View Poll Results: What would you like seen done with Pathfinder?

Voters
429. This poll is closed
  • Remove pathfinder

    83 19.35%
  • Keep Pathfinder but remove the time-gating (available at launch)

    208 48.48%
  • Pathfinder is fine as-is

    138 32.17%
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  1. #501
    If they'd add in a way to get rep at your own pace, Pathfinder threads would cease to exist.

    Seeing you need 12,000 rep and get 85 rep per WQ? That's not fun at all, I'm sorry. It needs major changing.

  2. #502
    Quote Originally Posted by Frosteye View Post
    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
    First off random numbers are BS.
    Your own god damm poll suggest that 80% is fine with path finder. But want something less time gated. So 1% is 80% :P.

    Secondly you brush off all reasons with Muh immersion. It has more reasons. Like blizzard not making content x amount of people just fly past. Why make a terrain when most people fly over it and dive bomb the quests. And more reasons....not going to tell them here...this is like the 10th i need flying now cry post.

    3th you make it sound like its heavy time gated....IT IS NOT. Right now pathfinder 1 gives you a bonus to speed, pathfinder 2 launches and is farmable/getting it is real fast. So the only time gating they do is saying....now its flying time. Could that be sooner...yeah. I think right now its most of the time patch 2 or 2,5. I think patch 1 or 1,5 would be better.

    4th We at least ( not even counting spells/items ) have not 1, not 2, but 3 Hearthstones. 1 for a inn, 1 for dalaran broken isle, 1 for garrison. So you can go around a zone really fast. And there are a LOT of flightpoints and you have a god damm flute that works in the last expansion and the current one. So you have 2 options to go around the zones real fast. And 3 options to get to big city's fast.

    Question: What is your problem with the current system??? You have enough way's to get around in zones and continents. So why do you need flying? answer me this!

  3. #503
    Quote Originally Posted by det View Post
    I see two problems here:

    -nobody ever gave me a definition of "the playerbase"
    -people complaining on the forum do not represent what everybody else does. Just look at how few people actually post here in the statistics and even in this tiny thread, there are people disagreeing with you, some agree partially...so again..what is this playerbase?

    (if your playerbase would be in any agreement, you wouldn't have a 3 way split poll and only 17% in favor of removing it - now we can discuss what the 50% really mean with " remove the time-gating" - because to me they seem to be fine to at least grind out whatever rep is needed.

    I like to point out that there was a thread that asked the simple question of "flying yes or no" and over several hundred pages and thousands of posts...it didn't bring a clear answer.

    Yeah..."playerbase" and knowing what they want. The playerbase is everyone of us and we all want different things. Would I have a problem with paying 1000 gold and be able to fly? Nope. Not even with paying 10 000 or 100 000. But I also don't have a problem with Pathfinder as it is - well...I guess I have one..the gap between part 1 and part 2 is too long.

    - - - Updated - - -



    No idea if it is more accurate - unless you can did your way through the quarterly reports and connect the dots. As it is none of these things have anything to do with flying.

    Again, I know it is an unpopular opinion, but just as Google, Amazon and who knows what else knows what porns you watch, what shit you buy, what stuff to recommend to you, Blizzard monitors all activities and knows what we do. If they pull pathfinder in one x-pac..sure people might grit their teeth. Do it in a second x-pac and people still stick with it...hm...maybe it is okay with them

    Whatever - i am sure of one thing. If data shows, people are quitting the game in masses because of pathfinder, J. Allan Brack or maybe Mr. Kotik himself is gonna take Ion aside and tell him to drop the shit.

    Because..why offset something everyone dislikes and quits over by shop services, when you can have everyone happily staying AND pay for shop services.
    17% in favor of removing, but ~67% (2/3rds ) in favor of changing it. A clear majority agrees that the current incarnation of pathfinder is flawed.

  4. #504
    Quote Originally Posted by det View Post
    No idea if it is more accurate - unless you can did your way through the quarterly reports and connect the dots. As it is none of these things have anything to do with flying.
    I actually follow a few youtubers who did go through all the quarerly reports, as well as the earnings call, and conference call for questions from investors. Which is not to say that I'm some kind of expert. We're all just guessing. But the one thing I can be sure of is that the driving force in ANY corporation as large as Activision-Blizzard is money.

