Why flying being gated behind rep grind makes no sense

[Granyala]

It's possible for developers to change their minds without the bottom line being affected. This possibility seems to completely alien to many people participating in this discussion. That's what's frustrating.

There WAS a big community outcry when Ion said "flight is not going to return".

Whether the outrage itself was accompanied by people ragequitting the game or not is completely besides the point.
Fact is: the outcry was enough for them to change their mind and offer Pathfinder as a compromise, which largely seems to be an accepted solution by both sides.

So for Blizzard this means: case closed.

I don't believe the DEVs always wait until them magical sub numbers are affected. I doubt DEVs are as fixated on these as some of the playerbase is. That simply wouldn't be good business because a lot of people won't re-sub once they move on. So it is in their best interest to react BEFORE it comes to mass quits, after all, it is their goal to keep the game alive an healthy. Doesn't mean they don't make mistakes, doesn't mean they might react to slowly at times (Blizzard is a big entity, not some 3 guy indie studio). They are human, after all.

[Raelbo]

I don't lie and misrepresent the opposition. You keep saying all I want is to skip content. Or just want convenience.

Which. Is. False.

Yeah, it's a common theme among the anti-flying brigade. They lack an actual argument, so they resort to ad hominem

[Relapses]

There WAS a big community outcry when Ion said "flight is not going to return".

Whether the outrage itself was accompanied by people ragequitting the game or not is completely besides the point.
Fact is: the outcry was enough for them to change their mind and offer Pathfinder as a compromise, which largely seems to be an accepted solution by both sides.

So for Blizzard this means: case closed.

I don't believe the DEVs always wait until them magical sub numbers are affected. I doubt DEVs are as fixated on these as some of the playerbase is. That simply wouldn't be good business because a lot of people won't re-sub once they move on. So it is in their best interest to react BEFORE it comes to mass quits, after all, it is their goal to keep the game alive an healthy. Doesn't mean they don't make mistakes, doesn't mean they might react to slowly at times (Blizzard is a big entity, not some 3 guy indie studio). They are human, after all.

My point is that the impact is greatly exaggerated by the pro-flying group on this forum. It's their a-ha, we gottem moment. Blizzard finally caved because every single player on Earth was going to quit if Ion didn't change his mind. I just don't see it like that. Blizzard did something unpopular. Stuck to their guns. People whined and complained. In turn, they listened to feedback then introduced something they were likely planning to introduce at some point in WoD's development anyway.

Players like to frame it like the three weeks that Blizzard said no flying were like the trenches in Vietnam with players quitting left, right and center and Blizzard being completely eviscerated by near universal negative feedback. I was there. I remember it. There were some angry people but honestly it wasn't much worse than the recent HK scuttlebutt. But thanks to handy dandy rose tinted glasses we have players here speaking about it like they were David to Blizzard's Goliath. And here they are, still fighting the good fight on behalf of the entire WoW playerbase who see flying as a right as inalienable as existence itself.

[RemasteredClassic]

Yeah, it's a common theme among the anti-flying brigade. They lack an actual argument, so they resort to ad hominem

I have promised myself to do this on purpose: Unsub for a whole year every expansion. Honestly, if I don't I would, actually, I WILL feel cheated. Never gonna let the system win while I lose. It needs to always be win-win when I am the client and I am the one paying with both money and time.

[Granyala]

Players like to frame it like the three weeks that Blizzard said no flying were like the trenches in Vietnam with players quitting left, right and center and Blizzard being completely eviscerated by near universal negative feedback. I was there. I remember it.

Well you know how it is in Klingon tales. Embellishment is everything.
The rivers ran red with blood that day! MORE BLOODWINE!

I do agree with you. Forums were a bit of a mess but apart from that I didn't notice much. Certainly not comparable to the first Real-ID war. Now THAT was a slaughter!
Then again, only Blizzard would notice mass unsubs. We don't have that data available. Something made them change their minds rather quickly, that is for sure.

