Why flying being gated behind rep grind makes no sense

[Eupriestlol]

Couldnt agree more with the OP. This is one of the reasons why I quit. Hell, I dont even like flying that much but having this ridicilous boring grind along with other time gated mechanics for gaining rep made me so bored and annoyed. It felt like I had an invisible hand slapping me when I wanted to play the game I wanted to that said "NO THATS NOT THE WAY TO ENJOY THE GAME DO IT LIKE THIS". That along with horrible lack of class design and generally ugly sets I finally quit.

[Strawberry]

The hardcore no-lifed it in a record time anyway, so gating didn't stop them from zooming through it. The losers are the casuals who support this game, yet they get treated with repetitive boring chores every day leaving them no time to really enjoy the game. It makes absolutely no sense.

I quit several times and even when I reactivated, I played once, or twice max per week, no longer than 1 hour a day and couldn't stand looking at the same zone anymore.

Who thought of this anyway? What's wrong with simply just not giving flying to anyone until a certain time has passed rather than make people hate your own game. This is beyond ridiculous.

You'll get tons of shit from people who enjoy mindless grind, but remember, people are sheep.
Some of us are not.
People bitched about lack of content so Blizzard removed flying and new races and made us grind for them.
It amazes me how community can be so stupid to even defend this decision.

[scubi666stacy]

You'll get tons of shit from people who enjoy mindless grind, but remember, people are sheep.
Some of us are not.
People bitched about lack of content so Blizzard removed flying and new races and made us grind for them.
It amazes me how community can be so stupid to even defend this decision.

Yes. It's also stupid to mention exploration because exploration only works once. What's even worse - their caves all have this copy-paste-design. If you have seen one, you have seen all. WTF does this have to do with exploration? As soon as I have found something, I am bored each and every time I have to go there again. There is no novelty in it anymore, so why bother?

WoW is a very bad fantasy simulator, so why do we have to have this unhealthy fixation on travel times? This game has always been quite convenient - even in Vanilla, it was the most convenient MMO game out there. It's simply not able to create true immersion by design. All immersion you have in this game comes intrinsically. And this is highly subjective.

I also wonder, how many of these exploration enthusiasts use addons which show them everything? I think, many people are quite hypocritical about that.

[Adam Jensen]

sounds like you're a crybaby lol i raid and do mythics and i have no issues with pathfinder

- - - Updated - - -



hard? lmfao no its not hard to get

This. Time consuming, yes. Hard, no.

The only one that made me angry (and I still haven't done it) is Draenor. Open 100 treasure chests? Okay cool, I totally want to spend hours combing Draenor for treasure chests, fuck off.

But in BFA, it's not hard to get revered with the given reps. Turtles were the slowest, but still.

[CrawlFromThePit]

You made a claim without substance, followed up by more of the same. I made an argument (replete with warrants, backing and rebuttals). Trying to equate the two is not only disingenuous, it's actually grossly disrespectful.

Claiming that what you said is more valid than what I said just because you feel like it doesn't make it so.

Yes, the whole point of WPvP is to fight. No, that doesn't mean that anything that preventing this from happening is effectively breaking it. That is an illogical conclusion.

For WPvP to happen it requires two (or more) people who want to PvP. The game doesn't force you to mount up and fly off every time WPvP might happen. It's a conscious choice. And if people are making that choice, knowing that it will prevent WPvP from happening, what that really means is that those people don't want to PvP. You're trying to shift the blame and it's disingenuous and dishonest.

There's a button to toggle that on and off. Are we at a point where all we do is use WPvP for the bonus and we fly away from the actual point of the feature? There's several issues there, including tools that allow people to be cowards running away from fights. We're supposed to fight and die, not run and cry.

What issue? That people get tired of negotiating terrain? That's hardly the games fault.

No, that content in general is straight up boring to most people so instead of enjoying it we're trying to rush through it to make it less painful. In other video game terms, it means it should be time to quit other than stacking bandaids to give people the illusion that the game is more fun.