    So everything is related. If they can remove a loved feature, but by doing so it can be replaced by something else in the game that makes them money, they'll probably do it. In this case, it's my belief that by taking flight out of the design of the open world, they save money in development costs by streamlining the process. They only have to design in a single level, mostly 2-dimensional world. They don't have to update AI to handle 3-dimensional pathing, etc.

    And while it's not directly related, if they're making enough profit from other aspects of the game, they probably don't feel that the losses from people sore about flying are enough to warrant changing how it works. There might be other factors involved that we're not aware of, as I mention below.

    Quote Originally Posted by det View Post
    Again, I know it is an unpopular opinion, but just as Google, Amazon and who knows what else knows what porns you watch, what shit you buy, what stuff to recommend to you, Blizzard monitors all activities and knows what we do. If they pull pathfinder in one x-pac..sure people might grit their teeth. Do it in a second x-pac and people still stick with it...hm...maybe it is okay with them

    Whatever - i am sure of one thing. If data shows, people are quitting the game in masses because of pathfinder, J. Allan Brack or maybe Mr. Kotik himself is gonna take Ion aside and tell him to drop the shit.
    I always hesitate to put a lot of stock in the idea that human beings, who are mostly divorced from the gaming community can make, good decisions based on that data. Brack is famously quoted with the "You think you do but you don't" line, and look how that turned out. Classic is now carrying the WoW title.

    The thing we have absolutely have to remember is that what the executives want is very much NOT the same thing as what is necessarily good for the health of the game. These are the guys who thought Diablo Immortal would carry Blizzcon as the big reveal, and who very much want to move into the mobile market. Not because the mobile market has good, quality, healthy games. But because that's where they can be the most predatory with their business.

    How does this relate to Pathfinder? Think about what Pathfinder actually does. It lets Blizzard use a more simple open world design formula(not that individual encounters or art are simple, but the overall approach to the open world), while simultaneously causing players to spend more time to complete objectives, and incentivizes players to complete more of the world by holding flight hostage.

    Hopefully you can see that while that probably does good things to the on-paper statistics of engagement and time played, it might not necessarily be all that enjoyable from a player perspective.



    Quote Originally Posted by det View Post
    Because..why offset something everyone dislikes and quits over by shop services, when you can have everyone happily staying AND pay for shop services.
    I would like you to also consider what I said earlier about the fallibility of the human beings running the game. If it was just a robot making the decisions based on pure logic, then maybe it's because in the long run the calculations have been done, and it actually saves/makes them more money this way. And maybe those ARE the actual arguments being made internally at Blizzard to support the No-Flying approach to the game.

    But I highly suspect what it really comes down to is more human: Someone, probably Ion and a couple of supporters, really just don't personally like the idea. And as people are fond of saying: It's Blizzard's game and they can do what they want with it.

    But another important thing to consider: Until the game actually uses a modern zone design where flying is fully integrated into it, how can Blizzard possibly have accurate data on how well players react to it? They probably have super accurate data collected on how players respond to zones without flying, since those are all over the place. But when was the last zone that had flying in from the beginning? MoP?

    Given how the initial test was WoD, and how that test was so controversial, maybe it's time they revisited the concept, if only to update their data.
    Last edited by SirCowdog; 2019-11-14 at 10:35 PM.

  5. #505
    Quote Originally Posted by det View Post
    That is the awesome thing with polls, isn't it? 299 ppl voted in your little poll.

    TWOHUNDREDNINTYNINE.

    A clear majority of..what exactly? Are 299 ppl representing WoW? Even if there are under 1 million subs, hell....you do the maths how representative that is - but I give you a hint

    1% is 10 000
    0,1% is 1000

    ...and your poll participation of 299 ppl is even below that..like 0,033% or something?


