Flying is finally the way it SHOULD be: Got it right after 8 long years

[VMSmith]

What, exactly, does one lose if they choose not to fly and instead ride along the ground? Outside of war mode, at least.

A little bit of time, sure. But that's the whole point of taking the ground route, you want to appreciate the sights along the way. So that isn't really a "non-optimal" way of playing. It's actually more optimal because you're getting the enjoyment you crave.

You don't harvest nodes as quickly. But, given that this is a terribly poor way of making an income in the game and it's vastly more efficient to just swipe a card for a token to sell on the AH this doesn't really seem very "non-optimal", either.

I guess you might miss some rare spawns that die to the people flying to them before you can get there. But is this really so important that it's worth wrecking the desires of the majority of players?

I can't think of anything else that might be "non-optimal". What are people doing in the game world that requires 100% efficiency over desired gameplay? Most of the people that hate flying seem to be instance-runners, anyway, who barely interact with the game world at all, if they can help it.

Blizzard's attitude towards flying is just a symptom of the rot that has caused me to drop WoW. It's this insistence on optimizing every aspect of the game for a small few that play in their preferred manner, which sucks all the actual joy out of the game for everyone else who just wants to have a good time. I don't think most people are having simple fun in WoW anymore, they're almost all just playing for the next dopamine hit. And it's not their fault, Blizzard has designed it this way at the behest of the tiny minority that demands hyper-efficiency at all times.

[WowIsDead64]

What, exactly, does one lose if they choose not to fly and instead ride along the ground? Outside of war mode, at least.

A little bit of time, sure. But that's the whole point of taking the ground route, you want to appreciate the sights along the way. So that isn't really a "non-optimal" way of playing. It's actually more optimal because you're getting the enjoyment you crave.

You don't harvest nodes as quickly. But, given that this is a terribly poor way of making an income in the game and it's vastly more efficient to just swipe a card for a token to sell on the AH this doesn't really seem very "non-optimal", either.

I guess you might miss some rare spawns that die to the people flying to them before you can get there. But is this really so important that it's worth wrecking the desires of the majority of players?

I can't think of anything else that might be "non-optimal". What are people doing in the game world that requires 100% efficiency over desired gameplay? Most of the people that hate flying seem to be instance-runners, anyway, who barely interact with the game world at all, if they can help it.

Blizzard's attitude towards flying is just a symptom of the rot that has caused me to drop WoW. It's this insistence on optimizing every aspect of the game for a small few that play in their preferred manner, which sucks all the actual joy out of the game for everyone else who just wants to have a good time. I don't think most people are having simple fun in WoW anymore, they're almost all just playing for the next dopamine hit. And it's not their fault, Blizzard has designed it this way at the behest of the tiny minority that demands hyper-efficiency at all times.

Unfortunately Blizzard build their game around pseudo-resource-mining. When you're done with 2 dailies and 3 WQs in ZM, all you can do - is circling around location, while chasing treasure/rare random spawns. This is so called "sandbox" design. "Sandbox" means, that player doesn't have any predetermined objectives. He does, what he "wants". At least he has such illusion. And Blizzard think, that just flying to chest/skull/star on a map - is way too trivial. Getting from point A to point B - is part of content.

Another problem - is factor of competition. PVP is also big part of problem, while Blizzard claim, that it isn't. Blizzard assume, that competition factor is very important. Because, you know, it's MMO and it's about so called "interaction" between players, even if it's PVE content, WarMode is off and such interaction is negative. And that for majority of playerbase competition >> immersion. I.e. that majority of players would choose flying due to feeling envy and jealousy, when other players do something quicker, than them, than choose immersion.

Another problem - so called "traveling metrics". Blizzard have never told it openly, but they seem to have some sort of "rule" about traveling time. Traveling time from point A to point B shouldn't be shorter, than some X. There are two ways to force such rule on players. 1) To make world bigger 2) To slow players down. And Blizzard just think, that making world bigger isn't effective. They think, that they can scale it down without consequences for quality of content. But this is misconception.

But answer is simple: sandbox design - is just bad. May be some players like it. May be it's cheap to implement. But predetermined goals and playing around them - is what makes game RPG for me. If you want me to kill 10 mobs - just give me quest to kill 10 mobs. As simple, as that. And I want to play PVE game, not PVP or pseudo-PVP. Keep your competition for War Mode. And traveling isn't content for me. It's like bus between my home and my job. It would be much better, if teleport would be finally invented. I wouldn't need to get up at 6am, eat unhealthy fast food at cafes and come home late then.

