the game. You should acknowledge that, to be fair. And the fact that this thread is closing in on 2000 glorious pages of pointless discussion proves that, if nothing else.

[-Superman-]

I read that argument so often here. I let it slide, because essentially it's not about that, but in this context I feel the need to interject that I'm meandering around Draenor more than I ever have in MoP. So what you're saying is factually false. The removal did impact the game. You should acknowledge that, to be fair. And the fact that this thread is closing in on 2000 glorious pages of pointless discussion proves that, if nothing else.

Well, if we didn't have so many people who don't give a fuck about the topic anyway, comments like yours would never appear. If the topic is that pointless, surely there is something more interesting or productive for you to invest your time in. Some of us actually want to be here.

[Deleted]

In other words the "gameplay" (or non gameplay) of the fp has you getting up from the computer investing less actual time with the game. Somehow that's better then an fp. It sounds an awful lot like you ENJOY the convenience of being able to afk and do other shit while on the fp...

The gameplay stays exactly the same but you are stimulated to take a moment for a break, and this is enforced by the game to the player(s). What you do in this break is yours to decide. You wanting to stare at your screen, enjoying the world view, but trying to steer away from the FP path is your decision. There are many, many other options available. So yes, together with always going for the path of least resistance (widely documented by GC and others, but not quite understood by various participants over here) that does make it an improvement.

Again the mandatory grind for you (that you whined so hard about) was somebody else's content. Now it's gone, their avenue for progression deleted because QQ. Look at you enjoying that convenience..

Grinds are still there, and back then they made sense as there was no other content. Right now, you still do dungeons and garrison invasions and what not. You can also still do a rep grinds. The diff is they are not mandatory anymore, and I consider that a good thing. The only forced grind is the leveling maybe, and the first time you can opt to enjoy it for what it is if you are a casual player. Nothing wrong with that! Facerolling dungeons and scenarios while outgearing them, for VP, that is what got removed. It was terrible for the content, downright disrespectful. There was no challenge involved in it, it was a mindless grind or carry (which is neither fun for those who carry, nor for those who get carried). Moving that to self responsibility and tying it into cache and BoE is better than what it was.

1) It's not variety. It's the same shit albeit at a diff difficulty. How many times can you farm highmaul before you get sick of fucking highmaul? Especially since normal and heroic don't have any mechanical changes..

Tuning was well done tho, and the way it works is once you outgear it you can skip certain mechanics. If you really dislike it you can minimize the time you spend on different difficulties. This will increase the amount of wipes which in PuGs isn't acceptable and serious guilds will ask you to do the lower difficulty. Most guilds are not even remotely close to serious. For 99% of the WoW community they can simply skip lower difficulty, or higher difficulty. You don't have to do all 4. Is it better or worse than TBC model? Hard to say, back then you saw the content when your time was due. Some only saw KJ somewhere in WotLK.

2) You don't have to farm 4 diff difficulties but if you don't you get even less gameplay out of the game since it's all invested in raiding now and no other progression worth a damn exists. Again it sounds like you really enjoy the convenience of being able to raid log..

It does cost a lot of time, I do like the convenience of having the option and choice to do whatever I like. Fancy pet battles? Go do them. This is as casual friendly as it gets, since I am the filthy casual in that regard.

Dungeons didn't get old for me. I liked the fact that if I missed a week of raiding in ICC or through most of Cata my progress wasn't completely gutted because raid or die. Raiding however has gotten real old for me real fast.

Sounds more like you are burned out on raiding. WotLK badges were, in hindsight, terrible (at the time, it was quite good). You had to do the dungeon every day, or else! It was improved in Cata with 7 a week. Then it was replaced with a more flexible system with VP but this meant you'd do the easiest content (hc scenarios) and get burned out on that. The VP upgrade system got replaced with garrison cache.

Its quite ironic how you want all these grinds back, and then complain about garrison? Both are there, and pretty much optional now.

It's not my fault neither you nor the developers seem to have any consistency in your arguments. It's okay for you to have the convenience of the garrison or the fp or whatever but flying as convenience well it sucks you got it taken it away...

Convenience is a balance, saying you got yours why don't I get mine isn't a compelling argument, nor is it contradictory. You don't wanna go to one extreme when it comes to convenience. If the game is too convenient, where players get BiS epics mailed after a week because they are subscribed, and then one shot all the bosses in raid... that sure is... convenient. I understand working hard (ie. grinding) is a good thing, if optional, available in small bite sizes.

[Huehuecoyotl]

The gameplay stays exactly the same but you are stimulated to take a moment for a break, and this is enforced by the game to the player(s).

So you are basically saying that game-play where you have zero interaction with the character is exactly the same as game-play where you do have interaction with the character?