    So..what representative conclusions do you honestly pull from that? You know...conclusions that Blizzard does not have more "hard" numbers on?
    let's go backwards. Would you say the majority of the playerbase wanted flying gone from the game?
    From the huge outcry that made Blizz not doing that says no. So then. If it's a COMPROMISE between the DEVS and the PLAYERS where the DEVS get to design the game how they want and the PLAYERS can keep flying does that tell to you that players are generally happy with this? ACCEPTING something doesn't mean HAPPY.
    It was called a COMPROMISE for god's sake. Ion got boo-d for pathfinder on the most fanfanatic event. That should tell you something.
    Last edited by Lei; 2019-11-14 at 11:00 PM.

  6. #506
    Quote Originally Posted by VinceVega View Post
    An lets start the same discussion for the one millionth time. They won't change it. Get over it.
    While we are beating dead horses, can we talk about high elves coming to the alliance again too?

  7. #507
    Quote Originally Posted by det View Post
    Wow...it is pretty late where I am here, so it is gonna take me some time to digest what you wrote - but....thanks for the well thought out replies. There is good food for thought - but yeah...baseline in the end will always be what makes them most money and hopefully not short sighted cash in, ruining it in the long run.
    I REALLY wish that I could have this type of conversation more often. But I tend to let the trolls and haters push my buttons on this topic. When I really get down to it, I have spent a lot of time thinking about games in general, but game design in WoW specifically. Largely because it's one of my favorite games....well....used to be, anyway. :/

    Quote Originally Posted by det View Post
    As you said "ANY corporation as large as Activision-Blizzard is money" - but ...hell...not only are they required by law to have the incentive to make money (not kidding...when you set up a business, you also have to do so with the intention to make money...it is an actual requirement in my country) - and that also applies to companies smaller than Blizzard

    Let's not kid ourselves. I am a single, self-employed male. My goal is to bloody well make money ^^
    Look, I'm not going to get mad at anyone for wanting to make money. But I can, and will, get mad at someone for the WAY in which they make their money, if that way is underhanded or dishonest.

    And that's what gets to me about a lot of the AAA game companies. I look at games like The Witcher 3 as a prime example showing how making a quality game can be profitable. Without every opportunity being taken to lie, trick, coerce, or prey upon the customer wallet. It is absolutely possible to make a highly successful, profitable game without treating your employees and customers like absolute shit.

    So when I see things like Blizzard putting more store mounts than ever before in the cash shop, taking away player agency with things like the GCD, personal loot, and flight, as well as pushing predatory mobile trash like Diablo Immortal....I can't just sit back and say nothing. That crap pisses me off!

    Blizzard.... just make a quality game. Stop trying to trick or psychologically manipulate players out of the money. You have some of the most dedicated fans in the history of gaming. Just respect them, and respect your game. Stop following the trends of industry super-avarice and underhanded coercion. Go back to setting the trend and being the industry leader by dispensing with all that bottom-tier greed. People WILL respond positively to that.
    Last edited by SirCowdog; 2019-11-14 at 11:41 PM.

  8. #508
    Quote Originally Posted by Lei View Post
    Ion got boo-d for pathfinder on the most fanfanatic event. That should tell you something.
    This is a super-important point that I think a lot of people don't fully appreciate or understand.

    A lot of detractors...of ANY argument...are fond of using the "vocal minority" line to undermine the validity of an opponent's stance. We see this ALL the time in the debate about flying.

    But here's the thing. The vocal minority argument might be true when it's just a few random people on the forums. But the people who go to Blizzcon are the most dedicated, and arguably financially stable, fans of Blizzard. These are the types of players that Blizzard wants to target. The ones with money, and the ones who are already predisposed to spend that money. FFS, they literally paid months in advance to travel to what boils down to a glorified advertisement for Blizzard products!

    If those kinds of players are booing your announcements, Blizzard needs to sit up and pay attention. We saw this with Diablo Immortal. We saw it again with Classic. While they might not be representative of the entire playerbase, they can be strongly considered as a sounding board for the limit of what you can get away with. These are literally, not figuratively.... the most dedicated and invested players.

    Blizzard has been doing much better about listening and acting on player feedback as of late. It's not perfect....it likely never will be. But Classic made Blizzard realize that sometimes players know what they're talking about. I would strongly hope that Blizzard will recognize and listen to players about Pathfinder as well. Not just random forum posters who "REEEEEEEEE!" about some random buff or nerf....but the most dedicated portion of their players who attend Blizzcon.

