Pathfinder returns for Shadowlands

[Hinastorm]

Looks like I won't be preordering.

I'm sick of this garbage. Literally nobody complained before WOD about flying except like 1% of World PVPers, and another 1% of avid roleplayers who claimed "Muh immersion!"

Even Blizzard's most avid fanbase in attendance at Blizzcon was largely unimpressed by this announcement

See you in shadowlands!

[SirCowdog]

People bitched so hard when flying was removed that it became pretty clear to anyone who was thinking that making flying a reward was a no-brainer. Seems as though it still is.

Except that by now, 4 expansions in, it's not even a reward. It's a consolation for putting up with Blizzard's grounded, convoluted, timegated BS for most of an expansion.

Anyone who's thinking knows that flight as a 'reward' is one shite deal.

[Aliven]

I am not sure how you think this random comment of yours pertains at all to what I am saying.

I am talking from the perspective of someone who wants to be able to fly, and how, without the timegating, everyone who wants to fly is pretty much forced to choose between doing so, and taking their time to immerse themselves in the content. And given that the whole point of withholding flying in the first place is to try and get people to immerse themselves in the content, I am saying that what they did with Pathfinder II in BfA made zero sense at all.

Pathfinder II had no timegate. So instead of players taking their time to enjoy Nazjatar and Mechagon (two zones which the devs clearly put a lot of work into making), everyone was just rush, rush, rush to grind the rep asap, because they faster we did so, the sooner we got to fly. Thus the zones became a chore rather than an experience.

It is, as I already said: "When the options are to do what is most fun or do what is most expedient to get ahead, then that isn't a choice at all".

For you. If i want to have immersion i dont give a fuck about what other players do or can do. I walked in some zones to enjoy the beauty of them, even when i had flying enabled.

[MoanaLisa]

Except that by now, 4 expansions in, it's not even a reward. It's a consolation for putting up with Blizzard's grounded, convoluted, timegated BS for most of an expansion.

Anyone who's thinking knows that flight as a 'reward' is one shite deal.

Remove flight entirely from the game again then. See if anyone cares. If it's generally perceived as a shit reward, then the issue resolves itself.

[Baneto]

Remove flight entirely from the game again then. See if anyone cares. If it's generally perceived as a shit reward, then the issue resolves itself.

That would slow the game down way too much for me to enjoy it, at least.

I dont have my hopes up high with current Blizzard, but I really dont want another dragged out pathfinder like its been since WoD.

[SirCowdog]

Remove flight entirely from the game again then. See if anyone cares. If it's generally perceived as a shit reward, then the issue resolves itself.

That's the logic of Blizzard. Sadly, taking things away from players and making the game more tedious does not magically make badly designed open world areas better.

The problem is not really flying or mounts in general. They just make the problem easier to see. Removing flight would solve the symptom of it being a bad reward, but would completely ignore the reason WHY using it as a reward is a bad idea in the first place. It would be like cutting off your hand because you made a typo.

The real source of why flight is a bad reward is because the design of the open world in places lime Nazjatar is based on the flawed assumption that annoying ground navigation that takes longer to move through is better. Based on the premise that it will be more immersive if players are forced to spend more time there, regardless of the actual relevance or value to the player of the content being traveled through.

Why did people rush flying in Nazjatar a d Mechagon? Because the content there(and BfA at large) was mostly irrelevant by the time flight was available. Spending more time there because travel is slow wouldn't make that content more immersive.

So what Blizzard needs to do is make more interesting open world content that isn't so god damned disposable. There needs to be a reason to return to areas and actually explore and move through them instead of just another rep grind full of Kill-X quests that only rewards garbage like BfA treasures and rares did.

And that overhauled open world design DOES need to have flight and ground mounts addressed. But not by removing it. Instead it should be incorporated into the design. GW2 might be shit in a lot of ways, but the way tbey did their mount system is a good example of where to start.

