Flying in WoW Discussion

[AdamSavage]

It seems they have delayed flying once again... Can never take anything they say at face value anymore.. The decided at the last minute to add in a bunch of stupid mounts and more pets, likely all store bought only. Anything to milk the player base for more cash... I'm seriously getting quite fed up with waiting, and debating if I should just permanently quit wow. Remove the game and delete all my toons and just walk away.

[Castile]

Really? You'd delete your account over flying that you know WILL be in the next expansion...ok.

[AdamSavage]

Really? You'd delete your account over flying that you know WILL be in the next expansion...ok.

Yes, but given Blizzard's track record with Honesty this expansion... Do you think I believe them ? How long they going to make use wait ? Till the end of that Expansion as well ?

We intend to disallow flying while leveling from 90 to 100, and have flying become available again in the first major patch for Warlords of Draenor.

Several Months later.. it's on PTR only. It was marked as release, and now it's not. Looking at likely another month. Which would make it 3 months sense they said we could have flying.. By the time it EVENTUALLY comes out, nobody will care anymore. It's the end of the Expansion, and everything is no longer relevant basically.

I honestly don't know how much longer I can hold out for flying.. The wait is just brutal..

[Lisaara]

Adam, have you ever thought, maybe....just maybe.....they had coding problems? You're getting all hurt and you don't even know WHY it was held off for so long. Looking at EVERYTHING(meaning not just WOD), Blizzard has never ever lied on purpose. Sometimes....things happen and we just gotta deal. We don't know what's going on in the background. They aren't allowed to tell us everything and it's like that in EVERY company that develops stuff. I've got friends that work in the gaming industry. A lot of stuff is NDA and I mean A LOT. I've been trying to get you to understand this every time you complain about flying and/or make a brand new thread to complain about flying because it got pushed back for whatever reason.

I'm not trying to be mean but this is going in circles. But honestly....if something isn't ready, I'm HAPPY Blizzard is taking the time to fix it before releasing it, even if it means I have to be patient. I think most of the 'no flying' complainers forget about that and everything else mentioned above.

[AdamSavage]

Adam, have you ever thought, maybe....just maybe.....they had coding problems? You're getting all hurt and you don't even know WHY it was held off for so long. Looking at EVERYTHING(meaning not just WOD), Blizzard has never ever lied on purpose. Sometimes....things happen and we just gotta deal. We don't know what's going on in the background. They aren't allowed to tell us everything and it's like that in EVERY company that develops stuff. I've got friends that work in the gaming industry. A lot of stuff is NDA and I mean A LOT. I've been trying to get you to understand this every time you complain about flying and/or make a brand new thread to complain about flying because it got pushed back for whatever reason.

I'm not trying to be mean but this is going in circles. But honestly....if something isn't ready, I'm HAPPY Blizzard is taking the time to fix it before releasing it, even if it means I have to be patient. I think most of the 'no flying' complainers forget about that and everything else mentioned above.

You are right.. They have not technically lied to us. "We intend to" isn't a actual promise, so it's not actually a lie. They do however have a serious problem with clear and direct communication. You should never have 3-4 different devs, all telling you completely different things. I've been on PTR and I flew around, but because it's PTR... It's not the same as live. There was nothing to "test" because anywhere I went, it was fine...

Unless my memory is horrible, I've only made one thread about flying. Changed the tittle a few times, to reflect changes through out the Expansion, but that's it. I've commented in other threads about no flying, but far as I know. I have not made more then one thread, directly about no flying. I was under the impression this patch was strictly going to be about Flying.. but further reading, shows that anything could be added to this patch.. I have no idea now, when they will finally put flying out on live..

As for deleting, my Toons.. I'm not sure I would ever do that.. Remove the game, I could see myself doing that. I've just had a really bad day, and with this new ptr build. It made it even worse.. Instead of a simple *Sigh*, I got really worked up..

