No flying in 5.0: Would it be better?

[Vhailor]

Edit:

I think the genie is well and truly out of the bottle. As you say, this game is designed to be convenient. We're used to moving quickly and freely and a lot of people like it.
Instead of taking things away or adding costs and artificial difficulties, I think it would be better to look at ways of giving us more incentive to travel on foot and more reason to be in the open world.

Mabinogi had a cost attached to mounts/pets (they could only be summoned for about an hour per day, and each had different inventory sizes, so you better not put anything you need all day on them.) However most felt this was an annoyance since a common thing to do in mabinogi was use the pets as a kind of chain-gun (summon all the pets in order one at a time, and unsummon them before they take damage, as they had a CD between use, but if you had at least 10 of them you had enough to keep smacking a boss while playing dead.)

Like the most reasonable thing off hand would attach a fuel/feed cost to mounts to move faster than walking speed. But this adds a road cone that wasn't previously present, thus people would not like any change to how they work. Like the present Gysahl greens for the chocobo is the closest there is in the game to this, and unless mounts get upgraded to combat pets, it would not be justified.

I generally agree here, there'd likely be backlash. Still, the point of the thread, as I understand it, is to speculate whether or not a removal of flying would make the game better, not more popular and/or avoid community backlash.

WoW and FFXI are that way.

So? Those games are also, by most any measure, better than FFXIV is, albeit they haven't aged well in a variety of ways, especially in terms of graphics and UI, in XI's case. This is a thread about whether or not a certain course of action would make FFXIV better. Emulating its predecessors in certain ways seems like a reasonable statement to make.

Also, please don't willfully mistake my post. I'm not advocating for limited travel options. I'm advocating for attaching a cost to travel options. If you don't have a cost, players will always flock to the method of travel that is fastest / most convenient, which invariably cuts out as much exposure to the game world as is humanly possible. Attaching costs puts other methods of travel on more of an even playing field. There's nothing masochistic about this, and it's a rather asinine summary of what I wrote.