[WowIsDead64]

That's the logic of Blizzard. Sadly, taking things away from players and making the game more tedious does not magically make badly designed open world areas better.

The problem is not really flying or mounts in general. They just make the problem easier to see. Removing flight would solve the symptom of it being a bad reward, but would completely ignore the reason WHY using it as a reward is a bad idea in the first place. It would be like cutting off your hand because you made a typo.

The real source of why flight is a bad reward is because the design of the open world in places lime Nazjatar is based on the flawed assumption that annoying ground navigation that takes longer to move through is better. Based on the premise that it will be more immersive if players are forced to spend more time there, regardless of the actual relevance or value to the player of the content being traveled through.

Why did people rush flying in Nazjatar a d Mechagon? Because the content there(and BfA at large) was mostly irrelevant by the time flight was available. Spending more time there because travel is slow wouldn't make that content more immersive.

So what Blizzard needs to do is make more interesting open world content that isn't so god damned disposable. There needs to be a reason to return to areas and actually explore and move through them instead of just another rep grind full of Kill-X quests that only rewards garbage like BfA treasures and rares did.

And that overhauled open world design DOES need to have flight and ground mounts addressed. But not by removing it. Instead it should be incorporated into the design. GW2 might be shit in a lot of ways, but the way tbey did their mount system is a good example of where to start.

Dunno. I guess, whole initial idea was to recreate TBC experience, simply because Blizzard assumed, that TBC was the best Wow's xpack due to constant growth of sub number. And TBC required you to do long tedious grind to get flying. I.e. flying was "reward" back then.

Overall it's misconception. Nobody calls TBC the best xpack ever made today. TBC wasn't that good. It was just better in comparison with Vanilla. It was first xpack in Wow's history. It was something new. So it caused boom effect. Overall MMO genre was on it's peak. And WotLK was better. Yeah, there wasn't growth of sub numbers. But you should clearly understand, that Wow servers weren't working in China back then due to censoring death theme. I.e. overall number of subs could have been twice biger back in WotLK, i.e. around 20M subs.

It's WotLK, Blizzard should orient on. And WotLK was massive success exactly because it was casual-friendly.

[SirCowdog]

Dunno. I guess, whole initial idea was to recreate TBC experience, simply because Blizzard assumed, that TBC was the best Wow's xpack due to constant growth of sub number. And TBC required you to do long tedious grind to get flying. I.e. flying was "reward" back then.

This needs to be put in the proper context. Because, at the time, getting flight was not difficult. Getting EPIC flight took awhile if you weren't already prepared, but the amount of time it took was not out of line with other expectations of grind that existed during that era. This is so important that it's difficult to put into words. But in today's context, getting epic flight would only take maybe the same time as grinding the gold for a wow token. Many people already have it. Some have to struggle a bit, but the general expectation is that it's not at all difficult or time consuming to get.

And not to mention, you know what else happened when you got flying? There were some new places to access that otherwise weren't available from the ground. Granted, it was a VERY simplistic change to the content, but it was at least a nod in the direction of Blizzard trying to use flight to enhance the experience. And at the time, in the context of player expectations of 2007, this was actually good.

But today? People don't look forward to flight because it's a reward. They look forward to it in relief that they can finally stop slogging through boring, needless bullshit. Flight doesn't enhance or add to the experience of modern wow. It just removes the roadblocks and tedium. That's a subtle but insanely important distinction.

Being grounded often doesn't make the game more immersive. It just makes it slow and irritating most of the time. Likewise: Being able to zoom past everything with a flying mount doesn't make bad content good. It just allows a player to mitigate most of the bad and get to the thing that actually matters to them.

Make the content more interesting, and include flight into it in a way that ADDS to the game, and you solve both problems.

[Raelbo]

I think it's also important to note that Blizzard KNEW players would rush Nazjatar and Mechagon for flying, but designed the zones for ground interaction anyway.

First off, the question I would be asking is: Do they actually know how to design for any other kind of interaction?