I think you need to step back and think about the position you are taking in this argument. Because it seems like you don't understand the difference between playing a game and watching a film.

You can choose to take a break any time you want while you are gaming. You can step up and walk away from the screen, make a coffee, take a leak. All those things you said you could do while taking a FP. The difference is, with flight, you can choose when to do those other things, and you know that as soon as you return you will be back to game-play.

With the removal of flight, any time you want to take a trip from A to B you are forced to break the connection to the game. The travel mode in the game is demanding that you cease interacting, as soon as you step onto a FP. And you have to wait until the FP has finished the period of forced zero interaction before you can carry on playing the game.

So, a game with continuous game-play, where you can take breaks when you want, that are as long as you want, versus a game where the game-play ceases for periods defined by the game, rather than you. I will give you a hint, one of those is better than the other, and it isn't the one you think.

[Last Starfighter]

Design inconsistency only applies if you believe the reasons blizzard gave for removing flying.

The problem about scapegoats always is a reasonable argumentation.

I still believe the reasoning mainly was to generate playtime. And probably to find a way to save development effort.

Another thing blizzard should try to learn: Tell your customers your true reasons you want to change something.

What is worse about..

We are not able to add Karabor and Bladespire as faction hubs in time as we want to release the expac as soon as possible. As we already are done with planning the development of upcoming patches, we dont plan to implement the cities as faction hubs in the future anymore.

or

We will not implement flying initially into Warlords of Draenor, as Tanaan Jungle will not be done at start, and are not able to allocate development time to setup sky boxes around it. We will probably put it back into the game at a later point if Tanaan jungle got implemented, while we dont know if that is going to happen in 6.1 or 6.2 yet.

If people are not going to miss flying, we think about removing it completely from new content, as our development effort for regions would be lower and we could add other features in the time we would have to use to make every new continent flyable. Additionally, flying speeds up content consumption, while we are only able to add a limited amount of content in the open world.

.. than the reasons blizzard tried?

"And we are not able to allocate development time to setup sky boxes around it". That would take an hour. Now I think it's you who's looking for the conspiracy. This would take no time at all to do. Blizzard has been talking the past couple of years about regretting putting flying into the game. This isn't something that just came up for WoD...

[Deleted]

With "skipping content" I meant skipping the opportunity for random encounters. Be that with other players, a rare you happen to notice (by not staring at your minimap), some odd conversation from NPCs that you happen to catch a glimpse of, noticing a cave that's hidden that you haven't noticed before... seeing the intended layout of the area. Stuff like that. All of that is more or less skipped if you fly from A to B precisely. FP for instance will drop you at a certain point and you have to walk the last distance yourself. That alone gives tons of opportunity for you to notice stuff that you don't notice when you just fly in a straight line from A to B. And the supposed "immersive flight" that some pretend to exist is just a myth. I'm ready to admit there is even a niche for that, but I cannot believe for a second that it's a noteworthy fraction of the WoW population. A game, I repeat, that at its core is not about flying.

Now you're truly grasping at straws. By your logic we would need to asap remove summoning stones, warlock portals and the likes as they completely eliminate all of these. As for the rest. People already experienced pretty much every single last part of this to it's entirety as far as it exists during the leveling phase. "NPC Dialogues", "Some Cave" that is in all honesty the best you can do as an argument?

All of this is in it's entirety eliminated by flight points, you say you have to walk but let's be honest it's mostly around 5-10 metres on auto pilot from the flight point to the raid you want to visit mostly taking the exact same route and then summon the other guys in your group. That is the entirety of the content you're supposedly defending here and trying to make out as something awesome. 30-60 seconds of the same exact way on a ground mount.

And that while you completely and utterly ignore that by now people have run these ways dozens if not hundreds of times. That WoD rares except for the mount rares (which are conveniently completely out of any way you might take by accident) are only for leveling purposes and mostly rare just once (and nearly always up).

The thing about MMOs (and especially about PvP servers, if you want to take it further) is not that you happen to be on a server with thousands of other people that you never meet. It's also not about standing in OG and being overwhelmed by hundreds of people spamming your chatframe.

Well, maybe WoW isn't the game for you then. Because that's pretty much how it has been since TBC. I'm on a high population PvP server. World PvP was dead the moment they introduced Battlegrounds, people stand in the main city almost the entire time since TBC, around since when the Alliance here has been in decline. When Blizzard introduced paid faction change they threw the "PvP" tag effectively out as the already failing Alliance collapsed over night. The PvP tag might aswell be removed by now since the Alliance is effectively extinct since Wotlk.

