Removal of flying - Was it a failed experiment?

[l33t]

And since you clearly know the experiment wasnt properly done, how should they have done it?

See, the problem is, Blizzard denied flying because of mythical, unseen by anyone "engaging, dangerous world, which will be completely nullified if flying enabled". Me personally have seen no things like that.

What I've seen is this things:
- unclear paths, and a very high density of boring, unthreatening mobs, which, combined together, granted a lot of situations when you had to rip through a dozen packs of mobs to reach some cave entrance. (Easily fixed by making mobs more threatening but more rare, possibly make more patrol routes as well as some forms of random encounters such as ambushes or road blocks. Also, it would be nice if mobs aggro on some sort of sight mechanics, so you could sneak behind them in a close distance. But most needed thing is hard fucking mobs! Mobs should be so hard that pulling three mobs at the same time must lead to almost imminent character's death, unless cc/bursts/kiting is used.)

- daze/dismount still based on armor/role, you get instant dismount when you play clothie while you can ride through mobs 24/7 when you play a tank. Which is DUMB AS FUCK, and irritating beyond all possible limits. (Obviously, no such idiotic disparity must exist. Static dismount/daze percent chance must be implemented for all characters no matter which race, class or armor type they are.)

- mobs have a lot of ways to interrupt casting, while usually they do nothing vs melee. With a grand removal of caster mobility this leads to lots of frustration when caster played, as well as uber high levels of boredom when played on melee. (Obvious solution: Fire Holinka the dumbass, give all casters their mobility back and implement abilities which require melees to run away from target.)

- and, of course, absolutely no reason to fly/walk/ride/whatever anywhere, because there was no world content. (Obvious solution: make world content, lol)

That's how the noflying experiment should've been done, if you ask me.

[dejaa]

Conceptually, I like the idea of developers taking risks. I think it makes for better, more interesting games. But it won't always pan out, as in this case.

I like the idea of developers taking sensible risks. The results of this one were entirely predictable to everyone but said developers because they were so tied up with their own 'vision' for the game they couldn't see the forest for the trees.

(Though I do believe developer opinion on this was mixed. My own speculation is there was one person high enough up was the anti-flight bull walrus that pushed this through and continued to disallow flying. From the collection of dev interviews my guess would be Alex Afrasiabi.)

[darklogrus]

The concept was fine, the execution was horrid. The world didn't feel like it was immersive but built to delay the player as long as possible. The world wasn't dangerous or savage. It felt like mobs were purposely designed to daze and dismount you the majority of the time for no other reason to then just slow you down.

[Exeris]

I feel it was a fantastic decision that could have lead to amazing levels of immersion and gameplay.

They didn't actually design around the idea of it, so uh... I'm not sure an experiment even happened.

This is pretty much what I wanted to say.

Was so confused when the world in WoD kinda died at max level, I thought one of their main goals was to make the world more alive and interesting with events and so on. What is the point of flying when there is hardly anything to use it for.

[DarkAmbient]

Don't play an open world sandbox MMO if you don't want 'inconvenience.'

WoW isn't a sandbox MMO.

On topic, removing a fun mechanic that's been in the game for 8 years already = bad idea.

[alyx]

I think it could have been done better. I wasn't for the removal of flight however I wasn't raging about it either. I liked how it was handled in MoP, it was really cool dinging 90 and being able to explore freely.

I agree on this note.
When leveling I don't mind exploring stuff but afterwards I want to have the convenience of being able to fly freely since I have done the exploring part.
Same count with alts, I have quite a lot of them and as I have seen the content on my main I don't feel the need to do it over again with my alts (except for area's I haven't visited previously, but then I can choose not to use flying for that part)