Uh yes. That's what I said. Travelling in the world is that boring, repetitive "crap". Flying is the solution.

There's many possible solutions, many that include zero bandaids. Like making world traversal fun to do.

Another unsubstantiated assertion that makes no sense. Flying is not teleportation. Ironically one of the features they added to the game in order to try and get rid of flying was the flight master's whistle, which is teleportation. Of the two, flying is far more immersive in that you don't just cut-scene to the next location. You still move from point A to point B, still get to see the world and what is in it.

Just because you don't understand doesn't mean it makes no sense. There is no gameplay in flying, you point to the arrow on your minimap and you let it go, look at random stuff on your second screen. No one is engaged in flying from point A to point B, no one is actually looking at the world. What really makes no sense is assuming people are actually engaged in flying gameplay. That's the real intellectually disingenuous statement here.

I don't know of anyone who just wants to avoid interacting with the world. It's about spending less time interacting with elements within the world that serve little purpose and provide minimal entertainment. When you're trailblazing into new, unexplored territory, it's fun and engaging to fight your way through the local inhabitants. When you're retreading the same path for the 50th time, not so much. And this notion you have that "it's immersive" is actually nonsense. How are monsters that you killed yesterday and the day before and the day before that (spanning months) magically respawning immersive? By all rights a zone like Naz'mir should, by now, be devoid of all forms of hostile wildlife, having been utterly decimated by their stupidity of trying to take on a clearly superior opponent. In the very least, any wildlife that still remains should be terrified of my character by now, and run and hide rather than try to attack.

Sorry, but this notion that flying is helping us to avoid valuable and engaging gameplay at this stage in the lifecycle of the content is nonsense. WoW is an RPG, and with any RPG the focus is always on the stuff that makes the story happen, not all the banal crap that fills the space between, of which, yes, travelling between points of interest does become.

So instead of having fun content you want to fly through boring content? I mean yes it's a valid option, better than slowly doing boring content. Still a pretty bad solution in the grand scheme of things. Also keeping flying around puts that mentality in both devs and players that it's fine to have boring content that we're basically forced to do for over a year just because "it becomesl ess tedious once players can fly" which is just an excuse to be lazy, we both know it. It's a half assed solution just like the bandaid on an open wound I was talking about, it barely hides the problem but never fixes it.

I'm not saying flying is helping us avoid engaging gameplay, I'm saying the game is lacking engaging gameplay and the ability to fly reinforces design to keep going in that direction because everything becomes a series of mundane tasks that can be done fast because of flying instead of actually creating good and fun gameplay moment that people can take the time to appreciate. And I'm not just talking about a spot where we do something, I'm saying the entire process of leaving town to go on an adventure and all the stuff that could (and should) happen on your way to your primary objective. First of all there is nothing happening in between, Blizzard should just make stuff, lots of it with random spawners that make things different, and never show any of that on the map, remove flying so when we play there's stuff happening instead of a slow fake teleport from A to B (that's what flying realistically is).

Sure if we keep the game in the disgusting state it's in right now I would rather have flying, but the whole point of my argument comes from the fact that flying was one of the motivator behind "bad world content isn't so terrible if we can just skim through it quick". We end up with a map where we click on a task and just do it without engaging with the world or other players, in a MMO, that's terrible. Couple that with how insanely easy all the world content is and you have a recipe for disaster where almost everyone is crying that the game sucks except the few who I would assume enjoy clicker games and automatic mobile games. That's not how the game was first designed and not the original target audience.

Apart from producing new content, not really.

That's 100% what I'm suggesting. Stop hiding old boring content behind flying and make better content instead.

Then you're only seeing half the picture, and this stage in the discussion I am getting the feeling that this is because you only want to see half the picture.

Yes, your perspective holds totally true for new content. I have made this point repeatedly. But at this stage in the content, what "good" immersive gameplay is being lost to flying? None. You might be able to argue that it's immersive, but it's about much value as experiencing first hand the joy of diarrhoea that your character got from eat food that had sitting in the guild bank for too long.