[Raelbo]

I don't believe the DEVs always wait until them magical sub numbers are affected. I doubt DEVs are as fixated on these as some of the playerbase is. That simply wouldn't be good business because a lot of people won't re-sub once they move on. So it is in their best interest to react BEFORE it comes to mass quits, after all, it is their goal to keep the game alive an healthy. Doesn't mean they don't make mistakes, doesn't mean they might react to slowly at times (Blizzard is a big entity, not some 3 guy indie studio). They are human, after all.

Agreed 100%.

The amount of time it takes to implement content in this game - from concept to going live - is probably at least year, if not longer. They have to be able to anticipate how the players are going to react long before the content is released. And yes, they don't always get it right.

I think that the biggest benefit of analysing player response to current content is to help them predict how players will respond to future content - so that they can learn from their successes and mistakes.

Flight is definitely one of the issues where Blizzard badly misread player sentiment. The problem essentially boils down to 2 problems:

1) Confirmation bias: Blizzard had decided that flying is bad for the game. Therefore they are biased towards accepting feedback that supports that narrative.

2) Players are more likely to be vocal when they're complaining, not when they're happy. With flying, the assumption during WoD was always that flying would eventually be implemented. So most players in favour of flying didn't feel the need to harp on about it. The people who did have a vested interest in debating the subject were those who wanted it not to be implemented. Therefore the narrative on forums at the times was heavily skewed towards the minority anti-flying camp, creating a false impression that the playerbase was fairly favourable towards the idea of no flying.

It was only when Ion announced "flight is not going to return" that suddenly the real voice of the players was heard. Because up until that point, the pro-flying camp (which is the vast majority of the playerbase) had no real incentive to get involved in the debate.

The only sad thing for me is that Blizzard haven't changed their mind about flying. They still think it's harmful and something they'd rather not have in the game. They may have acknowledged the player outcry, but they haven't acknowledged its legitimacy.

[Acherus01]

If it only were that simple. Firstly not everyone plays 1 - 3 hrs per day.

Secondly, the grind is not always quick and easy. I remember the Tanaan Jungle grind was one of the most frustrating ones I experienced.

If you don't have 1 hour per day of freetime to spend on it a game, maybe you shouldn't play an MMORPG? Why spend so much money on a game you barely get to play?

And how is the grind in any way difficult? A grind by definiton is a slow and (often)mind numbing, repeatable exercise in a game to achieve something. If you want to play an MMORPG without a grind, you dont want to play an MMORPG at all..

I remember tanaan as well, I do not remember it being difficult or frustrating. It anything, Tanaan was one of the few good points of WoD. Particularly the music and atmosphere of the zone.

- - - Updated - - -

Third...which he conveniently forgot to mention: Either stay subbed 8-10 months between part 1 and part 2, or unsub until part 2 is released.

If you can't handle the game without flying, don't play the game until flying is released. Simple as that. I didn't conveniently forget to mention anything, just read between the lines. Use your head....

[Jtbrig7390]

Why spend so much money on a game you barely get to play?

$15 isn't so much money.

If you play 2hrs a month u get more out of it then going to the movies and its cheaper.

[Ihsan997]

Yeah, whatever. The highly vocal anti-flying community is fantastic about shouting that flying is a cancer. What you're not good at is backing up this assertion with a solid argument.

Only a very simplistic mode of thinking blames flying for the problem.

It’s because of that fanaticism and simplistic mode of thinking, though, that threads about this topic don’t seem to yield varying results. The anti-flying crowd is most definitely a crowd, and certainly a more foul-mouthed one, which isn’t concerned with actual meeting of consumer demand; their concern is limiting the options of others. For that reason, some of your efforts in this thread end up wasted. You and others have made some well-written and thoughtful posts, but I’m not sure if the crowd (more like an angry mob) can be swayed.

- - - Updated - - -

Im fact my position is to give both ground and flying players what they want. Mixed content where flying is not always the better option.

But you wouldn't know that because you keep ignoring what's actually being said in favor of hate directed at something you don't like for no better reason than it disagrees with you.

This is a correct assessment, but due to it’s correctness, I think your time may be better spent elsewhere. You’re talking to a wall in regard to this issue.

[Mormolyce]

I swear we will be having this same discussion over and over until the end of time.