So please tell me how I am playing the wrong game, how the PvP tag matters when it was killed off for profit a long time ago and how suddenly the state of things that has been true since BC is "wrong" and how no flight will suddenly fix it when nothing else changed including all the factors that lead to the current situation?

It's about the hypothetical opportunity for anything to happen. If I want a good storyline, awesome graphics or a well crafted RPG system, I play other games... I play WoW because there are players in it. They create unique situations and experiences that nobody can ever copy into a single player game. By flying over everyone else's head, you're removing yourself from that. If you can fly around everywhere, you are one person less that I can hypothetically meet at any point in time. If enough people do that, it's making the world look empty, because the less chance for random encounters there are, the less there will be random encounters.

What an great argument, especially since the World is empty anyway already. Since there's no reason to go out and if people go out they usually have a certain goal in mind which means they get a summon from their group, use one of the tools to directly get teleported where they want to go or use a flight path and then run for about 30 seconds to their destination.

No, timeless isle does not count, that is the designer forcing players into the same area just like a dungeon or a raid. I'm talking about random encounters in the open world, not encounters by design. And that is the core of an MMO, that you're playing with (or against) other players. For that to have a meaning, you need to have a common ground (quite literally in this case) on which such meetings can happen.

Except, they don't happen and even if they happen as rare as they are nowadays you see another person for about 5 seconds before said person has passed you. That is in all honesty why you want to have no flight. So every few days you might meet someone leveling (who would be grounded anyway) or while you head through Everbloom wilds someone passes you in the other direction coming from Blackrock Foundry? THAT is your entire reason for having no flight?

Now, I was okay with flying when it existed. That's how the game was. But when Blizzard started talking about removing it and explained how content was "skipped", I understood immediately what they meant. It's a fast forward button in a game that took a long time to develop and it's a fast foward button on any kind of random social encounter with other players other than in predetermined "social hubs" that are by design not "random social encounters".

Sorry but I just can't take you serious anymore at this point. What you're saying and claiming here is so disconnected from the actual game it's unbelievable.

[Zervek]

I love how WoW gets rid of one of the features it had that made it STAND OUT from the other MMOs.
Now other MMO's are embracing flying. It's kind of Ironic, really.

Blizzard is removing everything that made the game great, and other games are adding those features. And to anyone who says "Hurr durr flying didn't make the game great, it just let you skip the mobs in the DANGEROUS (lol) world." Is full of shit because we've had flying for 8 years. LONGER than we haven't had it; so it isn't wrong to consider it a core feature of the game at this point.

We don't have flying because Blizzard is pooling all their resources to their other games. They have GIVEN UP on WoW and only do the bare minimum to keep the addicts PLAYING. It doesn't matter if the addicts or happy or not. They are MILKING their CASH COW to develop their OTHER GAMES because even they have lost interest! It's obvious and yet people STILL defend them.

If they added flying now, players would realize just how small Draenor really.

[Deleted]

"And we are not able to allocate development time to setup sky boxes around it". That would take an hour.

I have no idea. Probably it was even completely impossible or very expensive to implement to prevent people from getting into Tanaan.

And the more easy way to prevent it was to turn flying off.

[Kazgrel]

"And we are not able to allocate development time to setup sky boxes around it". That would take an hour. Now I think it's you who's looking for the conspiracy. This would take no time at all to do. Blizzard has been talking the past couple of years about regretting putting flying into the game. This isn't something that just came up for WoD...

Other than some off comment by GC about his personal dislike of it a couple of years ago, I've never seen any blue ramblings about it until WoD development, when the Titan-ic team got appointed to lead the way.

[Thyranne]

lol yeah. but if anyone here has played FF14 ARR they will soon realise flying wont make much difference in that game with the way the areas are designed, the whole world is gated between areas with loading times between areas though it is minimal you cant just fly everywhere

The only reason that FFXIV has loading screen is because of PS3. In the new zones (where you can fly) the world will be seamless (like in WoW). They also said that once they drop support to PS3 they'll consider making current zones seamless.

[Ordinator]

Happy Birthday thread <3

[Glorious Leader]

I read that argument so often here. I let it slide, because essentially it's not about that, but in this context I feel the need to interject that I'm meandering around Draenor more than I ever have in MoP. So what you're saying is factually false. The removal did impact the game. You should acknowledge that, to be fair. And the fact that this thread is closing in on 2000 glorious pages of pointless discussion proves that, if nothing else.

You might be, however my suspicion is that your experience is atypical especially relative to the start of mists when everybody and their mother were out doing daily quests.

The removal of flying had the POTENTIAL to impact the game but the developers threw in so much more convenience that at the end of the day no flying has relatively little impact. When I can sit in my garrison, and all the mobs in the world are push overs, and i can't build an ogre tp waystone everywhere then removing flying has little impact on me. On me. To the people who actually enjoyed flying and being out in the world, they got boned.

