Originally Posted by
Snufflupagus
Then you are playing the wrong kind of game.
Sadly, your kind are loud enough that over the last fifteen years the game has genre-shifted so that it’s doing it’s best not to be the kind of game it is. The world in the name doesn’t make any sense any more.
Obviously it’s a moot point at this stage. People like you have won; World of Warcraft has been summarily and wholly ruined. But I’m not gonna pretend like flying is a good idea when the only argument people have for flying is “it lets me play World of Warcraft without playing World of Warcraft”.
As someone observed earlier, flying is effectively a dev tool that lets you skip bits you don’t like. You suggest that people who don’t like flying just don’t. To extend that logic:
* I don’t like raiding, but want to wreck noobs in PVP. We should have a boss instakill button so I can get mythic loot, but you can just not use it.
* I don’t like farming, but want to have maxed crafting professions. We should have a mats vendor so I can buy all my mats as I need them, but you can just not use it.
* I don’t like losing arena matches, but I want high rating. We should have a rating vendor. You can just not use it.
This does not make sense. The game is a whole system recursively built on itself. Flying whips out one of the central jenga blocks that everything is built upon: the world itself. Without that, everything teeters.
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(Sorry I don’t know how to have more than one quote in a post. I’m not often a poster).
The suggestion that WoW’s open world doesn’t matter is two things:
A) True. It doesn’t.
B) Comical. What an absurd proposition.
World of Warcraft is the open world. That was the pitch. That was the value proposition. Run around the open world of Warcraft. Build a character, explore this vast world, grow strong and blahblahblah. The open world is the game.
And then flying came.
Saying we should just get flying right off the bat because the open world doesn’t matter is like telling someone they should just smoke a pack a day, they’ve already got cancer—except every two yearsish they get a new expansion and a magical reprieve from cancer and you’re breathing down their neck to keep smoking. The open world doesn’t matter because it’s trivialised by flying. If players are just gonna fly over it, why would the devs make the world matter?
The upshot is that we get a crappy, claustrophobic, meaningless world and a game that is essentially just menus queueing up for a set of scenarios. Modern WoW would literally be a better game if you just logged into a menu screen, chose an instance and got tossed into the relevant loading screen. The world is an utter irrelevance... but that’s because of flying, not the other way around.
(Hence, incidentally, people crying about wanting a single faction and so on as well—WoW would be a better game of its current genre if there was just one faction, too, but it’d be a shit game).
But WoW can’t just get rid of the open world. That’s it’s core. It’s never gonna go away. So you and yours are stuck with a game that invests swathes of dev time in an open world you’d be better off without (and then invalidates that world with flying anyway), and I’m stuck with a game that caters to the twits who want to play fantasy-themed Counterstrike who suck dev time out of the world that makes it worthwhile because they’re just gonna fly right over it. Neither of us is happy.
Classic+ was the impossible dream that could’ve fixed it, but your side of the fence colonised mine and now they’ve fumbled that too.