I'm seeing a picture most poeple just don't see. I'm thinking outside the box, about what the game could be instead of believing it's inevitably stuck in this state and there's no way it could ever be something better.

Your gripes with World Quests are a different topic. And even if one assumes there is a fundamental problem there, flying isn't the cause, it's a mechanism that helps to mitigate the problem.

I mean you're not wrong in that if WoW gameplay was entirely different then flying may longer be required to address those problems. But it's an asinine argument to be making. The game is what it is, and given what it is, flying is a positive feature.

Or flying could work, if there was flying gameplay. Implement flying combat, floating fortresses to conquere, etc. so much possible stuff to do yet nothing is even tried. Oh nvm I lied, we had a floating dungeon in TBC, woopdeedoo.

The "problem" with my opinion is that I fail to agree with you. You'd rather win the argument than have accurate understanding. Maybe I am failing to see a real long term negative impact of flying on the game. But your style of argumentation, just throwing baseless assertions out there without any kind of logical structure to support those assertions, isn't giving me any reason to do so.

And the simple fact, for me, is that MMO-C has had tons of "debates" on the topic, and it's always the same, tired, useless "arguments" with people making unsubstantiated facts like "Flying kills WPvP. It's cancer".

Sorry, but at this stage the only rational conclusion is that you guys don't have a good argument to support these statements because, frankly, there is none, since the assertions are nonsense.

To be fair, we understand each other very clearly. You say flying helps the game in the state it's in right now, I agree with this, and you hinted that if content was better there would be a case to argue that flying would be less valuable, which is my stance.
I guess the only point where we really clash is that you seem to believe flying had no role in the downward spiral of the game's quality. I think Blizzard took the easy way out by just making the same stuff all the time and did nothing to support flying correctly, they kept it around which helped dumb down and make the game easier instead of using flying as a new way to create more engaging content that used it properly. Imagine if instead of having a normal flat end game map it would be stuff in the sky, we could have the usual gruond progression at the beginning, hit max lvl, get our flying license for free and take off to the new map with new end game world content in the sky. That's how I see it, I have a hard time believing it would be worse than what we have now.

There are so many problems with this claim that it's difficult to know where to start (and again, no warrants or backing or attempts on your part to consider rebuttals - just another baseless assertion).

Firstly where on earth do you come up with this idea that flying has led to Blizzard believing everything in the game should be ultra quick and easy? That's like saying that the internet is responsible for AIDS because before the internet AIDS wasn't an issue.
Secondly, what is the basis for your claim that certain elements of the game becoming "quick and easy" is undesirable?

Basically, you're just assuming that the direction the game has taken is bad, with no substantiation. And then you're dumping a significant portion of the blame on flight. Again, without any substantiation.

There's more people complaining about the game now than there was before. There's less and less people playing the game.
I mean there's no scientific paper to prove that but the cool thing is we don't need any of that, we both know it's true even if we act like denying it and saying "maybe it's not true we have no data". Like seriously, who gives a fuck? We know it's true just like we know apples are fruits.
The game was not designed around quick and easy at first, it was not aimed at players who enjoy quick and easy things. Changing the direction of the game AND the target audience is not a good thing, as evidence by the hit the game took everytime it went further in that direction. Call it what you want, this is not an opinion and acting like it is would be preposterous.
Diablo 3 and Diablo Immortal are also evidence of the same thing. Diablo 3 took a different direction, original fans of the franchise hated, now they're changing the target audience with Immortal and there's crazy backlash. Where's the positive for the players in all that? Some Chinese kids will be able to play on their cellphone? Blizz can do that without destroying the trust of their fans by simply making a new IP for mobile gaming instead.

I'm not assuming the direction the game has taken is bad. I know the direction is bad. You don't agree with this so you think I'm making assumptions.
I mean, if you think the game took the right direction, you'd have to explain why having less players, and more complaints, is a good thing for anyone.

Can you be any more conceited?