Also, to be fair, they did ensure that we got to experience those zones without flying. My issue is that, because flying was locked behind simply getting the rep from those zones (and not just for Naz/Mecha, but the whole of BfA), they were strongly incentivizing us to rush the zones and that is what compromised the experience.

To me, the issue isn't that I don't agree with Pathfinder. It's that I am not convinced, based on several other design decisions they have made, that Blizzard properly understand the philosophy behind Pathfinder. And as such, I take issue with some of the ways in which they implement stuff related to Pathfinder.

I get the sense that for Blizzard, the issue is that they have simply decided that "flying is bad for the game" in principle. But at the same time, they recognise that having flying is important to a significant number of players. And as a result, they have had to accept that they need to give us flying, but do so grudgingly, because if it were up them, they would simply remove flying entirely. And I think that's the wrong attitude. I think it's a silly attitude, and I think that if they actually understood the issues properly, then they'd realise that flying isn't bad. It is problematic in certain contexts, but in others it's actually a massive boon.

Where I do agree with Blizzard is that flying does change the way we experience content. It gives us a way of bypassing a certain kind of immersion that comes from having to navigate the world on the ground. And I do agree that this can massively detract from the enjoyment of the experience. Where I disagree with Blizzard is their desire to keep us perpetually ground bound, and I do so because I recognise that the enjoyment of that kind of immersion stems largely from a sense of discovery and exploration, that, pretty much by definition, is contingent on the content being new to the player.

They want to withhold flying in order to try and give us a better experience through enforced immersion. The problem is that this immersion rapidly loses it's ability to make the experience better as content gets older (and we have experienced it). Ergo, the act of denying us flying is incapable of achieving the desired outcome of creating a better experience. Sure, it keeps us immersed, but not only is that no longer of value, I would argue that it is actually detrimental. Because, in the case of traveling in WoW, what starts out as fun and engaging when the content is fresh and new, lands up becoming tedious and boring as the content gets older.

To me it's almost tragic the way Blizzard are actually shooting themselves in the proverbial foot here. They want to keep us engaged with content longer, and IMO flying is a great way to give a lot of zones a fresh infusion of energy they need once the novelty of the ground-bound travel experience has run its course. Instead of recognising that flying allows us to skip the shit that is making the zones unappealing, they instead try to force us to keep doing it in the misguided belief that because we found it fun once, we should continue to do indefinitely.

They should really be embracing flying, not spurning it. Yes, flying does need to be managed. But withholding it entirely is just as harmful (if not more so) than introducing it from the get-go.

Wouldn't it have made more sense, knowing that players would fly very quickly after the patch went live, to build either excessive timegated unlocks, or zones that would continue to provide challenges to flying players after the unkock?

I think a big part of the problem with Pathfinder II was that they failed to think the whole thing through and ended up just lumping everything together. And I honestly believe that this stemmed from a poor understanding of what they were actually trying to achieve.

As I said above, I think that they simply see flying as something that they're obliged to unlock at some point. Instead they should be tying it to when it makes sense to unlock it - ie at what point is the value of withholding flying no longer important. And to me it's patently obvious that the value of withholding flying in Kul Tiras and Zandalar had long since expired, while at the same time, the value of withholding it in Naz/Mecha was very much still relevant. Lumping the entire unlock together was just daft. Sorry to be blunt, but to me there is just no kind of way saying it.

What Blizzard should have done was to unlock flying, for people who had completed the requirements for Pathfinder I, for Kul Tiras/Zandalar after the Battle of Dazar'alor quest chain. Then for Pathfinder II they should have put I would say a time-gate of 2-3 months on Naz/Mecha. That would have given people ample time to get the full ground based experience in those zones, and to complete the requirements of Pathfinder II without having to feel rushed to do it.

It seems weird to me to say " the devs clearly put a lot of work into making the zone", but they did so knowing it would be largely bypassed. It's a weird decision for the devs to do that, and the blame doesn't lie 100% with just the players in that regard.

