Dragonflight Alpha/Beta General Discussion

[Aucald]

Well, I suppose that is a fair statement. However, I am still concerned that in the instance of a backlash against general negativity in any capacity we could see a sort of stifling of legitimate criticism, as well. It is absolutely true that WoW's userbase in general has a habit of saying "no, I hate it, bad" without providing any further elaboration and often completely contradictory to prior claims made on an individual level. There is, of course, plenty of garbage to shift through, but I do think that there are times where public outcry does reflect a problem—see all the fairly-warranted bitching about the Nightborne designs, for instance. Those were hideous, I think. Similarly, everybody bitched and moaned about Covenants as a concept. Initially it was your standard forum shlock, as no data had come in regarding how Covenants actually played, but once the time came around people ended up with a fairly good understanding of the issues with the system and its design flaws.

I suppose it is partially the caustic nature of such complaints that serve to prevent Blizzard from taking them to heart, but just as much I feel like there's a degree to which they can be inattentive. Then again, I suppose there's not much use in being concerned since MMO-Champion is a user forum, as opposed to an official forum which the developers are more inclined to watch and read—this is probably why all the leaks and whatnot happen here. As a result, any feedback given here tends to be serve only as an object of further discussion among other players. Without much in the way of Blizzard oversight, inadequate feedback is less of a problem than it would be otherwise.

Still, your point is completely correct. It is admittedly true that positive feedback tends to be substantially less detailed than negative feedback, and that negative feedback is often more caustic than constructive on the internet, though I have seen a good degree of decent general feedback being given online, as well.

I don't mean to imply that all criticism is pointless or given to no effect, because I don't think that's true either. Just that, due to our general nature as concerns negative criticism, we make it difficult to discern those helpful patterns or meaningful bits of critical input by dint of, in a group sense, overflowing the taps with unnecessary, self-serving, or just vitriolic and unhelpful feedback. This forum has a wealth of useful information, useful feedback, and diligently gathered data from a wealth of experiences as concerns WoW - but in order to get at it, any developer or QA technician would have to wade through a *lot* of noise (to put it gently).

[huth]

Yep
Either its very good and they keep it a surprise closer to launch.... or its very bad

There is no practical reason to include the music before launch. The sound system is working, adding more music is trivial and unlikely to cause issues.

It's not "either or" either. There's other options you fail to consider.

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You think there can be no feedback on music? Obviously even if there is it is far too late to fix anything but people can absolutely give feedback on music and the community is large enough to have people with the expertise required to give constructive feedback.

Sure, but in that situation you might as well get that from live. There's still no point putting it into the beta.

[Nymrohd]

The sound system is working

I mean I'll challenge that since much of my feedback in the last few betas has been about how horribly they sync voice acting.

[Aucald]

I mean, why would they even add the music to the beta?

It's not like it needs testing. Beta is a beta, not early access lol

There is no practical reason to include the music before launch. The sound system is working, adding more music is trivial and unlikely to cause issues.

It's not "either or" either. There's other options you fail to consider.

I'd disagree, as I've personally witnessed bugs in how the music itself functions in-game, from zones playing the wrong songs to music overlapping in some places, failing to start in others, and 101 other possible bugs concerning it. I remember in the WotLK Beta there was a brief period with the Grizzly Hills music played in every zone, and if I recall correctly, you couldn't even turn off the music in the options menu - in that you could toggle it to disabled, but it would still play at max volume regardless. So yeah, the music does sometimes need testing, too.

[Cheezits]

I think this is pretty cool: there is an otter mount vendor who sells the mounts for various things, such as rings from dungeons, trinkets from the raid and other collectible items.

https://www.wowhead.com/beta/item=19...-traders-ottuk
https://beta.wowdb.com/spells/376879...-traders-ottuk
https://www.wowhead.com/beta/spell=3...scouting-ottuk

This is a nice way to incentivize content for collectors.

[Lady Atia]

I think this is pretty cool: there is an otter mount vendor who sells the mounts for various things, such as rings from dungeons, trinkets from the raid and other collectible items.

https://www.wowhead.com/beta/item=19...-traders-ottuk
https://beta.wowdb.com/spells/376879...-traders-ottuk
https://www.wowhead.com/beta/spell=3...scouting-ottuk

This is a nice way to incentivize content for collectors.

The amount of new mounts is still far too low compared to Shadowlands. I get the feeling they may have listened to all the "too many mounts QQ" complains and now we collectors are presented with another early Legion for mounts ...

[Cheezits]

The amount of new mounts is still far too low compared to Shadowlands. I get the feeling they may have listened to all the "too many mounts QQ" complains and now we collectors are presented with another early Legion for mounts ...

It's because Dragonflying makes ground mounts unfortunately obsolete. This expac is going to be rough for mounts until they just enable the system on all mounts or a select amount.