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The gameplay stays exactly the same but you are stimulated to take a moment for a break, and this is enforced by the game to the player(s). What you do in this break is yours to decide. You wanting to stare at your screen, enjoying the world view, but trying to steer away from the FP path is your decision. There are many, many other options available. So yes, together with always going for the path of least resistance (widely documented by GC and others, but not quite understood by various participants over here) that does make it an improvement.

Grinds are still there, and back then they made sense as there was no other content. Right now, you still do dungeons and garrison invasions and what not. You can also still do a rep grinds. The diff is they are not mandatory anymore, and I consider that a good thing. The only forced grind is the leveling maybe, and the first time you can opt to enjoy it for what it is if you are a casual player. Nothing wrong with that! Facerolling dungeons and scenarios while outgearing them, for VP, that is what got removed. It was terrible for the content, downright disrespectful. There was no challenge involved in it, it was a mindless grind or carry (which is neither fun for those who carry, nor for those who get carried). Moving that to self responsibility and tying it into cache and BoE is better than what it was.

Tuning was well done tho, and the way it works is once you outgear it you can skip certain mechanics. If you really dislike it you can minimize the time you spend on different difficulties. This will increase the amount of wipes which in PuGs isn't acceptable and serious guilds will ask you to do the lower difficulty. Most guilds are not even remotely close to serious. For 99% of the WoW community they can simply skip lower difficulty, or higher difficulty. You don't have to do all 4. Is it better or worse than TBC model? Hard to say, back then you saw the content when your time was due. Some only saw KJ somewhere in WotLK.

It does cost a lot of time, I do like the convenience of having the option and choice to do whatever I like. Fancy pet battles? Go do them. This is as casual friendly as it gets, since I am the filthy casual in that regard.

Sounds more like you are burned out on raiding. WotLK badges were, in hindsight, terrible (at the time, it was quite good). You had to do the dungeon every day, or else! It was improved in Cata with 7 a week. Then it was replaced with a more flexible system with VP but this meant you'd do the easiest content (hc scenarios) and get burned out on that. The VP upgrade system got replaced with garrison cache.

Its quite ironic how you want all these grinds back, and then complain about garrison? Both are there, and pretty much optional now.

Convenience is a balance, saying you got yours why don't I get mine isn't a compelling argument, nor is it contradictory. You don't wanna go to one extreme when it comes to convenience. If the game is too convenient, where players get BiS epics mailed after a week because they are subscribed, and then one shot all the bosses in raid... that sure is... convenient. I understand working hard (ie. grinding) is a good thing, if optional, available in small bite sizes.

Okay so let's break down this down one at a time:

My feeling is that unless you're in the hardcore of hardcore guilds you likely get a break at some point during your raid anyway. Even if you didn't that still doesn't mean the gameplay is exactly the same. That's asinine. That's like saying I could have a bot play for me and the game play would be the same.


The grinds are still there they just don't award player power and subsequently are poor content not designed to engage anybody for any remote period of time. Of course if they did award player power you'd whine about them being mandatory and how awful it was that you were put out to do them. Well you got your wish and everbody else got fucked. Also I hate to point out but you afking on a flight path is better gameplay then grinding out dungeons for valor. I'm having a hard time taking you seriously.

See here's the thing. Casual friendly doesn't just mean everything is fast and easy to do. It also has to mean that the activities casual do ALSO award characther progression and/or player power. If a game offers all sorts of convenient activities to a casual player base but DOESNT INCENTIVIZE THEM then it's not very casual. It's telling the hoi polloi here's you crumbs off the table like it or leave it.

Wotlk badges were the best system they implemented (starting in tbc btw) because it also said If you don't do the fucking raid this week you aren't stuck for character progression. In WOTLK and most of CATA you didn't have to raid and you could still have meaningful progression on your character and not be gimp in the process. You could also still raid if you wanted but at least you had some variety in how you progressed. Not spam highmaul till your eyes bleed.

I would hardly call the Garrison optional, it's far to central to this expansion. I suppose you could skip it but it would just be really hamstringing yourself.

The game is far more convenient now then it's ever been. It's just also less rewarding for everyone who doesn't raid.

[-Superman-]

It's just also less rewarding for everyone who doesn't raid.

Which is why taking away the casual's favorite means of transportation and then STILL not offering the new and exciting content guaranteed to make us forget about flying, just doesn't cut it.

- - - Updated - - -

Near the end of the interview they hint at no flying throughout the entire xpac.

2014-03-08, 05:44 PM

One year ago today this whole thing got rolling. Happy Birthday Thread.