As I have said, I don't know that they know how else to design zones. And the problem then becomes that they simply resent the existence of flying, and do what they can to try and make sure we are ground-bound for as long as possible.

Players clearly want flying. Or at least the speed and convenience of it. And yet going into Shadowlands we've got pathfinder again, no flight whistle, and the Maw not even letting you use mounts at all initially. It's like they're doubling down on something they know players don't like instead of incorporating what players like into the design, accounting for it, and making the game challenging WITH those things as part of the design.

Or, assuming that they can't make flying-friendly content, recognise that being forced to stay ground-bound is only fun and rewarding for a limited amount of time and don't try to keep us ground-bound for longer than that.

I honestly don't believe that there are many players for whom not having flying for new content is a big issue, because the played experience of new content tends to be fun and engaging from the ground. The far bigger issue is what happens down the line, once the novelty of it wears off.

Really they need to just overhaul the entire mount system, ground and air so it's even possible to improve the overall world design to something more dynamic than "screw you of you like flying" if the first half of the expansion, and "screw you if you like ground mounts" in the second half.

Honestly, I do not believe that there are players who genuinely prefer the ground mount experience in old content. I think that what a lot of the anti-flying brigade actually want is to keep up the level of engagement they have with new and exciting content. Which is, of course impossible. The problem is that they remember having fun while being ground-bound, but they fail to realise that it was tied to the content being new. So when they see that the later experience (with flying) isn't as fun anymore, they falsely conclude that flying is the problem. It's a correlation vs causation error in thinking.

- - - Updated - - -

For you. If i want to have immersion i dont give a fuck about what other players do or can do. I walked in some zones to enjoy the beauty of them, even when i had flying enabled.

Taking the attitude of "i don't give a fuck about other players" is not only immature, it's also a terrible principle to apply to game design.

WoW has millions of players. The way the game is designed has to cater to the needs of the entire playerbase. The fact that you're happy with putting immersion ahead of progression simply makes you a rare oddity. It's entirely irrelevant to the discussion though.

Forcing players to choose between either enjoying the game experience or suffering a significant competitive disadvantage is bad game design. Period. If you're going to give players choices, they should be like-for-like tradeoffs.

More importantly though, and this is the point I am trying to make: the idea of implementing pathfinder such that players feel incentivized to sacrifice immersion in order to get flying sooner is antithetical to the whole concept of Pathfinder in the first place.

[SirCowdog]

First off, let me say that I REALLY hope Blizzard is seeing discussions like this. I know there's a LOT of polarized angry shouting at each other in most threads. But the past few posts in this thread are really breaking down the fundamental problems with the current open world design philosophy in a very clear and well-written manner, from several different viewpoints.

It's hard for me to understand how Blizzard isn't able to see what their design is doing to the game. Or maybe they do see it, but in their own echo-chamber or corprate imperative world, maybe it just doesn't register.

Also, I apologize in advance, but in the interests of reducing the wall of text threadnaut, I'm going to heavily edit in order to address what I feel are the key points. I actually agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I want to give my own take on some important issue you brought up.

Blizzard clearly has a design that they believe is the best experience. They're very obviously convinced that they're correct on these points. However, when you look at the discussion and feedback in the beta of Shadowlands in regards to class design, Covenants and their associated abilities, Torghast, and other systems.....there's very obviously a lot of back and forth as Blizzard adjusts to player feedback.

What baffles me is that Blizzard shows with these changes that they're fully capable of adjusting their design based on what players tell them is good or bad. And yet for whatever reason, Blizzard digs their heels in on the topic of flying and refuses to address it at all. Pathfinder is not a solution in anything other than the most technical definition. It only barely fixes the symptoms, and it does so by simply pushing back dealing with it until flight no longer has any real impact on the game one way or another.

Do they actually know how to design for any other kind of interaction?