[Makorus]

It's because Dragonflying makes ground mounts unfortunately obsolete. This expac is going to be rough for mounts until they just enable the system on all mounts or a select amount.

Even the fact that the Deluxe Edition mount is a mount you literally will never use is stupid enough as is.

Could have easily made it a skin for one of the dragons. Same with the Wrath Promo Protodrake.

[Highlord Hanibuhl]

I really hate how they make the Dracthyr available on november 15th, while I'm here sitting and anticipating it to be released next week.

[Sondrelk]

The amount of new mounts is still far too low compared to Shadowlands. I get the feeling they may have listened to all the "too many mounts QQ" complains and now we collectors are presented with another early Legion for mounts ...

Shadowlands was unique in that it offered 4 sets of 8 mounts, seemingly just because it could. Expecting that many mounts always seemed kinda silly.
The amount by we get now seems more reasonable, possibly just a tiny bit less than ideal.

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I really hate how they make the Dracthyr available on november 15th, while I'm here sitting and anticipating it to be released next week.

Its definitely annoying when the first three weeks should ideally be to get used to the new class. Dracthyr will essentially have to get used to their class extremely fast before getting thrown into Dragonflight proper.

[Highlord Hanibuhl]

Shadowlands was unique in that it offered 4 sets of 8 mounts, seemingly just because it could. Expecting that many mounts always seemed kinda silly.
The amount by we get now seems more reasonable, possibly just a tiny bit less than ideal.

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Its definitely annoying when the first three weeks should ideally be to get used to the new class. Dracthyr will essentially have to get used to their class extremely fast before getting thrown into Dragonflight proper.

Yeah I don't get why they wait so long to release the Dracthyr; it's hardly an early access now..

[Shadochi]

I hope all the areas that get added in patches are part of the same time and portals/quicktravel isn't required.
Last and only time this properly happened was in WoD, but that only had 1 zone. MoP almost had all zones like that besides Isle of Thunder being accessible only through portals.

My guess is that 1 patch will have the forbidden reach as a max level area, then there was the 10.1 datamine of "Dragon Isles Underground" which probably indicates a separate world instance but I would hope it would be the same. There is potential for the giant body of water surrounded by islands west of Ohn'ahran Plains and tbh they could just as well add islands surrounding the main island like they did in various mop patches.

Tho I must ponder what Dragon Isles Underground might be. If its a full zone it probably won't have dragonriding enabled, but its not excluded seeing how an underground zone like deepholm has flight. And it could possibly be a massive zone. But I believe it is more likely the Dragonflight mega dungeon that will be that, and not a whole new zone. My guess is that 10.1 would be forbidden reach with the underground area being the dungeon..

Another thing I wonder is what will we get for S3 as far as dungeons go? If they do a megadungeon then that could be split into 2 m+ dungeons, but what about the other 2 from DF? Could they release 4 m+ dungeons over by the time S3 starts and have them be S3, and then S4 be all the dungeons?

[Lady Atia]

Shadowlands was unique in that it offered 4 sets of 8 mounts, seemingly just because it could. Expecting that many mounts always seemed kinda silly.
The amount by we get now seems more reasonable, possibly just a tiny bit less than ideal.

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Its definitely annoying when the first three weeks should ideally be to get used to the new class. Dracthyr will essentially have to get used to their class extremely fast before getting thrown into Dragonflight proper.

They still could do as many recolours as they did with Shadowlands, the skins are in the data and actually the first alpha build had them in already. But the recent builds purged more and more mounts, we are now at 27 new ones if my count is right and many of them only have one colour available sadly.

[Cheezits]

Even the fact that the Deluxe Edition mount is a mount you literally will never use is stupid enough as is.

Could have easily made it a skin for one of the dragons. Same with the Wrath Promo Protodrake.

The Wrath Drake can probably get the animations, the problem is that there isn't an "adult dragon" dragonriding animation set in the game yet. The Azure drake is different, and we know the next dragon is probably the noodle.

So until they add dragon riding animations for the regular dragon rig... yeah

[Lady Atia]

I hope all the areas that get added in patches are part of the same time and portals/quicktravel isn't required.
Last and only time this properly happened was in WoD, but that only had 1 zone. MoP almost had all zones like that besides Isle of Thunder being accessible only through portals.

My guess is that 1 patch will have the forbidden reach as a max level area, then there was the 10.1 datamine of "Dragon Isles Underground" which probably indicates a separate world instance but I would hope it would be the same. There is potential for the giant body of water surrounded by islands west of Ohn'ahran Plains and tbh they could just as well add islands surrounding the main island like they did in various mop patches.