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We already know it IS gated. They've said so. You can't fly long enough or freely enough to reach certain places by design, and will gradually unlock access to those places over time.

Which is, I guess, flying without the reason we like flying - i.e. that it saves us time and hassle when getting to places.

All they want is to make movement into content. Because that way, you have to spend time and effort doing it, and the more time and effort you spend the more likely you are to continue subbing to invest said time and effort.

Whereas people like me would prefer to just have CONTENT be content, and have the stuff in between content be as convenient as realistically feasible.

Longer answer:
1) When "pathfinder" is accessible at release - it's guarantee, that flying won't be gated behind artificial obstacles, such as content patches.
2) Gradual return means, that it's not yay/nay binary thing. Player feels, that QOL improves for him with every achieved goal. First you can glide. Then it's jet pack. Then you can fly.
3) Player can invest effort directly into getting flying, that is very RPish. It's just crap, when player needs to do completely unrelated things to get flying "just because". Leveling mount to increase it's power - is great idea.
4) Dedicated flying-related content. I'm not 100% sure about it. From one POV it's great, as it's more RPish. Player feels, that he levels his flying skill via doing flying-related content. But at the same time mini-games aren't always good. I.e. playing ordinal flying-related content (quests, dailies, WQs) with flying = ok. But some sort of "flying-puzzles" can actually be terrible idea.

The worst variant - same candy in new wrapper. For example same renown and same artificial gating behind content patches, but now it's renamed into "Flying knowledge". Better variant, but also bad - attempts to make flying more "challenging". Players don't need flying just for the sake of flying. Flying allows players to avoid bad game design or design, that isn't "for them". If bad/not-for-them game design is brought to flying - then it's just pointless waste of time, as it's effort, that doesn't fix anything, but may be makes things even worse.

The worst case scenario - flying as mean for some players to still enjoy this game is completely destroyed in attempts to make it more "challenging" and add some "content" to it, narrowing Wow's playerbase even more.

[facefist]

To be fair, in Vanilla, we did not know what we were missing until TBC, and then folks wanted to fly in Azeroth. Didn't happen til Cataclysm. Now that we know what we are missing, it's gained momentum and importance to more than a few players. Not sure I would want to farm crafting mats while riding a horse after 18 years. WoD was probably the best since You could not only fly, but if you had lvl 3 stables in your garrison, you could mine and pick flowers like a Druid... from your mount.

I think its not that much about us not knowing what we were missing, but the overall change of the game and the players.

A game of adventure doesn't work if you just fly through the skies and drop at the exact location you want to go to. As the game is no longer about adventure, but doing X and Y as efficiently as possible, flying is a nice qol improvement.

Your gathering example is a good example of that: the gameplay of picking flowers on flying mount isnt more entertaining or interactive than doing it on ground mount, but it for sure is more efficient. Since we value efficiency over other things, we prefer to have flying.

[loras]

One of the things I'm looking forward to in Dragonflight is zones built with flight in mind. They noted they've been making these small cramped zones in the last few XPacs because they've been grounding everyone, so didn't want folks to get frustrated with how long it takes to get everywhere on your ground mount. Having bigger zones, more spaced out, with less mob density will be a welcome return to the older days of WoW.

This too is something i am rather excited about.
Perhaps less janky flows from one zone/biome into another would follow from this as well.

[Iain]

This too is something i am rather excited about.
Perhaps less janky flows from one zone/biome into another would follow from this as well.

Oh yes. The most interesting areas in WoW are always the borders between zones. It's just that they're awfully small places due to how fast the transition takes place. To have that extended further would be amazing.

A game of adventure doesn't work if you just fly through the skies and drop at the exact location you want to go to. As the game is no longer about adventure, but doing X and Y as efficiently as possible, flying is a nice qol improvement.

Your gathering example is a good example of that: the gameplay of picking flowers on flying mount isnt more entertaining or interactive than doing it on ground mount, but it for sure is more efficient. Since we value efficiency over other things, we prefer to have flying.

Exactly. It turns WoW into an app. In an app you want as few obstacles in between the user and their goal. But in a MMO, the obstacles are the game. So by removing the obstacles, you essentially remove the game.

