Hohenheim wrote:Right. Let's do this. This is not the greatest thread in the world.
No, this is a repost.
This is a rephrased post I made on /r/wow (
http://bit.ly/1cd6NjN) in response to Asmongold's video about flying. I promised to rewrite and repost this if enough people showed interest in it. Whoops.
If you want to read the original post, it's linked above. There is swearing in that one, but it also has a bunch of replies from other people and my replies to them... etc. I don't know if I'll keep up with the reposted version.
Swearing has been removed, by order of the King and no; there's still no TL;DR at the end. Either you read their argument and my [ranting and raving] rebuttal, or you don't bother at all. If you're not going to bother, why should I?
Levelling Difficulty/Flow/Whatever "example of a quest to break a prisoner out of an enemy camp. Normally, players would have to fight their way through it, but with flight they could simply drop in, grab their guy, and split."
This is a fair point - while levelling. However, every expansion except Cataclysm has had flying at level cap (and requires a decent chunk of gold, for your average player). Every expansion before has responded well to that (it's cap content that lets people down, not the levelling). It doesn't break levelling if you have it at cap, and since the player at cap is significantly more powerful than any quest expects, the point becomes moot.
If you've got a post-cap quest you want to be difficult (like the Garona sneaky mission, for example)? Add a debuff that prevents flying during it.
Targeted Exploration "like trying to figure out what's in that cave on top of a hill and how do I get up there."
Right, because if someone wants to do that while levelling, they can. Then, at cap, they can get flying and fly up there if they're on their tenth alt (because it's frustrating forcing a player to memorise the path up that mountain to get Leorajh). Or they can still choose to use ground mounts if they want.
Or, if you really want to prevent them flying straight to it, get creative and add a local air disturbance, add archers, add turrets that shoot them out of the sky. It can range from Fatigue-like impending doom to serious inconvenience like the turrets on the Krasarang Wild keeps.
Breaks World PVP (No quote for this, but it's a well known sentiment)
This would be true, if a few conditions were true:
1. Players were not spread out over 100 levels, across time and space, to such an extent that calling for help in Hillsbrad while levelling no longer brings the full fury of your faction down on that ganker.
2. Players were not sitting in their Garrison, and were instead in a faction city (like they actually said there would be) so that the other faction had somewhere worthwhile to attack. Do people idle in Ashran? I don't know. I never go there.
3. Getting to the fight didn't take forever. This isn't a dig about flightpaths, because flightpaths are great when I want to STOP playing the game for ten minutes. (Seriously - flightpaths force your player to stop playing the game. If you say they're scenic... well, I can appreciate it a lot more when I can control where I'm going).
Design Flaws "Having looked at how flying has played out in the old world in the last couple of expansions, we realized that while we were doing it out of this ingrained habit after we introduced flying in The Burning Crusade, it actually detracted from gameplay in a whole lot of ways,"
The problem here, right, is the fact that you don't know how to create 3D worlds. You're 2D oriented.
Look at Cataclysm's zones as a perfect example. There are hidden areas in every zone, in every axis. Cataclysm's zones were brilliant. The worst of them? Uldum and it still had undergound areas which were extremely fun to explore, level and quest in (with flying mounts). Would have been nice if Skywall was a proper zone, but ho-hum - chalk that up to Azjol-Nerub syndrome.
Speaking of which: remember back in Wrath, when we lamented the lack of Azjol-Nerub as an area under Northrend? We want 3D playable spaces that we can explore. At least one of the developers there can do it, unless you've fired them since Cata.
All that said, let's be realistic. There must be limits to flying.
1. No flying except at cap (at least until next expac is out). Like every expansion so far. Less affect on levelling experience than heirlooms or Recruit-A-Friend.
2. Debuff players after they dismount from flying. 50% stat reduction or something. There's your PVP issues resolved all at once - people will seek out foes, and either engage them with the advantage of surprise and savage (you love that term) disadvantage of the debuff (it's just an idea, so no; it's not perfect).
3. Prevent players from flying for five minutes or whatever (perhaps inverse scale based on time in PVP combat) after engaging in PVP. Still allowed to use ground mounts.
4. That aerial hazard thing I mentioned - winds that blow a player away from areas you don't want them to fly directly to. Turrets that defend major cities. Flying mobs that need to be avoided. (this sort of thing was in BC, in both hazard and mob form). All that aerial fire over Shattrath should be more than just flashy lights and repetitive sounds. Don't want someone flying during a quest? Debuff them from the start (Debuff: BEANS. Too much gastric distress to fly!).
5. Gold cost. Just another sink, but it means players have something cool to put their gold towards instead of another mount reskin (not a jab at the Runesaber, that design is smashing). Hell, if you want to get creative, make it a quest chain that costs gold to start. Then you go and kill mobs in heroic dungeons, or specific heroic bosses, to knock out their ability to take out flying players (which, by the way, is the worst way to disallow flying in a lore reason. Seriously? Ask a player to dodge stuff in a raid encounter like he's tapdancing on hot lava, and then just pretend they'd get shot out of the air if they tried to use a flying mount?)
There you go. If you read this far; thanks for reading. If you just skipped it, that's fine. Reading was hard when I was a baby, too.
Honestly? I don't even think Blizzard has been paying any attention to peoples feelings on flying, since they just trot out the same rubbish over and over again. Maybe next time, I'll write this on a wall in a cellar so it gets a more receptive audience. I'll try and pretend Blizzard is the wall, but at least with a wall the message actually sticks.
Edited by Hohenheim on 24/05/2015 23:56 BST
)