Dragonriding is destroying exploration

[Segus1992]

Opposite for me. Never felt more connected to the world. Dragonriding opens so many doors you used to never think about when you had the previous flying model.

Yep, I feel the goal is to replace flying with dragonriding with time, and I hope they go hard on that plan. Dragonriding is what flying always should've been. I do kinda feel like you get too much Vigor regen while flying (1 per 5 sec is a lot), I thought I'd be forced to land.. ever. Still an extreme improvement over regular flying though.

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So if I understood the OP correctly... he's mad because Blizzard isn't forcing him and everyone else to be land-locked at the beginning of the expansion?

Yes. Which isn't strange at all if you think the criticism is valid - Blizzard also "forces" people to quest in the start of every expansion. Limitations is game design.

[Dhrizzle]

I know others have said the same, but this is very much a you-problem.

Well yes, but also no...

WoW is a game where you can always have more things to do and it's natural to try to find the quickest way to complete a task so you can move on to the next. It's up to the game designer to ensure that the optimal path is still entertaining. I know there are people who purposefully play in a gimped way but that isn't taken as a given, a dev (probably Ghostcrawler) once said they follow the adage "rats always find the quickest way to the cheese." As someone mentioned earlier if Blizz made raids easier players would complain, they wouldn't take off gear or use suboptimal talents.

[Hctaz]

It's human nature if the human has little self-control. And that's fine. I'm glad that people including the op are enjoying it. What I don't enjoy and don't support is fucking complaining about their own lack of self-control and blaming it on Blizzard. "Oh man, I shouldn't have eaten that much and now I feel sick. What kind of bastard are you giving me all that food?" Just....Jesus.....

Well... I mean, I can see it from the other perspective as well.

Humans might have the capacity for a strong will to do things that go against our natural instincts, but it's pretty difficult.

I mean, it's why we have problems like obesity and addictions in the first place. Our human instincts are telling us that this is fine and good and we can't always fight against that feeling 100% of the time.

I can't speak on the specifics of what Blizzard has or has not done to exploit its player base specifically, but I do think it is the responsibility of the game makers to protect the player base from themselves. I do think it's the ethical thing to do and to strive for.

Is Dragon riding or flying that egregious of an example? Not at all. It might be the thing that one particular person really cares about, however, so I understand why there are complaints.

I also think it's totally acceptable to blame somebody else for your own lack of self-control in certain situations. Everybody has their own struggles. If you take somebody who is dealing with being overweight and then plop them down at an all you can eat buffet, then that is absolutely not on them. You placed them in an environment specifically catered to take advantage of their specific problem.

I also think it's a little short-sighted to call one person out for struggling with something that you might not personally find to be a struggle. Maybe you don't have a problem with eating healthy, but that doesn't mean you're better than somebody else who does. Your body and your brain are just built differently.

I experienced that when I was put on Adderall a few years back. Spent the first 2 decades of my life loving soda. Drinking soda with every meal and then just randomly when I was thirsty. I had a real problem drinking just water or something that wasn't sugary. I also had a problem just kinda eating sweets in general. Started taking Adderall and my body did a complete 180 on sugar overnight.

Soda tasted like ass and gave me the jitters. Candy tasted like garbage. It's all chemical reactions in your brain. Some people have some reactions that prevent them from certain problems while others don't.

[loras]

I got dragonriding last night (playing DF casually) and one of the first things I did was mine 6 nodes all over a towering outcrop. At first, I thought they were all beside each other, but they were actually spread out vertically. I used the flying mount to scale down the natural tower, node by node. One node was even buried in a cave, which I used mining to open!

This wasn't a super eventful experience, but it felt unique. Something about busting open a cave entrance and extracting resources from a tower was genuinely fun, which is not something I usually say about mining.

...This sounds so good.

God damn people i had promised myself to wait for reviews and probably until spring but you're making it damn hard >_>

Also In regards to this thread's OP:

Don't expect others to fix your lack of self control, especially if the consequences for you are not actually harmful.

[YogSoggoth]

This community truly deserved Shadowlands now that i think of it...

[loras]

This community truly deserved Shadowlands now that i think of it...

We deserved BfA, but SL?
That's just too far man.

[YogSoggoth]

We deserved BfA, but SL?
That's just too far man.

Nah, man, it's too late to save us. When people have opinions like OP's... Guess there will always be these "glass half empty" kind of people. And for god's sake for some reason they are very vocal about it too.

[ReleaseDay]

Disagree, it makes exploration more fun.

[loras]

Nah, man, it's too late to save us. When people have opinions like OP's... Guess there will always be these "glass half empty" kind of people. And for god's sake for some reason they are very vocal about it too.

Ugh. Zugh i mistyped initially.
It seems fitting, given how you do have a point that these people are a bit like orcs. And not the clever or strong kind.

[Dejiko]

This sounds like a you problem.
Being able to take off in a hurry if i aggro some enemies because i explored an unknown region is great.
I want dragonflying for every expansion going forward, it`s amazing.

[Stormwolf64]

The whole point of the system is that it gives you a more fun means of flight. You aren't gated to max it out, and players can make leveling much easier as a result.

You are objectively whining cause of something that's fun. Stop it. This is why y'all deserved SL.

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You have no idea what you're talking about.

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Dragonriding is an easy win. The fuck?

I absolutely do know what im talking about. I've been around for a long time

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More like normal flying is perfectly fine.

BlizZard is infamous for looking to re-invent the wheel.

Players asked for housing and BlizZard gave us garrisons.

Players asked for a progression system beyond talents/levels and they gave us borrowed power and rental systems.