Dying in a raid is inconvenient and frustrating, immortality would be a major QoL improvement. But that also removes the whole point of raiding in the first place.

[bloodmoth13]

Or...just... use your ground mounts only and let the other folks fly around. Should be good enough to cater both crowds. But hey, no, the flight haters want to take flying away from the game (or "cripple" it as you just described). Just deciding to ride ground mounts only for their own "better" experience is not enough apparently...

Edit: To all those who would like to see flying get removed: Use ground mounts exclusively for a month and then come back to this thread to tell the story...

You know thats a stupid argument so why bother with it? in a competitive and time consuming game like wow im not ever going to intentionally pad out my game time by doing things slower. Its an absolutely moronic non-solution so please stop acting like it fixes anything.

Flying trivializes the game and there simply arent any simple solutions to that. The honest arguments for flying being controlled macro flight or viewing the game world from up high at your own pace i can sympathize with which my solution caters to, if that isnt your concern and you just want this game to be designed to be as brain dead as possible then your opinions should simply be ignored.

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That's a bit weird, you have the reply to your own statement as the first thing in that paragraph.

Why is your statement dumb? Because in order to judge something to be done "poorly" you need a goal with respect to which you can perform poorly (or not poorly). But the goal for people who intentionally don't use flying ISN'T "play the game at optimum efficiency". It's "I want to enjoy myself". And them following their preference to maximize that enjoyment by not using flying (if indeed that is their preference) is, in fact, playing the game PROPERLY with respect to that goal.


Why?

What's your reasoning behind this?

micro level flying is a major detriment to the game. When you can swim upwards at any given time and avoid all content on the ground that the game is designed around then its like playing with cheat codes active. the layout of the game and the entire design of zones gets completely wasted as the intended flow of things gets skipped over in favor of convenience, and that convenience is the absolute most optimal way to play the game and playing without it is just choosing to play in a way that is worse. There is no incentive to play any other way so players follow the path of least resistance till they can get to content that is actually engaging.

Macro flying where you fly between zones or explore is perfectly fine and id argue nobody really has a problem with that but lack an idea on how to implement that without making the regular gameplay awful.

My solution gives the best of both worlds.

[Biomega]

micro level flying is a major detriment to the game. When you can swim upwards at any given time and avoid all content on the ground that the game is designed around then its like playing with cheat codes active.

Cheat codes that let you... skip 3 minutes of galloping down a road with one hand and the other in your pants? Sounds serious, I agree.

the layout of the game and the entire design of zones gets completely wasted as the intended flow of things gets skipped over in favor of convenience, and that convenience is the absolute most optimal way to play the game and playing without it is just choosing to play in a way that is worse. There is no incentive to play any other way so players follow the path of least resistance till they can get to content that is actually engaging.

There's a few things to unravel here.

First: if you want a zone to be engaging, design it to be engaging. Two mountains and a winding road going around them with five packs of wolves off the beaten path is not engaging design, and arguing that skipping that is somehow a complete waste severely overrates the quality of that content. Sitting on a mount staring at landscape may be exciting to some, but the rest would rather arrive more quickly at the thing that's ACTUALLY fun.

Second: you say that this way of playing "is worse". You don't explain why or how, other than "it's worse, therefore people wouldn't do it if they had the choice not to". Which is a bit of a circular argument in the vein of content bad because bad. Why is playing more of the fun parts and less of the boring and meaningless parts "worse", exactly?

Third: you actually AGREE WITH ME in the end - people want to play more of the "content that is actually engaging". Yet somehow in the same vein, you argue for making them play LESS of that, and instead spending time doing content that is - by your own admission - NOT actually engaging. So you're defending something you don't actually seem to believe in all that much, for no real discernible reason.

[Ragedaug]

I can still take every argument against flying and see it's even more applicable to flight paths. I don't even have to be at my computer when I take a flight path. This is why the arguments against flight always feel disingenuous. I would take the anti-flight arguments seriously if you included, "also, this is why flight paths should be removed".

[chiddie]

And there's a reason - it's a natural evolution of reward-centered systems. They tend to demand more and more efficiency, because that supports the goal (the rewards) best.

If they wanted to change that they'd have to shift rewards more towards the journey rather than the destination; but that's very difficult and very expensive to do in a game like an MMO that has high player engagement and long-term content demands.