[Lisaara]

It's not, you're right. I understand completely you're disappointed and frustrated. However, compared to many companies *coughEAcough*, Blizzard has been very honest and understanding to its playerbase. I'm glad they're communicating at all. On the SWTOR forums? No one has used them for YEARS. Not even Devs! The Devs don't check them or even talk to the players! Players just post on Reddit now cause it's so dead. It sucks! I guess that's why I'm thankful Blizz actually takes the time to talk to us

I thought you made more than one. If I am mistaken, I am sorry. I might've misremembered from the posts about it. (I laughed a little at the typo...tittles...haha. XD)

It's okay. We all have bad days. *hugs* It'll get better. We'll have flying back. We know for sure they're not removing it for good. They're just having some...issues. Remember, WoD wasn't coded to allow flying so they're having to rework some stuff.

[Castile]

At the end of the day it's your decision to play or not - if not flying is the straw that broke the camels back then so be it. I dunno if i'd quite over something I consider to be very minor in me playing and enjoying the game but then you're not me and everyone is different.

I probably wouldn't delete anything lol just unistall or cancel your account...then you have your pixels to go back to when the game is more appealing to you.

[Wain]

AdamSavage, while I understand you're sufficiently frustrated with not being able to fly that you post quite often on the topic, perhaps keep it all to one thread? Thanks.

[Pewmew]

Really? You'd delete your account over flying that you know WILL be in the next expansion...ok.

Yes, but given Blizzard's track record with Honesty this expansion... Do you think I believe them ? How long they going to make use wait ? Till the end of that Expansion as well ?

We intend to disallow flying while leveling from 90 to 100, and have flying become available again in the first major patch for Warlords of Draenor.

Several Months later.. it's on PTR only. It was marked as release, and now it's not. Looking at likely another month. Which would make it 3 months sense they said we could have flying.. By the time it EVENTUALLY comes out, nobody will care anymore. It's the end of the Expansion, and everything is no longer relevant basically.

I honestly don't know how much longer I can hold out for flying.. The wait is just brutal..

Here's the truth about patch 6.2.2 being delayed until the first week of September(response from the official forums)...

Except your sub-numbers tanked and likely continued to tank. With no "new content" in sight, you had to string us along as much as possible to save face to your investors in Q3. Q4 will get padded by Blizzcon and likely Legion beta/hype and more than likely pre-orders.

September is the last month of Q3. My guess is that by stringing us along this far your hope is that those that have stayed will continue to stay now that there is an "end in sight". Maybe some of those that left will come back too, in time to make the cut-off for when you run your sub-number report for the quarterly report.

Am I wrong? It may be cynical, but you have to admit the timing is pretty suspect.

Stringing people along helps pad the Q3 sub numbers...

[AdamSavage]

Do you have a source for that quote ? I would like the see the follow up response, if any.

[Lisaara]

Or it could be coding issues....if you played the PTR, you'd have seen the problems they've been having because WoD wasn't designed for flying.

That quote wasn't from a blue. It was from someone being cynical on the forums.

[AdamSavage]

Lore put out his own thoughts on the flying.:

I'll start with this: we're a software development company. More precisely, we're a video game developer. Anything and everything can change in the software development world, for reasons that are often impossible to predict ahead of time. As a result, we're hesitant to 100% commit to anything. We've learned that, no matter how confident we are at any given point, there's always a very real chance that there's something we haven't thought of that makes what we want to do impossible.

The whole "weeks, not months" thing makes an easy example. At the time that was said, we firmly believed that it would only take us a few weeks to polish off Tanaan and fix a few areas we knew were likely to have some bugs, and then we'd roll out the flying patch. It's easy enough, right? We just change a few 0's to 1's and it's all done.