There are a number of possibilities I see that could be causing problems:

The game engine itself is limiting(which is doubtful consider zones like Stormpeaks)
The current team doesn't actually know how to innovate.
The leadership is stuck in a rut and unwilling to adjust with the times.
Corporate imperatives limit the team's ability to deviate too far from the tried and true design.
Morale at Blizzard is actually so low that it's effecting the development process.

Or any combination of the above.

I have serious doubts about the problem being with the skill level or innovation of the dev team. They're clearly capable of designing incredibly detailed and advanced encounters and systems. But there's obviously something in the works that is causing a lack of innovation or advancement of the quality and style of the open world since WoD. It's been the same basic formula ever since then, with a few notable exceptions, such as Highmountain.

They have simply decided that "flying is bad for the game" in principle.

I think on this point Blizzard is very clearly confusing "bad for the game" with "bad for our narrow idea of what we think should be good on paper".

You can see this sort of logic with some of the over-use of systems in cases like Azerite armor and Essences, and again in the Shadowlands beta with Covenants and conduits. Basically, every borrowed power system for the past couple of expansions has not really survived exposure to the playerbase unaltered. Blizzard starts with an idea that sounds good, but when the players get their hands on it and express dislike for part of it, Blizzard inevitably ends up having to change how it works.

Why Pathfinder and flying have not gotten this same treatment is very odd. Probably because whoever is in charge of the open world design feels it's in an acceptable state. I think that's a mistake, however. Each expansion since WoD that has had to deal with Pathfinder has increased the amount of grumbling and expressed distaste for the state of Pathfinder. Many players may like the core ideal of it, but the actual implementation leaves much to be desired. Ignoring that is going to cause Blizzard trouble in the long-run.

They recognize that having flying is important to a significant number of players.

It's hard for me to reconcile this with the way Blizzard actually treats flight. But it's one more aspect of what I described above, about how Blizzard seems to listen to feedback in some cases, but not others. And the overall observed behavior from Blizzard making it obvious that they think the "problem" of flight is solved.

Flight is problematic in certain contexts, but in others it's actually a massive boon.

They want to withhold flying in order to try and give us a "better" experience through enforced immersion.

Immersion rapidly loses it's ability to make the experience better as content gets older

These three points are all intertwined, IMO.

Yes, flight in its current state is problematic. Even if Blizzard adjusted the open world design to use flying(as I've suggested countless times), it would still be difficult to design for due to the raw power and speed it provides. Flight NEEDS to be overhauled to better fit into the way in which encounters and NPC AI work. But that actually also applies to ground mounts as well, just to a lesser degree.

Blizzard wants to withhold flying because of that problem. But their solution of restricting it until players have consumed the initial experience is very much the weakest and laziest solution. It's cowardly, and lacks creativity or innovation. Hiding until the "problem" goes away instead of actually dealing with it.

Which also has the side effect of angering many players, and generating an overall weaker experience. Yes, it accomplishes the goal of forcing engagement with simplistic ground-based content, but IMO it does nothing for enhancing actual immersion from, as you said, anyone but completely new players. Veterans don't give a shit about another rep grind filled with Kill-X or Click-X quests bereft of any significance, story or loot notwithstanding.

As I've said before, this entire theme and direction of open world design smacks of being based not on player enjoyment or enhancement of immersion, but to look good on paper for engagement figures. It goes back to a possible explanation of the first point you made about whether or not Blizzard knows how to design anything else. They clearly think sometimes looks great on paper, in the echo chamber. But doesn't really survive exposure to actual real life players.

But I guess as long as profit margins are up due to MTX, and engagement reports look good on paper, we won't ever really see ANY forward change in the general design theory of WoW's open world....flying or otherwise. Worse....there appears to be regression, as I pointed out in an earlier post: Removal of not only flight, but mounts entirely, along with portals and flightmaster whistle.

The entire debacle can probably be summed up by simply pointing out that Blizzard appears to have fallen prey to confusing tedium with immersion. Engagement figures instead of actual fun. Echo chamber on paper instead of real life player enjoyment.