It's a bit of a hole they dug themselves into. The gear-focused grind is just "what WoW is" at this point, and it's hard to pivot away from it without alienating people. But the consequence is that demands for more streamlining and efficiency tend to only ever increase.

WoW is now a slower D3 that requires partying to get rewards.

Oh and requires a sub, also.

[loras]

Oh yes. The most interesting areas in WoW are always the borders between zones. It's just that they're awfully small places due to how fast the transition takes place. To have that extended further would be amazing.



Exactly. It turns WoW into an app. In an app you want as few obstacles in between the user and their goal. But in a MMO, the obstacles are the game. So by removing the obstacles, you essentially remove the game.

Dying in a raid is inconvenient and frustrating, immortality would be a major QoL improvement. But that also removes the whole point of raiding in the first place.

Exactly!
/10chars

[OMGTwitchTV]

"So yeah, to Hell with the Earth, I got mine, screw you and everyone else on the planet. I'll be dead before it's completely uninhabitable after all."

Good logic. You're a good, moral person.

The world will likely go on another 10k years or more before it resets itself. Unless you are walking everywhere you go, growing your own food, composting, and using wind or water powered electricity, you are not exactly saving the planet. However, I'd much rather get back on the topic of how much flight has improved and gotten closer to ideal in a fictional game made for teens. I am sure there is an off-topic forum around somewhere in Greta Thunberg's honor where you can berate others.

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A game of adventure doesn't work if you just fly through the skies and drop at the exact location you want to go to. As the game is no longer about adventure, but doing X and Y as efficiently as possible, flying is a nice qol improvement.

Fun is a matter of perspective. As a mage, I kinda wish I had Demon Hunter wings so I could double jump and glade. Not sure any other mage wishes for it. I like turning into a dragon (Dragonwrath staff and the vial of sands), spreading my wings, and flying away. It's quite the adventure, for me anyway to see Azeroth and other zones through the eyes of the blue dragonflight and I travel from A to B.

[Izthak]

The world will likely go on another 10k years or more before it resets itself. Unless you are walking everywhere you go, growing your own food, composting, and using wind or water powered electricity, you are not exactly saving the planet. However, I'd much rather get back on the topic of how much flight has improved and gotten closer to ideal in a fictional game made for teens. I am sure there is an off-topic forum around somewhere in Greta Thunberg's honor where you can berate others.

Love it. You diverge to the random topic, then act like you're taking the high ground by trying to get back on topic when everyone isn't cheering your horrific view of the world on. Right on brand for you types.

[OMGTwitchTV]

Love it. You diverge to the random topic, then act like you're taking the high ground by trying to get back on topic when everyone isn't cheering your horrific view of the world on. Right on brand for you types.

I used the topic as an alternative analogy and then you spun it into some immoral tree-hugging crusade. So if you want to revert back to it, that's fine. But leave your ad-hominem insults at the door.

[bloodmoth13]

Can you be any more arrogant at all? Calling other opinions than your own "brain dead" and they should be ignored. Dude, get a spine please.

You should stop acting as if my suggestion couldn't be the fix to "un-trivialize" (lol). You create problems when there are none. As someone else has said: that horse has already been beaten to death. Just don't fly if you don't like it. Let other people fly. Don't be the moron.

On top of that: Flying does not trivialize the game unless all you do is trek around from node to node and not run some actually challenging content like mythic raids and high M+.

trivializes the open world, you know what im talking about and mounts arent allowed in dungeons because they would completely invalidate them. Lets flip the argument on its head and suggest let flying exist everywhere including dungeons and raids. The meta instantly switches to mounting past all content, and the same arguments apply "who wants to kill those mobs for the Xth number of times anyway?"

The same arguments against that apply to the open world. I want the open world to be more challenging and entertaining not less, you think since its easy why not just make it entirely skippable. we both see problems but have different ideas on solutions, mine is 'if its too easy, make it more challenging' yours is 'if its too easy, let me do it faster' id argue that if the content is so easy then its not worth doing at all and you should be moving straight onto other challenges anyway, so why not just have a 'skip leveling entirely' button at that stage? people dont like leveling after all, why force them to play? if you enjoy leveling then you can level, but if you dont then you can press the skip button. Same argument.

and dont bother suggesting 'if you want more challenge handicap yourself' because that isnt a solution. its up to the game to provide the challenge not the player, its the players job to complete the challenge as best they can with the tools they have, and the best solution is always to skip obstacles if the option to skip is available.