Then we started finding a lot more bugs and glitches than we expected. We found tiny pockets of the world that weren't properly obeying the flight rules, and would drop players to their deaths if you happened to fly through them. We found issues with certain mounts and class abilities that were caused by hotfixes to resolve exploits, which resulted in those mounts and abilities not working. We found situations in which if you fly into your Garrison at juuuuust the right angle, you get disconnected and can't get back onto your character for a good half hour or so.

Finding those bugs, implementing fixes, testing those fixes, finding more bugs (sometimes caused by those fixes)... it all added up to a lot more work being needed to actually enable flying than we had originally expected. And as a result, what we originally thought would only take a few weeks ended up taking a couple months.

Now, don't get me wrong: I'm not making excuses here. And I don't at all blame the players who are frustrated and upset that we didn't hit the timeline we originally stated. Honestly, we probably should never have said that it would only take a few weeks. That was clearly a mistake, and I apologize for it.

But that should hopefully give you an idea of why -- ESPECIALLY given the missteps we've made in the recent past -- we simply can't 100% guarantee that nothing will go wrong between now and September 1st. Truth is, we're more confident in this release date than we usually are this far in advance of a patch. That's why we felt that we could give a date at all.

There's just always -- ALWAYS -- a chance that something can go wrong at the last minute. We could, say, be finishing the fixes for the last couple of dismount bugs on the Saturday before release, and when we compile the final build, all of a sudden activating your flying mount teleports you to the graveyard in Westfall and deletes the contents of your inventory. Is that likely? Not really, no. But it's possible, so we need to make sure you're aware that things can change, just in case something like that does happen.

There are alternatives, of course. We could just not give a date until we know for 100% certain, which is our usual strategy. Like I said, we feel a little more confident in this date than usual, so we thought it was okay to share it.

The other option would have been to try to have the patch ready to go by the 1st, but not actually plan to release it until a week or so later. That would let us announce a date we'd be extremely confident in, but we'd essentially be delaying the release of flight even further, and we definitely don't want to do that. So, we gave a date that we feel pretty good about, with the reminder that we won't be able to release if something catastrophic happens.

This ended up being a giant wall of text, but I'll leave it with this: I know it's super frustrating when it feels like we're not being as open as we possibly could be. And I know it's equally frustrating when it seems like we're completely unwilling to commit to anything concrete. I spent 8 years as a player before I became an employee. I know exactly how it feels.

I just also know that it's better to not expect much and be pleasantly surprised, than to feel like a promise was broken. At least that's my opinion.

[Lisaara]

aaand that's what I've been saying....since the start of all this demand for flying. It's not as easy as flipping a switch.

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/383513-no-621/

Here's this too.

[Malackai]

So in short they basically strung us along since the start of WoD?

And Draenor was never developed with flying in mind..

Good to know that from now on I cant take anything serious with them anymore its gonna save me a lot of frustration in the future.

[Lisaara]

Not intentionally, no. They didn't string us along intentionally.

Any coder will know this pain....*ahem*

"99 bugs in the code of the game! 99 bugs in the code! Take one down, toss it around, 129 bugs in the code of the game!"

^ Seriously, that's how it is.

[Xota]

They disregarded feedback both about flying and about their simultaneous indecision and decision for perma-grounding. That's effectively stringing players along. Only after Ion Hazzikostos said in an interview in May that WoD would never have flying (after months of devs characterizing wanting flying as wanting to cheat) and they weren't going to do flying in future expansions did they seem to notice feedback. I get that ironing out the bugs can take a longer time than expected, but if they'd been intending to implement flying in 6.2 from the get go, or had they considered it on the table as they claim, they could have been ironing out those bugs earlier. Many of those bugs effect gliding effects too.