I'm sure I can if I really put effort into it.

[MrKnubbles]

I don't know about you, but I like earning my rewards and unlocking new things. I think the current implementation is fine.

[LuminaL]

Oh I totally get why Blizzard want us to stay ground bound. And while I agree with parts of their argument, I recognise that they have a critical flaw in their understanding of the role that flying plays in the player experience.

Yes, one of the things that makes WoW so awesome is the sense of discovery and exploration while being immersed in their world. Flying absolutely breaks that. So in order to try and preserve that awesome sense of discovery and exploration and immersion, they want to keep flying out of the game.

What they don't get though is that the sense of exploration and discovery are transitory (with or without flying), and as a result, immersion stops adding to the game experience and instead starts to detract from it.

In short, exploring new content by land adds to the experience. But once you're familiar with the content, being constrained to ground travel becomes tedious. Blizzard's desire to withhold flying for as long as possible stems from their mistaken belief that players will enjoy the game more by figuring out what experiences we enjoyed the most and then making sure that we repeat that experience without changing anything. What they critically fail to take into account is how the stuff we experience today affects our future experiences.

fuck I hate every time someone says flying breaks exploration. NO it doesnt break exploration, I explored lot of things when I fly, but do you know what I do with ground mounts? I just stick to my everyday path which is basically 20% of the whole map.

with flying I fly around, find interesting points of views, take screen shots, search around for easter eggs, find cool places otherwise not possible with ground mounts, and ENJOY my view from the sky and appreciate the beauty of the zone Im in.

its the most MORONIC way to say you cant explore and enjoy the content with flying. have you ever been on a plane IRL ?

[rrayy]

I do. To be honest, I thought that Nazjatar and Mechagon is going to be pain in the as to earn it and then one day, I realized that one of them quests gives tons of reputation so I was fine with one week of grind. On top of that, I figured out to get one mount, and then at the end of quest line, it is another mount so it felt worthwhile. Now, it depends with what you are fine with.

Mechagon had the one WQ with a good cunk of rep at 850 xo. Add to that all the dailies you could find and it was around 1400 rep per day. That is two weeks of grind max. Nazjatar had sligtly less rep a day, but also had an Emisssary. Also, about 2 weeks max grind. So, yeah, this wasn't the pain in the ass it may have looked like at first.

[Borgmore]

Please cry harder about a game you obviously dont like to play.

[Onikaroshi]

I don't have as much issue with the rep grind, though it was extremely dull after the first few times, but you can get it done in like 10 days.

It's the year plus waiting to even get it that bothers me, I miss when it was available from launch

[Grenzstein]

Rep grinds are fine, they used to be much worse. MMOs are all about time sink, if you are looking for instant gratification might be best to look for other genres.

[ChairmanKaga]

The current version of unlocking flying in the first zones after everyone has reasonably probably played through the story line of the expansion is fine. This is especially true with the flypoint whistle system from Legion once you unlock world quests.

What they should do is once the following expansion is released, drop the requirements for earning flying from the now old zones.

[Dazmalak]

I wasn't really annoyed by the rep grind as it wasn't too bad (2-4 weeks depending on how diligent you are). What bothered me was the zone design for Mechagon and Nazjatar. The terrain was annoying at best, but the clusters of mobs EVERYWHERE made it such a pain in the ass. If nothing else it certainly made you feel rewarded for unlocking flying, but damn was it obnoxious getting there.

[kaminaris]

Rep grinds are fine, they used to be much worse. MMOs are all about time sink, if you are looking for instant gratification might be best to look for other genres.

My only hard problem with current system was gating it for a year.

If their aim was to discourage me from doing any world content, they have succeeded. Why would I bother going for achievements/pets/wq now if I can just wait until i have flying. So as a result I stopped doing any world content including emissaries and world quests 3 months after expansion release and by the time I got flying, I'm no longer interested in them anymore.

IMO flying should be timegated to X.1 not X.2. And once X.2 hits, new zones has their own mini pathfinder requirement.