    I'm not saying the should instantly kowtow and bend to demands. But maybe actually stop and consider what people are saying about not liking Pathfinder before copy/pasting it into Shadowlands.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by det View Post
    Again, thanks for the extensive reply. There isn't really anything for me to argue with. Nicely thought out. Have a good night and looking forward to more posts from you.
    Thank you. The fact that there are reasonable people out there who are willing to have this level of conversation is why I keep at it.

  9. #509
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    good god people give up the pathfinder arguments already, jesus.

  10. #510
    imagine if pathfinder flying was implemented since tbc

  11. #511
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    what would you say about realms with flying enable and with flying disable or shards with that or an npc that turn your flying skills off so you can be on the ground all the time , i LOVE flying btw

  12. #512
    Quote Originally Posted by MORGATH99 View Post
    what would you say about realms with flying enable and with flying disable or shards with that or an npc that turn your flying skills off so you can be on the ground all the time , i LOVE flying btw
    Yeah that could work

  13. #513
    Quote Originally Posted by MORGATH99 View Post
    what would you say about realms with flying enable and with flying disable or shards with that or an npc that turn your flying skills off so you can be on the ground all the time , i LOVE flying btw
    No offense, but why have an NPC to turn off your flying if you just...I don't know....don't use your flying mount?

    Anyway, I think the idea of turning off flight for everyone who has War Mode toggled on is the easiest, simplest, and most straightforward change that Blizzard could implement to shut up the "Flying hurts WPVP" people. They'd actually get what they want, too! So it's a win for them.

  14. #514
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    Quote Originally Posted by d00dles View Post
    Alternative: Allow flying mounts within 30 yards of the flight point. Problem solved?

    This means players would be able to fly fast for the first quest (assuming the quest hub has a fp) but from there on out its ground mounts only. Players cant escape from pvp or unnecessary crazy flying rules. Seems like a decent compromise to me.
    There is an easier solution - turn flying back to 60% speed, this way both ways of transportation are relatively similar. Those who want to slog through a whole location over 15 minutes on a flying mount can do that, those who want to get to places quickly using ground mount/fly paths can also do that.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Frosteye View Post
    I would buy Shadowlands and try it out if they said they were removing the time-gating of flying (available at launch). Is it my idea of perfect? No - but it would be a start in the right direction.

    Part 1:
    - Max level
    - Loremaster
    - Exploration
    - Drop the rep requirement

    Part 2 - removed

    ez way to make the playerbase happy
    Then flying is not a reward, but a glorified max level ability unlock.

    At this point blizzard can't do anything with flying besides delaying it or removing it completely (they could also turn it back to 60%, but people would consider that a removal of flying). Lots of players who play WoW in-and-out (as in "i do 4 daily quests over 10 minutes on all my 12 characters in just an hour, but without flying it takes 4 hours instead!") really like flying, because it's a very powerful tool to skip over terrain on top of being the fastest means of transportation, which shouldn't be the case in the first place. This system evolved into "flying or bust", because there is literally no benefit of using ground mount over flying mount, you are significantly slower, because the other option allows you to just skip over everything, and it's a problem that blizzard needs to solve. They decided to solve it with pathfinder, which is kinda "meh" solution that pleases everyone, besides vocal minority of players who want flying to be gone completely and those who want flying to be unlocked without effort.
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  15. #515
    Quote Originally Posted by SirCowdog View Post
    lSo everything is related. If they can remove a loved feature, but by doing so it can be replaced by something else in the game that makes them money, they'll probably do it. In this case, it's my belief that by taking flight out of the design of the open world, they save money in development costs by streamlining the process. They only have to design in a single level, mostly 2-dimensional world. They don't have to update AI to handle 3-dimensional pathing, etc.
    And yet we get people complaining that the world design is too convoluted and they struggle to find objectives or get around because of the need to find paths over or around hills and mountains. You seem to be confused with the simpler map design from when Blizz allowed flying and didn't even have to bother making paths to areas of content.

