Describe how you imagine WoW being if flying mounts were never introduced.

[DeadmanWalking]

I accept that people leave for many reasons, but to call me deluded for enjoying a certain era of the game more so than the current is seriously fucked.

Enjoyment of something is completely subjective, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and the beholder is a one eyed beast. I didn't call you deluded for enjoying something, I called you deluded for contributing one thing you don't like to the majority of sublosses. The online world has changed since 2004, wow use to be one of 5 MMO's, now there are several dozen MMO's with more every year. The majority of Console games are now online and there are hundreds upon hundreds of console games that can be played online.

Some people also don't deal with change in their environment well either, which comes from caveman times when an environmental change could cause your death. For every person who says they liked the old to the new there is a person who likes the new to the old. Your disatisfaction with wow is not proof of anything but your disatisfaction.

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It would balance it. Right now trying to use a ground mount gimps yourself in every way.

Slower flying mounts would be better. If you wanna get around run, if you want safety fly.

If you don't want to fly then don't. I like it just fine the way it is. There are at least 3 zones in MoP where you can't fly at all and ground mounts become useful again not to mention the entire questing experience requires use of ground mounts. For every person trying to nix flying there is someone demanding flying through the questing zone once you have 1 character to 90 because they don't care for the ground mount portion of the game like you do.

[Deleted]

Enjoyment of something is completely subjective, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and the beholder is a one eyed beast. I didn't call you deluded for enjoying something, I called you deluded for contributing one thing you don't like to the majority of sublosses. The online world has changed since 2004, wow use to be one of 5 MMO's, now there are several dozen MMO's with more every year. The majority of Console games are now online and there are hundreds upon hundreds of console games that can be played online.

Some people also don't deal with change in their environment well either, which comes from caveman times when an environmental change could cause your death. For every person who says they liked the old to the new there is a person who likes the new to the old. Your disatisfaction with wow is not proof of anything but your disatisfaction.

What are you even talking about? Please quote me where I pointed out that the majority of losses are from the "1 thing I don't like".

Come to think of it, you may be the delusional one here.

You feel to the need to try and defend the sub losses so valiantly, trying ever so hard to come up with redundant arguments about the changing face of gaming and whatnot, without ever backing it up with sources that said things, are contributing to the decline of this game.

Maybe you should consider that, hey, maybe the game just isn't as good as it used to be?

[Hoky]

I think the flying mounts killed a lot of interaction between the factions.
But I hate it they don't let you use your flying mount till a certain level with new expansions. On a PvP realm that is just a golden ticket for lame ganking from the higher levels, If you as lower level finally do beat the person in PvP ( this person who often can'' actually PvP well and just wins due the gear and level advantage ) Often decides to run away and then wait in the sky for you to engage another mob and jump down on you to let you get a repair bill like the total asshat that person is.
This made me think that flying mounts in some way destroyed the entire difference from PvP realms and PvE realms such as there was in Vanilla.

The ground mount era was way more fun for me then the flying mount. Of course everyone loves the convenience of flying to the other side of the continent without detours from flight paths. IT is great to get a nice view of your surroundings. But in the end it removes exploration for a big deal, It remove some mystic element from high mountains and tree tops.
And gathering was way more rewarding for yourself, as lazy people would buy the ore anyway and thus it also in some way had great effect to the ingame economy.
All in all, I think the game and gameplay might have been better off without them, But most people like things handed to them on a silver platter instead of gaming for it. And thus for the Business that is WoW it was a great idea.

[Otaka]

People wouldnt be as lazy as they are now. And all those elitist kids would have quit long time ago.

WoW would be better if they werent introduced. :P
But im as guilty as everyone who played in TBC, we all got excited to be able to fly without realizing the horrible side effect.

[Evilfish]

Very limited.

[Vyreks]

Pretty sure the game world would be a lot .... flatter?

[Varabently]

World PvP would likely have continued to be a thing. It would have obviously changed the landscape considerably. The cost of materials would probably go up.

[jealouspirate]

The world would feel bigger
Improved sense of scale
There'd be more player interaction
There'd be more WPvP
You'd actually have to PLAY the game to travel instead of alt+tabbing way above ground
There'd be a more persistent sense of danger
Tons of opportunities for a more interactive environment

Basically, it would be better in just about every way.

[Wildtree]

If one other change (which still hasn't) be made, I say it would be better.

The missing change is intelligent flight path travel.
1. The flyers choosing the shortest direct path, and not taking detour after detour.
2. The ability to interrupt a flight at the next incoming flight master. I remember how I was trapped, times and again, on a flight into a whole other direction, because while waiting to get there something else came up, like an instance run or someone needed something crafted. Or one simply forgot an item in the bank, and took off without it, and all that stuff. And the famous mis-click flying somewhere completely different to what was intended..
It's silly how you have to log out for a brief period to have your flight ending early at the next stop.. There should be an option to change your mind and land early.

[Grubjuice]

i imagine wow being very tedious w/o flying mounts.
also i imagine a lot of the world map easter eggs and cute little out of the way corners would never exist and there would be ramps, ramps everywhere.