Frankly i dont believe pro-fliers are honest at all with what they really want and they argue around what they really want because they know that what they want is weak: a skip button for gameplay.

[Dastreus]

FFXIV already has the best flight unlocking.

[Ersula]

The post-BC, pre-dragonflight model: The zones are designed to be traversed on foot, flight is a reward for later because it renders the normal traversal irrelevant. This is in the same logic as adding more flight points & decreasing experience to level: It's not so much for new players as old players doing something over & over should eventually become easier.

I don't have a problem with the old model. But I also don't have a problem with the Dragonflight model because they're marginally different: They already said your new mounts aren't going to be able to each certain altitudes at first so its still time-gated.

[pinkz]

When Blizz decided there would be no more flying at the start of WoD, a 1200 page megathread lit up the skies as people who both love and hate flying took to the thread and railed on it from both sides. In that thread years ago we said:

- Add faster methods of travel that flight paths. They did it.
- Make the skies dangerous again. They did that too.
- Restrict it to certain zones, but only after the Lore path was finished and not some REP requirements. Did it.
- Add more interesting transport systems. Done.
- Introduce new flight systems without so much looping. Mostly done.
- Add some ground mounts, but allow most mounts to fly. Did it.
- Remove Pathfinder and ease up with the rep requirements. Done again.

While I know the anti-flight group claims it "ruins the game", I would bet a month's salary they are using flight for dailies, world bosses, rare hunting, and more. So thanks Blizz for actually paying attention and making flight something worth having again, and slow rolling it so it didn't interfere with the initial passes through the zones.

What are your thoughts? Did they get it right? Did they do well enough leaving flight out of Oribos, The Maw, and Korthia? Since Zereth Mortis is essentially the new Timeless Isle, was this the better place to add flight, or should Korthia have been given flight and ZM left on the ground?

blizzard did not decide at start of WOD there would be no flying, prior to WOD a dev named Bashiok responded with a blue post where he stated flying was coming after the first patch and would be like previous expacs. the first patch came and blizzard said it was not really a patch. then prior to what was deemed as a actual patch people asked about flying, it was then ION said they are not going to add flying, also mentioned future expacs not having it.along with his reasons why.

WOD had dev's posting on twitter, facebook, wow forums, etc. they tried to claimed players pieced info out of context on flying in WOD. it was the WOW devs and ION that where lacking what other devs had clearly stated

Bashiok posted this at http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/10571977123#6 link is now broken at WOW forums. very clear, concise, nothing to be taken out of context

There's a lot of discussion about flying/not-flying and I'd like to try to sum things up and maybe realign the discussion a bit. Some of the other threads are near-cap, some have really gone down tangents, so I'm just picking this one to throw a reply into. Apologies to the other threads.

We intend to disallow flying while leveling from 90 to 100, and have flying become available again in the first major patch for Warlords of Draenor. No flying while leveling has been the case during Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, and Mists of Pandaria. We allowed flying during Cataclysm because as those zones were mixed-in with the 1-60 world it just would have been really jarring to dismount you as you fly into Hyjal, etc. but we would have disallowed it for Catalcysm zones as well if there was a reasonable solution there.

Flying trivializes combat. A lot of people like to say we're trying to force world PvP, or that we just really want people to look at the pretty trees we made, but those really aren't the reasons that drive this same decision we've made every expansion. Flying allows you to escape or enter combat at-will. There's a reason why flying isn't allowed in dungeons and raids, or battlegrounds and arenas, and that's because it would trivialize the core mechanic of the game in those areas - combat. For much the same reason it trivializes how content is approached in the outdoor world based on the simple fact that you can lift off and set down wherever you like.

So that's the main reason. But sure there are a lot of other problems it can cause for content design such as zones having to get a lot bigger because flying mounts can travel so quickly (and thus making ground travel in them take much longer), it reduces the impact of elevation within zones, it completely removes the ability for us to pace or present content in any structured way, and in general removes our ability to determine how and when players approach a situation, see a vista or location, or charge into/out-of a combat situation. It just greatly reduces any gameplay we want to create by allowing infinite choice in how content is approached to best suit a player's intention to (usually) avoid that content.