Tho I must ponder what Dragon Isles Underground might be. If its a full zone it probably won't have dragonriding enabled, but its not excluded seeing how an underground zone like deepholm has flight. And it could possibly be a massive zone. But I believe it is more likely the Dragonflight mega dungeon that will be that, and not a whole new zone. My guess is that 10.1 would be forbidden reach with the underground area being the dungeon..

Another thing I wonder is what will we get for S3 as far as dungeons go? If they do a megadungeon then that could be split into 2 m+ dungeons, but what about the other 2 from DF? Could they release 4 m+ dungeons over by the time S3 starts and have them be S3, and then S4 be all the dungeons?

The underground zone is prolly the new dwarfen zone mentioned in the Uldaman books, and I'm quite sure that's where we will get the noodle dragon since it looks like a cave dragon already. We could already fly in Deepholm, there is literally no reason why we shouldn't be able to fly in the new underground zone too.

[Sondrelk]

They still could do as many recolours as they did with Shadowlands, the skins are in the data and actually the first alpha build had them in already. But the recent builds purged more and more mounts, we are now at 27 new ones if my count is right and many of them only have one colour available sadly.

They could, i just don't think it's really all that necessary. It wasn't that Shadowlands needed so many mounts. It was that it seemed to want a covenant themed mount, with four variants to match the four covenant armor recolours, and then an upgraded version if the mount, also with four recolours.

And of course, Dragonflight has the dragonriding mounts, which if you count the various effects, would easily add up to a large amount of new mounts. Probably similar to BfA.

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The Wrath Drake can probably get the animations, the problem is that there isn't an "adult dragon" dragonriding animation set in the game yet. The Azure drake is different, and we know the next dragon is probably the noodle.

So until they add dragon riding animations for the regular dragon rig... yeah

I wouldn't be surprised if a future patch makes it so all dragons are capable of dragonriding. Or otherwise makes it so you can toggle a mount as dragonriding or regular, based on what is available.

[Lady Atia]

They could, i just don't think it's really all that necessary. It wasn't that Shadowlands needed so many mounts. It was that it seemed to want a covenant themed mount, with four variants to match the four covenant armor recolours, and then an upgraded version if the mount, also with four recolours.

And of course, Dragonflight has the dragonriding mounts, which if you count the various effects, would easily add up to a large amount of new mounts. Probably similar to BfA.

But the dragonriding mounts are still just four new mounts. Idk, I'm always in favour making all possible tints available as seperate mounts, so people can choose what colour they want to match for their transmogs. Now it looks like we are back to "you will get one thunderlizard mount, be happy about it, don't ask for the other colours!", which is a huge step back from what we had in Shadowlands.

I honestly hope they just moved some of the recolours to 10.5 so we will have ~25+ mounts per patch instead of ~50 mounts every second. (so at the end of an expansion we still get the same amount of mounts and all the recolours, just better spread out)

[Nymrohd]

Tho I must ponder what Dragon Isles Underground might be. If its a full zone it probably won't have dragonriding enabled, but its not excluded seeing how an underground zone like deepholm has flight. And it could possibly be a massive zone. But I believe it is more likely the Dragonflight mega dungeon that will be that, and not a whole new zone. My guess is that 10.1 would be forbidden reach with the underground area being the dungeon..

Ideally I'd hope for a fairly large zone that has entrances all over the Dragon Isles and allows for dragonriding. But something tells me that Blizzard cannot do that and it will have to be instanced.

[Makabreska]

Tho I must ponder what Dragon Isles Underground might be. If its a full zone it probably won't have dragonriding enabled, but its not excluded seeing how an underground zone like deepholm has flight. And it could possibly be a massive zone. But I believe it is more likely the Dragonflight mega dungeon that will be that, and not a whole new zone. My guess is that 10.1 would be forbidden reach with the underground area being the dungeon.

That would be an extremely illogical move for Blizz to not allow DR in any new patch zone. No chance for that to happen.

[Shadochi]

Ideally I'd hope for a fairly large zone that has entrances all over the Dragon Isles and allows for dragonriding. But something tells me that Blizzard cannot do that and it will have to be instanced.

Im not sure if phasing is done per amount of players in a zone or in the whole map that zone is a part of, but that could be a problem to where it would feel empty if the phase is shared with everyone above ground.

That would be an extremely illogical move for Blizz to not allow DR in any new patch zone. No chance for that to happen.

I didn't say in any new patch, obviously forbidden reach will have it and I suspect there wont be a portal to forbidden reach since its a quick glide from Valdraaken.
But Dragonriding would work way different in an enclosed underground zone compared to regular flight in Deepholm. Can be pulled off but would cut a lot of zone design aspects that people are hoping for in an underground zone IMO.
The easiest way would probably be to have some/most of the outer walls and pretty much the whole sky as a sandbox of the cave, but then there is no way that would be on the same map as DI, but another instance instead