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

[Deleted]

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.

[FuxieDK]

No it wasn't..

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

[Sorcerer]

No it wasn't..

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

I totally agree!!

[Deleted]

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.

[toxicrusader]

No it wasn't..

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

So much this.

[Deleted]

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

[Thage]

I respectfully disagree, OP. Blizzard did splendid things with flight that gave scale and impact to the world around you in BC and WotLK like flying through the Engine of the Makers in Storm Peaks, getting a bird's eye view of the desolation in Hellfire Peninsula, and seeing the almost literal seas of hostile Scourge swarming below you in Icecrown Glacier; it wasn't until they started getting lazy with zone development that they started spinning the PR machine trying to get people to justify their attempts to walk back flight so they could revert to older design shortcuts. Pandaria is especially a well-designed continent for flight as it's the last expansion where we had open, wide zones without an overabundance of vertical terrain meant to slow players down, so you could appreciate the scale of zones like the Valley of Four Winds, and get a good look at the rampant Sha corruption in the Dread Wastes.

But this is entirely a matter of personal opinion, and Pathfinding is a compromise between those of us among both the developers and playerbase who like flight and those who don't. Classic will be entirely ground-based, and luckily the Vanilla zones were designed with efficient ground travel in mind thanks to open zones with easy-to-navigate topography (mob packs notwithstanding).

[Lulane]

LFD/LFR & X-Realm was far worse.

[Perkunas]

No it wasn't..

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

I think Blizzard agrees with the OP though. I'm a BC fanboy myself, but that's only because the masses couldn't afford an epic mount and the basic flyer was slower than ground travel so people only really used them when they had to fly.

[randomnamegenerator16]

Definitely this was one of the worst decisions they made about this game. However, it is not possible to delete flying now, so current system with pathfinder is okay-ish (albeit flying should only unlock in the last major patch). Would be better to just not allow flying in current content at all and only add it retroactively after next expansion releases.

[tikcol]

I agree. The whole concept of flying mounts is a failure

[Mendzia]

It was bad decision but not the worst. LFR/pet and a few more things battles are much worse.

[Deleted]

Adn when exactly did you notice you hate flying? Was it by chance exactly after a tweet saying "you hate flying now, right?"

[time0ut]

LFG, LFR, LFD, cross realm, sharding, and phasing were much worse.

[Deleted]

It was like with most changes in WoW imo. They get added to solve a problem and they were great at that time. However when the game grows and evolves those solutions' drawbacks begin to get obviously clear.
It's been with quite a few of these features, but that's just the nature of an ever growing game I guess.

[Deleted]

It was bad decision but not the worst. LFR/pet battles and a few more things are much worse.

wtf with these haters these days. you cant pet battle and thats why its bad?

and no flying is fine and should be avail through pathfinder from the launch of an xpac for everywhere.

- - - Updated - - -

No it wasn't..Restricting flight after it was implemented, was the worst thing Blizzard ever did.

100% right.

[Thage]

I think Blizzard agrees with the OP though. I'm a BC fanboy myself, but that's only because the masses couldn't afford an epic mount and the basic flyer was slower than ground travel so people only really used them when they had to fly.

It might have felt that way, but pound for pound the 60% flying mount was faster than the 100% ground mount for one simple reason--you weren't limited by the terrain and mob density. Two people racing from the Dark Portal to Zangarmarsh, one on a 100% ground mount and one on a 60% flying mount, the flier will win the race because they're unimpeded by the obstacles the grounded player faces.

[Wiedzemir]

Flying and the arena. 2 worst decisions in WoW. First killed the open world, the second forced developers to balance literally everything around the god damn "competitive" PvP.

[guisadop]

I disagree entirely. Flying mounts add immersion to the game, since we had been seeing characters flying in gryphons and dragons since the Warcraft days. It also makes many tasks way less boring.


During early WoD a lot of activities required you to walk long distances in order to reach an objective. Because Draenor was so dull, I usually never did those.

[ReD-EyeD]

That feel when you have been playing since first days of vanilla and you LOVE flying, LOVE restricted flying in new content, ABSOLUTELY LOVE cross server, LOVE LFD and LFG system and sharding.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