I totally sympathize with people's desire to do that, they want to be efficient and have it be their choice, but we have to balance our intent to create a game against creating a sandbox where anything goes. There's a happy medium there somewhere, but flying mounts in most cases just do too much to undermine too many of our core intentions with the game world, the basis of the game: combat, or guiding players through a game experience, and for those reasons we have continually chosen (when we could) to disallow flying mounts in the 'current' outdoor content. In the past that's meant only while leveling, but in our experiences with the Isle of Thunder and Timeless Isle we feel like we can extend that for a bit longer in the new content, and have it be kind of a big deal again once you're able to earn flying in the first big content patch, and in the meantime putting focus on flight paths as well as having some more interesting travel options for players to use.

[OMGTwitchTV]

blizzard did not decide at start of WOD there would be no flying, prior to WOD a dev named Bashiok responded with a blue post

Oh I recall. It had more then 1700 pages on this very forum and nearly 2 dozen people got permabanned from MMO-C. It was a long, drawn out, knock down fight between the pro-fliers and anti-fliers.

Edit: I stand corrected: 2231 pages

https://www.mmo-champion.com/threads...-xpac/page2231

[Forteofgray]

seems like some people think DF flying is going to be how mounts fly in general. isn't it instead that the new flying system only works with the new "special" DF mounts, not every flying mount, and only in DF areas?

[Biomega]

Flying trivializes combat. A lot of people like to say we're trying to force world PvP, or that we just really want people to look at the pretty trees we made, but those really aren't the reasons that drive this same decision we've made every expansion. Flying allows you to escape or enter combat at-will. There's a reason why flying isn't allowed in dungeons and raids, or battlegrounds and arenas, and that's because it would trivialize the core mechanic of the game in those areas - combat.

That's always been a specious argument. It glosses over a crucial difference between the open world and instanced content: that while they're right that the core mechanic in instances is (generally) combat, that's not true in the same way in the open world. In fact, when you dissect what kind of combat is actually being skipped by flying, it's NOT "core mechanic" combat - it's TRIVIAL combat. And that combat is STILL being skipped by people without flying, just not as effectively. Just look at how questing worked in ZM: massive hordes of monsters running after players doing their utmost to NOT fight them. Because they're irrelevant distractions in between the things you actually want to be doing. That's not the same in instanced content - there, those fights ARE the content.

It seems that from the start the main argument against flying was on shaky ground; or, at worst, being actively misdirected to hide the real reason they don't want flying.

So that's the main reason. But sure there are a lot of other problems it can cause for content design such as zones having to get a lot bigger because flying mounts can travel so quickly (and thus making ground travel in them take much longer)

And here we have a glimpse at that reason: travel is intended to waste players' time. Flying makes them waste less time. Less time wasted means more time spent consuming actual content, thus depleting it faster, thus making people quit their subs. Can't have that.

it completely removes the ability for us to pace or present content in any structured way

Not even sure what that's supposed to mean. Is "pacing content" just code for "make the same stuff last longer by having you spend more time traveling there"? And that's supposed to be a GOOD thing?

and in general removes our ability to determine how and when players approach a situation, see a vista or location, or charge into/out-of a combat situation. It just greatly reduces any gameplay we want to create by allowing infinite choice in how content is approached to best suit a player's intention to (usually) avoid that content.

And here's another glimpse at the real problem they see: flying lets you skip filler content. If something is content but players would rather not do it if given the choice, usually that'd be the point where a designer goes "okay, why don't they WANT to do it?", because ostensibly your goal when making video games is to create something people WANT to play. Which means, by inference, that there's something else they'd like to do MORE - in this case, probably get to the actual questing rather than the random travel and annoyance in between. Or, if you extend it further, the rewards rather than the process. That should be a key takeaway for the designers: that there's a significant problem where rewards overshadow the acquisition, and that maybe, just maybe, that would warrant some investigation. Instead their solution seems to be "okay if people don't want to do it, let's just MAKE them do it". Which is effective, but above all is efficient - because it doesn't require a ton of extra design work (and therefore money).

WoW has simply fallen into a state where the designers accept that there's chaff and filler in everything they make, and that the approach they've adopted in an attempt to make the game more rewards-focused, therefore creating a tightly controlled loop of positive reinforcement that's more conducive to people wanting to keep playing. Everything AROUND those rewards only exists to stretch out that high-point-seeking behavior across the maximum amount of time, so people keep playing LONGER. Flying counteracts that - and THAT is why they hate it.