There is an active poll over on the WoW forums called The Friendly Skies. While I question the adjective friendly applied to almost anything MMO, I found the choices available on the poll amusing, even if the associated text is patronizing in tone.
Patch 6.2.2 is scheduled for release this week, allowing those of you who have unlocked Draenor Pathfinder to take to the skies on your most trusted of winged beasts, floating steeds, and flying machines. With this comes the added opportunity for you to handle your affairs with greater convenience and timeliness.
Our friends over at Wowhead have put together a guide of Draenor Content Made Easier by Flying. We suggest you give it a look to glean the myriad activities made more accessible by flight, and let us know what you’ll be swooping down from sky to do first.
Travel by flying mount on Draenor will be most handy for:
1. Accessing Archaeology dig sites
2. Collecting more battle pets
3. Exploration and sightseeing
4. Leveling alts to 100
5. Gathering herbs, mining, or fishing
6. Seeking out rare spawns
7. Adventuring further in Tanaan Jungle
8. Locating the remaining treasures
9. Barrel rolls, duh
10. …Everything
As I’ve said in chat a million times (at least) easy is a four letter word. I have an idea of what an easy fight would be, but I’ve never seen it in any game,
The boss draws his weapon, then trips and falls on it. That would be an easy fight.
Nothing that requires a group effort to achieve is easy. The troll who taunts with “come on, this is easy” deludes himself. Just because he finds his role lacks challenge doesn’t mean that getting 5 to 25 players together to do anything lacks challenge. If you doubt this, see if you can get just 4 people together to play a game of cards at home; without bribing them with free beer, of course.
If you didn’t have a guild in earlier versions of WoW (Original & Burning Crusade specifically) you stood around outside the instance you needed to run and hoped that 4 other people would show up and want to run with you. You could (and did) spend hours standing around hoping for a group. Nine times out of 10 you would give up in frustration. The tenth time you would manage to get a group together only to discover that the tank couldn’t tank, the healer couldn’t heal, and DPS was a joke. About every third group you managed to get into an instance with would actually finish the dungeon.
Forget about ever raiding. Raiding was for guilds; I mean, you could try your hand at assembling a raiding group yourself. I tried it several times, never successfully, because of the next problem on the list.
Then came Looking For Raid/Group and suddenly the impasse of just getting a group together was bypassed; allowing for an automated assembly process as part of the game design. However, finding a group of people who knows what they are doing still remains a challenge. Being able to select the role you want to queue for has no bearing on your knowledge of what the role requires, what your classes gear spec should be, what the best spell rotation is, what to interrupt and when, etc; a near bottomless pit of knowledge that is required just to complete a raid with a moderate level of success.
So Looking For Raid/Group didn’t make the game easier, it made playing the game possible for the average player, which just adds to the frustration of the elitist jerks who think the games should be designed for them.
In much the same fashion as LFR making group efforts possible in game, so too flight makes certain kinds of gameplay possible, not just easier. Dismissing the constraints of time and frustration with the word easy is patronizing. Some people have real lives to live, they don’t have all day to spend grinding their way through repetitive content just to get to the thing they want to do today.
I am enjoying flight being added back into WoW. Not enjoying it so much I have forgotten the threat on the horizon, though. When it comes to Legion, I am still in the #NoFlyNoBuy camp. I really do hope that Blizzard game developers are taking us seriously.