[rrayy]

First off, the question I would be asking is: Do they actually know how to design for any other kind of interaction?

Also, to be fair, they did ensure that we got to experience those zones without flying. My issue is that, because flying was locked behind simply getting the rep from those zones (and not just for Naz/Mecha, but the whole of BfA), they were strongly incentivizing us to rush the zones and that is what compromised the experience.

To me, the issue isn't that I don't agree with Pathfinder. It's that I am not convinced, based on several other design decisions they have made, that Blizzard properly understand the philosophy behind Pathfinder. And as such, I take issue with some of the ways in which they implement stuff related to Pathfinder.

They understand it just fine. Pathfinder is the way that allows those that don't want flying in the game at all to have their time where it is not.

I get the sense that for Blizzard, the issue is that they have simply decided that "flying is bad for the game" in principle. But at the same time, they recognise that having flying is important to a significant number of players. And as a result, they have had to accept that they need to give us flying, but do so grudgingly, because if it were up them, they would simply remove flying entirely. And I think that's the wrong attitude. I think it's a silly attitude, and I think that if they actually understood the issues properly, then they'd realise that flying isn't bad. It is problematic in certain contexts, but in others it's actually a massive boon.

This is simply untrue. There are devs on both sides of the issue. Alex Afrasiabi is on the anti-flight side while Ion is actually on the pro-flight side. This was a compromise between both sides. All you are saying here is "I think flying is good for the game and if the devs just simply admitted I am right, the game would be better". They understand the issues properly because they are the issues they have with flying. This is how the deves resolved their issues with flying.

Where I do agree with Blizzard is that flying does change the way we experience content. It gives us a way of bypassing a certain kind of immersion that comes from having to navigate the world on the ground. And I do agree that this can massively detract from the enjoyment of the experience. Where I disagree with Blizzard is their desire to keep us perpetually ground bound, and I do so because I recognise that the enjoyment of that kind of immersion stems largely from a sense of discovery and exploration, that, pretty much by definition, is contingent on the content being new to the player.

You miss the point of what they are doing entirely. The time gate is to allow for a significant amount of time for those that hate flying to play the game without it.

They want to withhold flying in order to try and give us a better experience through enforced immersion. The problem is that this immersion rapidly loses it's ability to make the experience better as content gets older (and we have experienced it). Ergo, the act of denying us flying is incapable of achieving the desired outcome of creating a better experience. Sure, it keeps us immersed, but not only is that no longer of value, I would argue that it is actually detrimental. Because, in the case of traveling in WoW, what starts out as fun and engaging when the content is fresh and new, lands up becoming tedious and boring as the content gets older.

Not what they are trying to do at all. This isn't about immersion. It's about game play and having both a non-flying experience and then a flying one. They spent a ton of time creating these worlds and people immediately skipping over them makes it seem like it was a waste of time to create.

To me it's almost tragic the way Blizzard are actually shooting themselves in the proverbial foot here. They want to keep us engaged with content longer, and IMO flying is a great way to give a lot of zones a fresh infusion of energy they need once the novelty of the ground-bound travel experience has run its course. Instead of recognising that flying allows us to skip the shit that is making the zones unappealing, they instead try to force us to keep doing it in the misguided belief that because we found it fun once, we should continue to do indefinitely.

They aren't shooting themselves int he foot. This is nothing more than you making stuff up to claim they should just get rid of Pathfinder. Pathfinder gives them what they want which is spending time on the ground first, then being able to fly over. Bering able to skip over content immediately is never good for the game.


What they need to do is add more content to the zones with each patch instead of one thing if they are going to wait intil the .2 patch to unlock flying. That means more than just adding some assaults and calling it good. You could add an Argent Tournament like hub(without stuff like the jousting of course) for example. There needs to be a steady addition of content between release and unlock so it doesn't become irrelevant.

