Originally Posted by
WowIsDead64
Yeah, totally agree. Flying was selling point in several xpacks and flying mounts were used as greatest rewards and motivation to do content. And it actually worked. It's just hypocrisy to say, that it's flying, that killed this game. At moment, when Blizzard tried to remove flying back in WOD, it was 50/50. We don't talk about it any longer. But it doesn't mean, that that second half of playerbase has changed it's mind and now loves no-flying. Simple thing - this half of playerbase has QUIT this game.
Overall it's flying and LFD, that are considered to be the biggest Wow-killers, that started to kill this game at the end of WotLK and beginning of Cata. No. LFD was bad, because Blizzard refused to punish toxic players for ruining dungeon experience. Because when you assemble group manually - you can blame yourself only for picking bad players. And Blizzard allowed everybody to have access to dungeons, while put obligations on other players to carry them, no matter what. For example they allowed needers to press "Need" button on everything, when players were asking to restrict usage of "Need". It created category of toxic players, who cared about getting gold from selling enchanting dust only and didn't really care about other players in their party. And increased difficulty of dungeons only made things much worse. Because who cares about toxic players, if content is easy anyway. Or PVP players, who wanted to abuse PVE gear in PVP and PVP is synonym of toxicity, while lack of PVE skill and desire to do PVE content - are synonyms of mess.
And we talked enough about flying already. Overall flying problem - is scale problem. World was big back in old times, so any amount of players had enough space to fit into it. Flying existed to compensate travel time in such big world. But then Blizzard decided, that they would save large amount of development costs, if they would just make world much smaller (as claustrophobic, as TI for example), remove flying and increase respawn rates to compensate. And nothing will change in players' experience. Problem is - it doesn't work. World doesn't scale well. Making it much smaller kills whole immersion. Because it's no longer about beating enemies. It's some sort of circus, where 100 players kill same 10 mobs on 2x2 spot and pretend, that they play RPG game.
Another major problem with flying - is that Blizzard try to make an illusion, that Wow is MASSIVE game and that MASSIVE amount of players play it. For whom it's so important just to see, not even to interact, massive amount of players on small spot? For some "social" players? Big city kids, who can't live without traffic jams and rush hour in subway experience? According to stats only 10% of players are socializers. Funny thing. I'm not sure, if this is coincidence or not, but same amount of players were raiding back in old times. I understand, that this 10% of players are VIP players, because many Blizzard developers like Ion himself are also raiders. But it's not good idea to sacrifice 90% of playerbase to please just 10% of it.