[froschhure]

it's generating longer playtime = more subs for chinablizz

[Granyala]

The only sad thing for me is that Blizzard haven't changed their mind about flying. They still think it's harmful and something they'd rather not have in the game. They may have acknowledged the player outcry, but they haven't acknowledged its legitimacy.

To be blunt: with their current design, flying IS harmful to the open world gameplay, because it allows the player to skip 95% of it.
So I am completely with them, when they state that it should only be available at a later stage, once people played the game the intended way.

Back in TBC it took time to get the 5K. Similar time to pathfinder now, if you didn't hardcore china grind. It was late TBC when I got mine and I played a lot more back then than I do now.

Pathfinder is okay. Do stuff, get rewarded. As far as open world gameplay is concerned, flight is an insanely powerful reward to the player, one could say its's the penultimate reward to outdoor content. It should take time and necessitate effort.

What is not okay is delaying part II for a year, thus giving no possibility of flight in the mean time. That just feels completely lame and arbitrary.

[Merin]

$15 isn't so much money.

If you play 2hrs a month u get more out of it then going to the movies and its cheaper.

Movies are, and were even back when the internet was unavailable, a horrible value... Not to mention nothing impressive and fun is made anymore since Disney figured out they could just remake Ironman over and over and over and over and slap a different name on it.

That said, I still agree, if you're into an MMO even a little it's hardly a poor value.

[Biggles Worth]

it's generating longer playtime = more subs for chinablizz

Doubt it. I haven't flown in an expansion since MoP

[SirCowdog]

If you can't handle the game without flying, don't play the game until flying is released. Simple as that. I didn't conveniently forget to mention anything, just read between the lines. Use your head....

You literally just confirmed the same thing I said: "Don't play the game until flying is released" = "Unsub until part 2 is released".

Thank you for confirming my point.

- - - Updated - - -

This is a correct assessment, but due to it’s correctness, I think your time may be better spent elsewhere. You’re talking to a wall in regard to this issue.

Every time the wall makes a fool of itself by posting nonsense, and showing everyone how ridiculous the no-flying position is, my time is most definitely NOT wasted.

- - - Updated - - -

As far as open world gameplay is concerned, flight is an insanely powerful reward to the player, one could say its's the penultimate reward to outdoor content. It should take time and necessitate effort.

What you just said about how valuable or powerful flying is as a reward would be true....if getting it didn't ensure that there was no content left to use flight on once it's obtained.

This is the fundamental flaw of Pathfinder. Getting a powerful tool is not much of a reward when that tool does not have much to use it on. Put another way: The tool's value is greatly diminished because, by the time you get it, all of the things the tool would be good for are largely irrelevant or trivial.

I see two major ways to correct this, and make flying the powerful reward Blizzard claims it's supposed to be.

1) Once flight is obtained, it unlocked new content which is only reachable via flying. Whether that's due to direct physical limitations of the content literally being unreachable from the ground, or by placing all players with flight in a new phase where that content only exists.

2) Release flying earlier in the expansion, allowing it's use on content which has yet to be completed or is repeatable content which is still relevant.

Either way, the content design would have to include some form of challenge or barrier to a flying player. How, exactly, that is accomplished is a topic of discussion. But simply dropping 280% speed or faster flying mounts into ground-based content, which doesn't even acknowledge that flight exists, is a terrible idea.

[Metzindown]

Simple fix. No flyers....don't use flying mounts. Flyers....use em if ya got em.

/Thread.

[SirCowdog]

Players like to frame it like the three weeks that Blizzard said no flying were like the trenches in Vietnam with players quitting left, right and center and Blizzard being completely eviscerated by near universal negative feedback. I was there. I remember it. There were some angry people but honestly it wasn't much worse than the recent HK scuttlebutt. But thanks to handy dandy rose tinted glasses we have players here speaking about it like they were David to Blizzard's Goliath. And here they are, still fighting the good fight on behalf of the entire WoW playerbase who see flying as a right as inalienable as existence itself.

I love it when pro-ground players go straight to hyperbole.