[Alroxas]

IMO flying should be timegated to X.1 not X.2. And once X.2 hits, new zones has their own mini pathfinder requirement.

To be fair, flying in BFA was much better than in Legion. Once achieved we got flying not only in Kul Tiras/Zandalar but also flying in Mechagon and Nazjatar. Compare that with Legion where we got flying in the Broken Isles but Argus had no flight, so you were still "stuck" with ground mounts in content that is current.

[Grimbold21]

Flying shouldn't be gated, period. It should be as it was in TBC or Wotlk.

You want to ground people? Design the next continent as you did anything up to WoD.

And BFA rep grinds are excessively bound to WQs. Diversify the methods of obtaining rep. You could associated to dungeons once more. Just reduce the amounts earned to avoid hitting the max fast.

I remember being a part of the no flying club once. Firmly believed in it.

Then WoD zone design arrived...

[Strawberry]

Yes. It's also stupid to mention exploration because exploration only works once. What's even worse - their caves all have this copy-paste-design. If you have seen one, you have seen all. WTF does this have to do with exploration? As soon as I have found something, I am bored each and every time I have to go there again. There is no novelty in it anymore, so why bother?

WoW is a very bad fantasy simulator, so why do we have to have this unhealthy fixation on travel times? This game has always been quite convenient - even in Vanilla, it was the most convenient MMO game out there. It's simply not able to create true immersion by design. All immersion you have in this game comes intrinsically. And this is highly subjective.

I also wonder, how many of these exploration enthusiasts use addons which show them everything? I think, many people are quite hypocritical about that.

Caves from 2010 copy-pasted in the new expansion with flat textures.
WoW needs to die and Blizzard needs to make something more modern.

[AlmightyGerkin]

To fly you must earn their respect in their area.

[SL1200]

There are a lot of reasons I don't play anymore, but the root cause was the removal of flying.

[Raelbo]

Claiming that what you said is more valid than what I said just because you feel like it doesn't make it so.

Actually I never said my argument was more valid than yours. I pointed out that you didn't actually have an argument. And not just because I feel like it, but because I put in the effort to substantiate it where you didn't. My argument may not be correct, but by providing warrants, backing and qualifiers, my argument had actual substance. All you presented was a baseless assertion; the argumentation - showing how you drew your conclusions - was completely absent.

And yes, there is an objective way of assessing the quality of such an argument. Look up the Toulmin method.

There's a button to toggle that on and off. Are we at a point where all we do is use WPvP for the bonus and we fly away from the actual point of the feature? There's several issues there, including tools that allow people to be cowards running away from fights. We're supposed to fight and die, not run and cry.

I have no problem with these "facts". But they fail to support your assertion. If you believe they do, you need to provide the warrant. In other words, nothing you said here demonstrates that flying is the problem or that it is killing WPvP. All you are saying is that people don't actually want to do WPvP, they're just using WM to get some bonuses. I could even agree with you that enabling warmode should impose certain restrictions on one's ability to evade PvP by means of flight, but that is a vastly different proposition from making a BS claim that flight is responsible for breaking WPvP

No, that content in general is straight up boring to most people so instead of enjoying it we're trying to rush through it to make it less painful. In other video game terms, it means it should be time to quit other than stacking bandaids to give people the illusion that the game is more fun.

If content is straight up boring, that's not a problem with flight.

Also, there is no such thing as the "illusion" of fun. Either you're having fun or you're not.

There's many possible solutions, many that include zero bandaids. Like making world traversal fun to do.

Again, not flight's fault.

Just because you don't understand doesn't mean it makes no sense.

It's your job to provide the warrants and backing that show how it makes sense. Don't try putting that on me. An assertion might make sense in your mind, but unless you can show how you came to your conclusion, with facts and the logic linking those facts to your conclusion (warrants, backing) and qualifiers under which you're making your claim, you have no reasonable grounds to expect anyone else to be able to understand what you're on about.