They should really be embracing flying, not spurning it. Yes, flying does need to be managed. But withholding it entirely is just as harmful (if not more so) than introducing it from the get-go.[/quote]

[WowIsDead64]

This needs to be put in the proper context. Because, at the time, getting flight was not difficult. Getting EPIC flight took awhile if you weren't already prepared, but the amount of time it took was not out of line with other expectations of grind that existed during that era. This is so important that it's difficult to put into words. But in today's context, getting epic flight would only take maybe the same time as grinding the gold for a wow token. Many people already have it. Some have to struggle a bit, but the general expectation is that it's not at all difficult or time consuming to get.

And not to mention, you know what else happened when you got flying? There were some new places to access that otherwise weren't available from the ground. Granted, it was a VERY simplistic change to the content, but it was at least a nod in the direction of Blizzard trying to use flight to enhance the experience. And at the time, in the context of player expectations of 2007, this was actually good.

But today? People don't look forward to flight because it's a reward. They look forward to it in relief that they can finally stop slogging through boring, needless bullshit. Flight doesn't enhance or add to the experience of modern wow. It just removes the roadblocks and tedium. That's a subtle but insanely important distinction.

Being grounded often doesn't make the game more immersive. It just makes it slow and irritating most of the time. Likewise: Being able to zoom past everything with a flying mount doesn't make bad content good. It just allows a player to mitigate most of the bad and get to the thing that actually matters to them.

Make the content more interesting, and include flight into it in a way that ADDS to the game, and you solve both problems.

It's Blizzards' idea. Overall at some point they decided, that WotLK was bad and therefore they needed to recreate Vanilla/TBC experience. Haven't you noticed, that Cata should have been Vanilla 2.0? There were many myths floating around Vanilla, mostly caused by simple fact, that all players were noobs back then and everything seemed harder, than it actually was. But now we have Classic servers and Blizzard can actually collect real data and not rely on prejudiced nostalgia crap. May be we'll have TBC servers soon, that will finally show, if TBC was actually so good or not. I actually started playing on official servers back in TBC and it was boring as hell. I barely leveled to 70 and quit then. And WotLK was blast in comparison to it. So I don't understand, why Blizzard constantly try to revive this experience. Nobody asks them to do it.

[SirCowdog]

This was a compromise between both sides.

As compromises go, it's pretty awful. I described, in detail, why this is in my points above and below.

The time gate is to allow for a significant amount of time for those that hate flying to play the game without it.

I highly suspect that the amount of people who "hate" flying is vastly overexaggerated. Regardless, as I've said before, the entire concept of making flight binary, and catering to some of the players the first half of the expansion while catering to the rest in the second half of the expansion....is crap. Especially when the players who enjoy flying have to slog through a bunch of garbage to get what they want, while those who enjoy the ground have to do literally nothing.

Not what they are trying to do at all. This isn't about immersion. It's about game play and having both a non-flying experience and then a flying one. They spent a ton of time creating these worlds and people immediately skipping over them makes it seem like it was a waste of time to create.

This is mental gymnastics. Blizzard is very much NOT trying to create an experience WITH flying. They're slapping flight onto an experience that has already had all its value and "immersion" extracted from it.

As I explained in the post where I replied to Raelbo, it doesn't really matter that they're spending all this time creating worlds when they're creating something that players don't necessarily want. They KNOW a large portion of the playerbase enjoys flying, yet CHOOSE to waste their time and effort creating ground-only experiences that they KNOW players will seek to skip. Why? Because players know these grounded experiences are largely not interesting. Until Blizzard moves away from a world filled with timegates and 99% Kill-X quests, that's going to remain true regardless of flying. Ergo: Flight is not the problem, the underlying boring design is. Therefore, your argument about "time spent creating worlds going to waste" isn't valid.

Not to mention that trying to force players into engaging with something they don't want by taking away something they do want is a flawed premise as well.

Beeing able to skip over content immediately is never good for the game.