The argument and criticism of the No-Flying philosophy in WoD started as early as Beta when the concept was first introduced. Criticism and complaints about it continued to rise, but then started to die down due to a rising perception that flight would be unlocked in 6.1. Once Blizzard announced that flight would NOT be returning in 6.1, that's when the shit started to hit the fan. Most notably was the irritation by players who had bought the collectors edition to get the flying mount, compounded by Grinning Reaver and Iron Skyreaver sales.

The debate and pushback from the community against no-flying was an ongoing thing that only got worse due to Blizzard's poor and misleading communication. Considering how Blizzard plans and works on WoW content months, if not years in advance, I find it VERY difficult to believe that they had planned to go with Pathfinder at any time later in the game. This is especially reinforced, considering the infamous quote from Ion in the Polygon Interview(in which he also confirmed would be the same plan for future expansions):

"At this point, we feel that outdoor gameplay in World of Warcraft is ultimately better without flying. We're not going to be reintroducing the ability to fly in Draenor, and that's kind of where we're at going forward."

You want to claim people in favor of flying are wearing rose-tinted goggles, but your own view seems pretty damn skewed to me. They never planned to do any sort of flying compromise or unlock. The only reason they changed direction was due to community backlash, probably involving a lot of unsubs and store mount refund requests.

[Raelbo]

To be blunt: with their current design, flying IS harmful to the open world gameplay, because it allows the player to skip 95% of it.
So I am completely with them, when they state that it should only be available at a later stage, once people played the game the intended way.

I didn't mention it specifically in my reply to you, but if you read through my discussion on the topic you'll see that I actually agree with Blizzard's point that introducing flying too early into new content is a problem. I would say that most of the moderate pro-flying crowd will also happily concede that point.

For me the frustration in these debates is the inability of some participants (particularly in the anti-flying camp) to recognise that the effect that flying has on the game changes as the content matures. It's not a simple black and white answer. The arguments against flying early in new content are valid, but become completely invalid when discussing older content. In fact as content gets older the opposite ends up happening and flying actually ends up enhancing the game experience by adding a new fresh dimension to the game while reducing an element of the game that has grown stale.

It's like you say, flying should only be available at a later stage, once people played the game the intended way. Except I'd go one step further and add the corollary that flying should only be restricted for the earlier stage, before people have the played the game the intended way.

Pathfinder is okay. Do stuff, get rewarded. As far as open world gameplay is concerned, flight is an insanely powerful reward to the player, one could say its's the penultimate reward to outdoor content. It should take time and necessitate effort.

I agree that the idea behind Pathfinder is fine. In fact I think that it's actually quite an elegant solution, when done right. The objections to flying are that it ruins the experience of playing through new content. Pathfinder, by design, requires you to experience the content from the ground before you get flying.

I am not sure that it needs to take time and effort - I mean, we've already done enough IMO to "earn" flying - there is no need to essentially punish players by forcing time and effort simply for the sake of making us "earn" it again. The need is more about ensuring that players get to experience the content sufficiently sans flying (which just happens to take time and some degree of effort).

What is not okay is delaying part II for a year, thus giving no possibility of flight in the mean time. That just feels completely lame and arbitrary.

Completely agree. In fact I really think that the way they implemented it in BfA was stupid. Stupid in that it lost sight of it's actual purpose and ended up significantly detracting from the game experience as a result.

Remember, the objective of Pathfinder is try and ensure that players don't compromise their game experience by flying too early through new content. So Pathfinder Part I gets us to do all the quests and then do enough WQ content in each zone to get us to Exalted with the faction. That's rational. We get to fly only after spending enough time on the ground.

I am even fine with an added time gate - this means that there is no pressure on anyone to rush through the content to activate flying. We can play it at our own pace according to how we actually enjoy the content.

So, six months into the expansion, pretty much everyone who actually plays this game has completed Pathfinder I without any pressure. Yet they continue to withhold flying. To what end? Truth be told there is no purpose. It's simply that they don't want us flying because they're stuck in their myopic view of "flying bad".