There is no gameplay in flying, you point to the arrow on your minimap and you let it go, look at random stuff on your second screen. No one is engaged in flying from point A to point B, no one is actually looking at the world.

Flight has no autopilot feature. Therefore you still have to engage to some degree (even if minimally) to get to your destination. That is, by defintion, some gameplay.

Secondly, how can you make the claim that no one is engaged in flying. All I need to do to defeat your statement is to provide a singular example that refutes it. I have personally, often "engaged" in flying, taking the time to enjoy the view and admire the world below me.

What really makes no sense is assuming people are actually engaged in flying gameplay. That's the real intellectually disingenuous statement here.

No, what really intellectually disingenuous is attributing statements to someone that they never made. I never said that people are actually engaged in flying gameplay. I simply said that flying is more immersive than teleportation because you're still physically experience a connected path from point A to point B. Even in the most extreme case of you watching Netflix (or what you're looking at on your second screen) flying still requires more of your attention than teleportation does.

So instead of having fun content you want to fly through boring content?

Again, that is not something I said and twisting my words in order to try and win the debate suggests that you lack an answer for what I am actually saying.

Firstly, I never claimed that the content was boring. I claimed that travel between points of interests becomes boring when content becomes old. That is where I see the value of flying.

Secondly, if you want to make the claim that the actual content is boring, then that still doesn't support your claim that flight is the problem.

I mean yes it's a valid option, better than slowly doing boring content. Still a pretty bad solution in the grand scheme of things. Also keeping flying around puts that mentality in both devs and players that it's fine to have boring content that we're basically forced to do for over a year just because "it becomesl ess tedious once players can fly" which is just an excuse to be lazy, we both know it. It's a half assed solution just like the bandaid on an open wound I was talking about, it barely hides the problem but never fixes it.

Yes, I get what your logic is: That Blizzard cba to make better content because they can give us flight. But that is classic causation vs correlation fallacy. Furthermore, your argument is undermined by the fact that Blizzard themselves lament the inclusion of flight in the game. Clearly flight is not even their prefered solution to your problem. Which would make it very odd if it were somehow the cause.

I'm not saying flying is helping us avoid engaging gameplay, I'm saying the game is lacking engaging gameplay and the ability to fly reinforces design to keep going in that direction because everything becomes a series of mundane tasks that can be done fast because of flying instead of actually creating good and fun gameplay moment that people can take the time to appreciate. And I'm not just talking about a spot where we do something, I'm saying the entire process of leaving town to go on an adventure and all the stuff that could (and should) happen on your way to your primary objective. First of all there is nothing happening in between, Blizzard should just make stuff, lots of it with random spawners that make things different, and never show any of that on the map, remove flying so when we play there's stuff happening instead of a slow fake teleport from A to B (that's what flying realistically is).

Sure if we keep the game in the disgusting state it's in right now I would rather have flying, but the whole point of my argument comes from the fact that flying was one of the motivator behind "bad world content isn't so terrible if we can just skim through it quick". We end up with a map where we click on a task and just do it without engaging with the world or other players, in a MMO, that's terrible. Couple that with how insanely easy all the world content is and you have a recipe for disaster where almost everyone is crying that the game sucks except the few who I would assume enjoy clicker games and automatic mobile games. That's not how the game was first designed and not the original target audience.

That's 100% what I'm suggesting. Stop hiding old boring content behind flying and make better content instead.

And finally, you've actually bothered to lay out a decent argument. I don't necessarily even have to share your sentiments, to accept the logic and see the validity of your reasoning. However this is not an argument against flying, nor does it support your initial assertion that "flying is cancer".

I'm seeing a picture most poeple just don't see. I'm thinking outside the box, about what the game could be instead of believing it's inevitably stuck in this state and there's no way it could ever be something better.

Blowing your own horn about your superior thinking ability on a forum frequented by nerds isn't likely to impress anyone.... Don't tell us you're good at out the box thinking, present logical arguments that show us how you're thinking. If you're as smart as you think you are, those on your level will recognise it.