It's kind of moot. They know they bungled badly. Both the decision to perma-ground players, which they had to backtrack, and their drawing out of the decision. They're going to have to understand why players are skeptical and cynical, and stop complaining that players are speculating about their decision making process.
I just wish they came up with a better feedback method, since it kind of seems like un-subbing questionaires is what they finally made a difference. I pay (or token) monthly, I won't ever be asked for that feedback. And while twitter does force people to get to the point, it's horrible otherwise for providing feedback. There's no room for details or explanation, things tend to come across as ultimatums. Us 'old' people aren't even sure we're doing it right. If in-game feedback had a 80 character "summary" field, and promoted use of hash-tags, and developers responded in a way we knew that someone actually read some of it, that'd be a much better, at least for me.

[AdamSavage]

So in short they basically strung us along since the start of WoD?

And Draenor was never developed with flying in mind..

Good to know that from now on I cant take anything serious with them anymore its gonna save me a lot of frustration in the future.

I think this is partially true. Had they never wanted us to fly, they would of never made the world ready for flying. I think somewhere along in WoD Development, they stopped trying to make the world flying friendly. I'm not sure why they couldn't of just flat out got straight to the point. Unfortunately, with Dev A saying one thing, and Dev B saying something different. Players kept getting misinformation. What the actual true intent was, we may never know. We do know that 1/2 wanted us to have flying, and the other 1/2 did not.

The ironic thing is, to this day. They still have not learned to communicate properly, and they are still contradicting each other.

Example: http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/3841 ... -it-again/

From Rygarius:
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/198200 ... -8-19-2015
Ikhj says: Here you make it sound like 6.2.2 is definitely 100% set in stone for a September 1 release: "Patch 6.2.2 arrives Tuesday, September 1"

From Lore:
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic ... age=40#781
Ikhj says: Now all of a sudden a short while later this obscure caveat is added, saying that there is a chance that it could actually be delayed beyond September 1: "Please keep in mind that this release date is not set in stone". Many players would not have even seen this follow up post.

[Malackai]

Exactly and that's what grinds my gears the most.

I could have lived without flight hell i have been playing ff14 for a while now and they dint even had flight till 2 months ago so ye.. but I absolutely hate companies that use the whole yes/maybe/will see/no tactics they have been using lately.

Straw that broke the camels back I guess >_>

Not intentionally, no. They didn't string us along intentionally.

Any coder will know this pain....*ahem*

"99 bugs in the code of the game! 99 bugs in the code! Take one down, toss it around, 129 bugs in the code of the game!"

^ Seriously, that's how it is.

As someone that tests code and functionalities on a daily base for a company I am fully aware of bugs and relations between bugs etc.

Still MoP was designed with flying in mind. We barely had any bugs related to flying in there (maybe not even bugs as far as I am aware)same with some earlier expansions as well.
Now WoD while it might have been designed with flying in mind in perhaps the first couple of alpha builds and maybe some first beta builds. its very easy to see that they most likely gave up on Q&A "flight ready" very early after it was released.
The only conclusion I can get from that is someone must have told the Testers/QA not to bother testing the new additions to be fully functional with flight in mind. So at that point they new fully well they where not allowing flight ever. yet they kept saying next patch, we might enable flying we will see how it goes etc.

[Lisaara]

If you're familiar with coding, then you can't be that mad at them cause they wanted to test the waters and see what was going to happen. While communication could've been better, I think a lot of you are being a bit too harsh on them when sometimes.....a lot of this was also out of their control as well. Often the devs have to wait to hear from another dept before they can do/say anything.

[AdamSavage]

If you're familiar with coding, then you can't be that mad at them cause they wanted to test the waters and see what was going to happen. While communication could've been better, I think a lot of you are being a bit too harsh on them when sometimes.....a lot of this was also out of their control as well. Often the devs have to wait to hear from another dept before they can do/say anything.

What did they honestly think would happen ? You can't just take something away from the players, and expect them to be ok with it. They are really out of touch with what they think the player base wants, if they thought they would be ok with this.. The amount of people grumbling about no flying, should of been a hint.. I honestly question the thought process that goes on with the Devs at times. The decisions they make at times, simply make no sense. Then other times they make great decisions.