You know what else is not good for the game? Constantly taking away things that players enjoy. Rather than taking away flight for most of the expansion, they should be creating content which can't be skipped over by flying. I.E.: Making content that USES flight rather than content that tries to pretend it doesn't exist. As I've said countless times before:

Overhaul how flight works. Overhaul the open world to include that change so that flight can be used sparingly and evenly in some, but not all, situations.

[ymirsson]

Make me NOT to want to fly over the immersion somehow and i will stop wanting to fly.

[SirCowdog]

The point of Pathfinder is so people experience the content the way it was designed first. So if you have in fact experienced the content the way it was designed already - You should be able to fly. That, I stand with.

Or they could stop being stubborn and formulaic, and actually include flight in the design in the first place, saving EVERYONE a lot of grief.

Think about how much time they have to spend verifying that flight doesn't break the game, literally, when pathfinder part 2 is available to complete. If they took that time and effort and put it into incorporating it into the game the first time through, it wouldn't take that much more to simply make it work from the beginning.

Pathfinder is deeply flawed. Even if it technically accomplished what Blizzard wants, it does so at the cost of everyone who enjoys flying as part of the game.

[LichLigth]

Except that by now, 4 expansions in, it's not even a reward. It's a consolation for putting up with Blizzard's grounded, convoluted, timegated BS for most of an expansion.

[tmamass]

Dunno. I guess, whole initial idea was to recreate TBC experience, simply because Blizzard assumed, that TBC was the best Wow's xpack due to constant growth of sub number. And TBC required you to do long tedious grind to get flying. I.e. flying was "reward" back then.

?? what grind? Level 68 and a questline and my druid could fly. other toons had to be 70 to buy it

[SirCowdog]

Except that by now, 4 expansions in, it's not even a reward. It's a consolation for putting up with Blizzard's grounded, convoluted, timegated BS for most of an expansion.

Um...yeah. I said that. Thanks for the support, but you might want to add your own words next time.

[SirCowdog]

You're underestimating just how much work that would take for WoW. As you always have.

Right, because we should simply accept the garbage open world designs of BfA? I'm sorry, I don't buy this argument. And simply giving Blizzard a free pass because "It's too haaaaaaaard!!!" doesn't help anything. Besides, WotLK showed us they could do it, and that was a decade ago. You're telling me that with today's advancement in technology and practice with the WoW engine, along with record profits, they somehow forgot how to do it? That doesn't add up.

Now, if you meant a complete overhaul of the entire design philosophy of the open world, I'm with you. But it's going to be a necessary step they need to take eventually. Simply pushing it back and procrastinating isn't helping. And I'd also like to add: Maybe if they stopped wasting so much time layering overly complex systems that get replaced almost EVERY patch, they'd have more time to work on other things....like the open world. :/

Oh, and btw. I NEVER said that this would be a simple or fast endeavor. Only that it's a much needed investment if the game is ever going to get better than what we've seen in the past 3 expansions, and probably now a 4th.

[WowIsDead64]

?? what grind? Level 68 and a questline and my druid could fly. other toons had to be 70 to buy it

I don't know for sure, because I didn't play much back then. But, as I know, basic flying was slower than ground mount back then. And epic flying required 5K gold. Yeah, I know, that some players say, that farming gold was easy back then and it's easy today. But not for me. I would take same amount of time for me to grind 5K gold, as would take to grind 5M today. Another reason, why Blizzard decided to change such universal currency as gold, that was actually fair, because almost every activity grants gold, so it's universal reward, into something else, like achievements and time-gating - is because be can buy gold for $$$ now. They wanted to make getting flying harder, but selling for something like 5M gold per character would be P2W.

So, overall I agree, that Pathfinder is good. But time-gating isn't. As always. Compromise - is when both sides sacrifice something. What do no-flyers sacrifice, when we have year long time-gating? What do they sacrifice, if we get flying only when content and whole xpack is completely obsoleted? And we sacrifice xpack release, that is supposed to be the best part of xpack. How can it be fair compromise?