Now, Pathfinder part II. What do they do? Release it with no time gate, and a significant effort grind, to unlock flying in all zones. So how do players respond? They all (or mostly) end up playing Nazjatar/Mechagon fanatically for 2-3 weeks so that they can unlock flying in a bunch of zones that should have already been unlocked. Which completely screws up the Nazjatar/Mechagon experience for any player who would actually have more fun taking the zones at their own pace instead of feeling pressured into obssesive compulsively grind the shit out of the them for 3 weeks and then never wanting to touch them again.

Surely, if Blizzard actually properly understand what they were trying to achieve - namely enhancing the gameplay experience - they would have done the following:

• Pathfinder Part I as is. No problem there
• Release flying for Kul Tiras/Zandalar 3-6 months into the expansion (basically give everyone enough time to complete Pathfinder Part I without having to feel forced to grind it)
• Add Pathfinder Part II for Nazjatar/Mechagon (could even make them 2 different achievements) but not allow flying in those zones
• Release flying for Nazjatar/Mechagon 2-3 months later (basically give everyone enough time to complete Pathfinder Part II without having to feel forced to grind it)

What they ended up doing was indeed lame and arbitrary, and it happened (IMO) because Blizzard have a massive carrot up their collective posteriors about flying and believe that the longer they withhold flying the better (for our own good). They don't understand that what they actually need to be doing is figuring out the right time to release flying and how that ties into how much we've done the content that we want to be able to fly in.

I suspect that the person who came up with the idea of Pathfinder gets this, but unfortunately most of the people implementing it don't.

[SirCowdog]

You are totally misrepresenting the effects of flying on game.

Here are some facts that you keep avoiding by creating bs arguments:
- flying puts less people on the ground
- flying kills immersion and routes
- flying greatly reduce world pvp “due to much less player interaction”

You want to sacrifice all of these for the sake of convenience.

And you blame me because everything you said is dodging and blaming other stuff.

Yes, flying puts less people on the ground. I have never disputed that. That point has literally never come up until just now. What I DID dispute was the claim that flying directly causes less people to engage in WPVP. These are two very different topics. Once again you're claiming I argued something that I did not.

Immersion is purely, 100% subjective. Just because don't like it doesn't mean that it kills immersion. For many players the loss of flight does more harm to immersion than anything else. Furthermore, I've argued in favor of mixed content and the rebalancing of flight so that both flying and ground mounts would reach parity, allowing players to actually choose their preferred style of play.

As for world PVP, you need to stop beating that horse. You're just plain wrong. Flying doesn't reduce WPVP. Certainly, it changes the dynamic from what it was when only ground mounts were available. But it did not reduce it by any measurable or significant amount. BGs and Arenas did more harm to open world than anything else, followed by safe teleports to dungeons, cross server tech obliterating server reputation and identity, and Blizzard's complete and total abandonment of PVP objectives in the open world.

No matter how many times you claim flying harms WPVP, you will never be right. You're just lying to yourself, and Classic transition from Phase 2 into the release of battlegrounds will fucking prove this to you when it happens. God I can't wait for that so people like you will finally be slapped in the face with reality.

And the more you keep repeating this nonsense; the more you keep making up lies and falsehoods about other people's points, the worse it makes you look. You have zero credibility already. So at this point you've moved on to making the entire anti-flight position look worse by association!

[Didly]

Gating flying makes perfect sense.

It's called compromise. It's a compromise between people who enjoy the ground only experience and those who want to zip around and fly.

Thankfully Blizzard understands that flying totally kills the perception of server activity, degrades world PVP, and continues to gate it.

Flying doesn't reduce WPVP. Certainly, it changes the dynamic from what it was when only ground mounts were available. But it did not reduce it by any measurable or significant amount. BGs and Arenas did more harm to open world than anything else, followed by safe teleports to dungeons, cross server tech obliterating server reputation and identity, and Blizzard's complete and total abandonment of PVP objectives in the open world.

All of these things contribute to reducing world pvp, flying just exacerbates the problem by removing people from the same plane, making them less visible. Not sure why this is so difficult to grasp for you.

Less players in the same vicinity + less player visibility = less player interaction in the form of pvp