Players asked for flying and they gave us Guild Wars gliding system.

Etc, etc, etc.

Does the current blizzard give you the impression that they can design a decent housing system and an expansion? Blizzard is probably the least effective "big" mmo company out there. They'd botch it completely.

And we do not have the right to demand it either. We can only hope... well tbh, wow is the least social mmo i think, housing would be worthless a day after release except for social guilds and rp players.

[Biomega]

Does the current blizzard give you the impression that they can design a decent housing system and an expansion? Blizzard is probably the least effective "big" mmo company out there. They'd botch it completely.

A little off-topic, but the reason Blizzard isn't doing housing isn't design, it's technical limitations. The game is too old for the kind of technology that would be needed to do housing well, and rather than doing it poorly they choose not to do it at all.

Blizzard's failures are more macro than micro most of the time anyway. They have conceptual issues, not execution issues.

[McCrazy]

I really like the system itself, but I feel like it was a major mistake putting it at the start of the expansion. I'm flying through entire zones in a matter of seconds, basically just jumping around from quest marker to quest marker and ignoring the world itself. The feeling of exploring a new continent has completely vanished for me, as I'm not slowly uncovering the map and finding interesting places anymore. I'm dashing from one place to the next at breakneck speed, not caring what is in between them at all.

The system also makes the new areas feel small as hell. I've already seen the entire expansion in like 20 minutes by collecting the glyphs. And now I can just go from one end to the other in 2 minutes. There's zero sense of scale. It almost feels like playing a few small new patch zones.

The gameplay itself feels amazing, but I would've prefered just having ground mounts and then getting dragonriding for each zone at the end. They barely feel like actual zones to me, as it's like I'm teleporting around and skipping everything instead of actually exploring.

I don't know, what you are talking about. My first character is 68. I'm now on my way to the third area, Azure something. My Zulian Tiger took me everywhere on the ground and I used the dragonriding only for the quests where it was needed and for gathering some glyphs and ores on the way.
Only in the last hour of playing or so, did I fly some more, because the questing send me to places far apart.

It is your choice to fly, so don't complain about not seeing anything and the lack of exploring seems to be your lack of wanting to, since nothing keeps you from riding a ground mount, other then you.

[Stormwolf64]

A little off-topic, but the reason Blizzard isn't doing housing isn't design, it's technical limitations. The game is too old for the kind of technology that would be needed to do housing well, and rather than doing it poorly they choose not to do it at all.

Blizzard's failures are more macro than micro most of the time anyway. They have conceptual issues, not execution issues.

They certainly have all kinds of issues. Now its cultural issues

[Nachtigal]

If dragonriding isn’t in 11.0 WoW will be officially dead.

[Doomchicken]

A little off-topic, but the reason Blizzard isn't doing housing isn't design, it's technical limitations. The game is too old for the kind of technology that would be needed to do housing well, and rather than doing it poorly they choose not to do it at all.

Blizzard's failures are more macro than micro most of the time anyway. They have conceptual issues, not execution issues.

I would argue that blizzards absolute failure to do any half decent balancing for their mythic plus dungeons since inception and raids for almost literally every expansion is an execution issue, and a big one at that.

[Nachtigal]

Also, I would like to argue that flying at the start would more often than not actually prolong exploration. If you’re skipping from point A to point B flying, you’re likely going to miss things. This leaves incentive to go back out in the world and explore when you’re done questing.

[Biomega]

I would argue that blizzards absolute failure to do any half decent balancing for their mythic plus dungeons since inception and raids for almost literally every expansion is an execution issue, and a big one at that.

Only because you're misunderstanding the issue. They're not INTERESTED in balancing M+ perfectly in the first place. Their goal is only "good enough", measured by their own internal metrics - not by community metrics. WoW is a tangled mass of cogs, tweaking one always makes five others pop out. Between raid, M+, and PvP (just to name the main three focus-points) it's impossibly impractical to achieve balance in all. That's why they don't even try. The only reason people think they fail in the fine-tuning adjustment is because they're using their own, highly focused metric - they're not looking at it like a company does.

Now, you may disagree with their one-size-fits-all-three-ways-to-play philosophy, of course (I personally very much do); but that's a macro issue, not a micro issue.

[Stormwolf64]

Also, I would like to argue that flying at the start would more often than not actually prolong exploration. If you’re skipping from point A to point B flying, you’re likely going to miss things. This leaves incentive to go back out in the world and explore when you’re done questing.

This logic makes sense in upside down land. When people are done flying from quest to quest many will drop exploring and stick to queuing. Exploration is best done when you're questing while leveling up.

[Nachtigal]

I would argue that blizzards absolute failure to do any half decent balancing for their mythic plus dungeons since inception and raids for almost literally every expansion is an execution issue, and a big one at that.

I would argue that “balance issues” are a sort of “token” topic to bash when one has nothing to actually complain about. Or, they’re just a simpleton with no thoughts of their own, but their friends are mad and so they need something to say to fit in with their friends.

Note that I’ve gone out of my way as to not insinuate that you are one of these people. I realize that there will be people who’s issues with balance are genuine. I just think that it’s a waste of time for blizzard to spend a bunch of time/effort making the numbers closer.

I think it would be time better spent designing the game in a way where people could have a handful of classes or specs they enjoy playing, so that if one of them isn’t performing to someone’s satisfaction, they can easily swap over and play a different class for a bit.

They can’t please everyone, so you can be sure that there will inevitably be people who will still fall through the cracks. Namely those who only enjoy one class/spec.