I guess the only point where we really clash is that you seem to believe flying had no role in the downward spiral of the game's quality.

Let's rather put it this way: You haven't yet provided a proper argument supporting the notion that flying is actually playing this role. Essentially all you've done is stated that there is a correlation between the demise of the quality of the game and the introduction of flying. That is woefully insufficient to suggest the causality you're trying to claim.

I think Blizzard took the easy way out by just making the same stuff all the time and did nothing to support flying correctly, they kept it around which helped dumb down and make the game easier instead of using flying as a new way to create more engaging content that used it properly.

While I can agree that they failed to use flying as a new way to create more engaging content, you've given no reason to support your claim that it has "helped dumb down" the game. Flying is ostensibly a convenience feature. That doesn't necessarily mean that it makes the game easier. The things that make this game difficult or challenging in the sense that they require skill and ability are not affected by flight (eg mythic raiding, high end PvP)

There's more people complaining about the game now than there was before. There's less and less people playing the game.
I mean there's no scientific paper to prove that but the cool thing is we don't need any of that, we both know it's true even if we act like denying it and saying "maybe it's not true we have no data". Like seriously, who gives a fuck? We know it's true just like we know apples are fruits.

While having good, reliable facts that both parties can agree on to support an argument, facts alone do not make an argument. You've devoted quite a bit of effort here into demonstrating how the game has failed. What you've not done is built a case to support the notion that flying is the cause.

I'm not assuming the direction the game has taken is bad. I know the direction is bad.
You don't agree with this so you think I'm making assumptions.

If you want to claim something as fact, then it needs to be established as such. Either by means of everyone accepting it as fact, or by providing sufficient substantiation.

I mean, if you think the game took the right direction, you'd have to explain why having less players, and more complaints, is a good thing for anyone.

Not at all. If I want to argue about whether the direction the game took was good or bad (or somewhere in between), I need to be able to support why I think it, based on facts, warrants and backing.

1) You've stated that the game has less players (than it had in the past). This is a "fact" I am prepared to accept. But this fact doesn't prove that the game took the wrong direction, because you have no benchmark for how many players the game would have retained had it followed the right direction. Sure, you can speculate, based on guesses of how various features have been received by players and how that has affected player retention, but the fact is that this game is going to lose players no matter what it does, simply because it is an old game.

My guess in that regard is that BfA has generally been less well received than Legion, which was very received. But I don't think that the reason for BfA's poor performance is based on the quality of the content so much as a lacklustre storyline and the general perception that it just doesn't execute features quite as well as Legion - or in the very least, failed to expand on them according to expectations. A good example of this being Azerite traits not being as compelling as the combination of sets, legiondaries and Artifact weapons.


2) You've stated that the game has more complaints. I do not accept this as a fact. Yes, the game has a lot of complaints on a site like MMO-C, but I don't see evidence that it is any worse than before. Nor do I believe that MMO-C is a particularly accurate barometer of the feelings of the playerbase at large.

Critically, the quality of the complaints is generally pretty poor. I'd be a lot more concerned for the state of the game if the quality of those complaints were actually any good.

- - - Updated - - -

fuck I hate every time someone says flying breaks exploration. NO it doesnt break exploration, I explored lot of things when I fly, but do you know what I do with ground mounts? I just stick to my everyday path which is basically 20% of the whole map.

with flying I fly around, find interesting points of views, take screen shots, search around for easter eggs, find cool places otherwise not possible with ground mounts, and ENJOY my view from the sky and appreciate the beauty of the zone Im in.

You make a fair point, even if you could have been a bit less rude in your delivery.

I'd certainly agree that flying offers opportunity for extra exploration. That doesn't mean, however, that it doesn't fundamental change the initial sense of discovery and exploration you experience in new zones (in your own example, figuring out your main path).

Either way, your point doesn't invalidate the idea of keeping players on the ground for new content.

its the most MORONIC way to say you cant explore and enjoy the content with flying. have you ever been on a plane IRL ?

It's fortunate then that I didn't try to say this.