    How does this relate to Pathfinder? Think about what Pathfinder actually does. It lets Blizzard use a more simple open world design formula(not that individual encounters or art are simple, but the overall approach to the open world), while simultaneously causing players to spend more time to complete objectives, and incentivizes players to complete more of the world by holding flight hostage.
    Both world and content design are more complex after flight was removed, the daily system of pre-WoD Warcraft was hardly complicated and flying made it an absolute snooze fest if you were "forced" to do it by tying in (or "holding hostage ") end game progression.

    If you take your spin away from the description what you're saying is Blizz are using flight as an incentive that keeps people playing and giving them a reward they consider worthwhile. In general that is considered a good thing...

    Hopefully you can see that while that probably does good things to the on-paper statistics of engagement and time played, it might not necessarily be all that enjoyable from a player perspective.
    Here you're showing your blindspot again. Try to remember that your "player perspective" differs from others. Just because you're not keen on something it doesn't mean others don't find it enjoyable.

    I would like you to also consider what I said earlier about the fallibility of the human beings running the game. If it was just a robot making the decisions based on pure logic, then maybe it's because in the long run the calculations have been done, and it actually saves/makes them more money this way. And maybe those ARE the actual arguments being made internally at Blizzard to support the No-Flying approach to the game.

    But I highly suspect what it really comes down to is more human: Someone, probably Ion and a couple of supporters, really just don't personally like the idea. And as people are fond of saying: It's Blizzard's game and they can do what they want with it.
    Whilst Blizz can do what they want with the game I think it's a pretty daft idea to think that just a few devs would be able to dictate the design if it was rejected by a majority of the player base, disliked by the other devs and offered no improvements to gameplay. Blizz have been pretty quick to change tack if systems are considered to be an overall negative.

    But another important thing to consider: Until the game actually uses a modern zone design where flying is fully integrated into it, how can Blizzard possibly have accurate data on how well players react to it? They probably have super accurate data collected on how players respond to zones without flying, since those are all over the place. But when was the last zone that had flying in from the beginning? MoP?

    Given how the initial test was WoD, and how that test was so controversial, maybe it's time they revisited the concept, if only to update their data.
    Blizz already experimented with different ways of flight being integrated into the game and due to engine limitations, a general unsuitability for games like WoW to use 3D combat and it moving too far away from it's open-world RPG/action/adventure roots they decided it wasn't an Avenue worth exploring further - in WotLK they got as far as advertising aerial combat on the box before scrapping it as a bad idea. What you call "modern design" just isn't going to happen. On the other hand Blizz had seen plenty of positive results from "no-fly" content like Isle of Quel'danas, Firelands and the MoP islands, as well as negative results for the Cataclysm leveling experience and MoP's initial glut of dailies. Even WoD had a response that made them think the game wouldn't need flying at all.
    Last edited by Dhrizzle; 2019-11-15 at 09:10 AM.

  16. #516
    I am now running a friend thru BfA (we just finished Legion) and flying makes it so, so much better. If they removed flying altogether I probably wouldn't have alts, on the other hand I'd also probably be unsubbed. That's me and your mileage may differ.

  17. #517
    Imo, pathfinder shouldve been availible right away as a reward for reaching exalted with all the factions. (and later in a .1 patch nerfed to only require revered so that new players arent forced to grind too much old content).

    As with almost every other aspect of wow, its the timegating that annoys me. Not the grind. Im happy to grind, i hate waiting thou.
    None of us really changes over time. We only become more fully what we are.

  18. #518
    Quote Originally Posted by Aphrel View Post
    Imo, pathfinder shouldve been availible right away as a reward for reaching exalted with all the factions. (and later in a .1 patch nerfed to only require revered so that new players arent forced to grind too much old content).

    As with almost every other aspect of wow, its the timegating that annoys me. Not the grind. Im happy to grind, i hate waiting thou.
    That would be a terrible system. That outright rewards players for waiting to do content.

  19. #519
    Quote Originally Posted by Lei View Post
    It was called a COMPROMISE for god's sake. Ion got boo-d for pathfinder on the most fanfanatic event. That should tell you something.
    He also got cheered. It was a clear 50/50

  20. #520
    Quote Originally Posted by Kallisto View Post
    He also got cheered. It was a clear 50/50
    He literally says while it's happening that there's more boo.

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