[tankbug]

This is one of the few things that those nostalgoholics claim was a failure of blizzard that I tend to agree with. Although, I like to ride in the air because it's fast, safe and gives you a good overview, I feel like the world beneath me has lost it's meaning. Enemy strongholds? Just fly in. Quest mobs deep in the enemy encampment? Just divebomb the shit out of them. It's like you have your own little teleport, jumping in and out of the world. In no way is flying game-breaking, but I wouldn't cry if they removed it.

[grexly75]

Actually I don't think so. These battles stopped with the introduction of BGs. And then ppl also lost interest because after a certain amount of kills no honor was awarded.

It is all an interesting mindgame. Guess the reality we will only ever find out if Blizzard introduced the ultimate server that bows to all the awesome suggestions on these forums:

A server with:
-no battlegrounds
-pvp only
-no flying..hell..no riding even
-no LFR, flex or normal
-5 man heroics that are as long as UBRS and LRBS combined but as hard as the 45 min timed run in Shattered Halls
-only heroic raids WITH long attunements chains

Naturally you cannot transfer there, you start at lv 1.

It also would shut down any elitist threads, because you can just point them to this server

One thing more would be that when your character dies, you have to re roll a new character and start all over again from level 1.. >

[Raelbo]

I want to hear how everyone envisions how these last 7(?) years would have been without flying mounts.

It's an interesting thing to brainstorm.

Game would be dead...

I get why people criticise flying mounts, but overall they are the lesser of two evils, the greater evil being people quitting the game because it is too tedious.

I really enjoyed my Tauren hunter when I first started playing and the sense of exploration as I ventured out into the barrens for the first time. When I finally got a mount though it was a godsend. There are only so many times you can run over the same stretch of road for 5 minutes before it gets dull. Terribly dull.

Again, by the time I got to Outland and worked to get my flying mount, the "joy" of traversing vast distances over land had gotten stale.

A world without flying mounts is fine as long as you are familiarising yourself with the world. But once you are familiar, it gets boring and frustrating to waste so much time simply moving between points of interest.

I think the way in which MoP handled flying mounts is pretty good and fairly close to ideal. You have the best of both worlds: nice immersion while people are new to the new areas, and then the convenience of flying once the immersion phase is depleted. Zones like the Isle of Thunder, Isle of Giants and Timeless Isle (like Tol Barad in Cata) work very well because they are contained areas of interest.

The issue of "world pvp" mentioned by many is IMO irrelevant. Flying mounts did not kill world pvp. A lack of interest in world pvp killed world pvp. There is one vital ingredient for world pvp, and that is having players from both factions wanting to engage in it. If the person you are wanting to pvp with is not interested in pvp, then why the hell should the game force him into it? That is just bad, self biased, illogical thinking.

From what I have seen, many advocates of world pvp are simply selfish bullies with little or no consideration for other players. For example, the other day, on Timeless Isle I joined in a kill of a rare, and as it died there were 3 PvP flagged retards sitting on top of the corpse, presumably hoping that some hapless victim would accidentally click on them instead of the corpse they were trying to loot. And yes this has happened to me before, on more than one occasion, and it's annoying. I typically end up electing not to even fight back (even if I could win) and then afking while dead for 5 mins because I just want the PvP flag off again so that I can do the things I want without being pestered by pvpers trying to kill me.

If you ask me, the ability to mount up and fly away from a would-be-ganker is great, and one of the best reasons to keep flying mounts in the game. To those who are frustrated by this: sorry, but the person mounting up and flying away does not want to do pvp with you. Find someone who does. Or better yet, join a battleground, a zone designed so that people wanting pvp can find other likeminded people to play with.

[Twoflower]

Not much different, except most things take longer to do because of travel times. Maybe PvP realms would be less populous.

This really. Except for push times just after an expansion release, you hardly meet people questing. Flying or not does not make much of a difference ( at least on our realm ).

[Deleted]

Bigger. I myself would enjoy the game so much more.

[HeedmySpeed]

There would be PvP gankers rampant through the lands.
That'd be a good thing though.

On PvE servers? It either be players grouping up for everything or solo players who are afraid to interact getting pissy at everyone 'stealing their mobs.'

[melodramocracy]

I want to hear how everyone envisions how these last 7(?) years would have been without flying mounts.

It's an interesting thing to brainstorm.

It wouldn't have been much different than it is now. *shrug*

[Mongoose19]

Game would be huuuuge and magical. That's probably one of the very few things that went wrong in TBC.

[Abysal]

Tedious. I played back before there were flying mounts.

The real purpose that tedious things like travel time provide for the game is that they fill in the empty time. It's less "boring" because you're not standing around doing nothing. The problem is that riding around on a ground mount for 20 minutes to get to your destination isn't somehow "fun" it's just a time filler. That's poor design. The problem with this game isn't flying mounts or any of the other conveniences that have been added. It's that it's gotten to where we fill time by standing around instead of by doing something. It's up to the devs to give us fun things to do while we wait for our queues to pop/raids to form/whatever.

[DeadmanWalking]

Game would be huuuuge and magical. That's probably one of the very few things that went wrong in TBC.

Good news! Just refuse to use a Flying mount and the game goes back to being huuuuge and magical to you. To me the game is still huuuuge and magical. It is entirely subjective. It's especially magical when I can get from 7 stars to the timeless isle to help my healer friend with thier quest to kill elites and gather stones so they can complete the quests to see back in time. Then again my friends enjoyment of the game is magical to me, spending 30 minutes getting there is not.