Quote Originally Posted by Shurrikhan View Post
I think I've missed the clue somewhere here. Which part are you disagreeing with?

GW2 did exactly that, at first, and only moved away from that in the new expansion's zones and only with the conviction to do mounts, as a concept, better than any other MMO.
What is not clear? You mentioned GW2 and I believe GW2 doesn't have actual flying (maybe gliding? I started playing GW2 last year during the wait for Endwalker, but haven't gotten far enough to get any mount), so I'm saying a no-flying situation for WoW would be preferable rather than a year of time gating with all those activities needed to unlock flight.

That's... so much easier said than done. You'd need mobs to suddenly have hugely increased threat acquisition areas, to be able to see through objects, being able to move at target mount speed (instead of just at normal sprint speed), etc., as to avoid their being bypassed by flight -- and those lasting dangers, then, aren't going to be worth the sudden gimmickiness of making those dangers last despite flight.

To pull off something like that, it needs to be a deliberate and thematic world design, like having separate and much more dangerous creatures already make use of the various air/aether currents such that trying to slip in among them by using those same means of transport risks getting their attention, much like risking the attention of giant crocodiles or the like when taking a canoe down a speeding river to get back to a quest hub more quickly. It then becomes a matter of comparative risk and reward, where sometimes you crank that risk up to basically ground players across set pieces or key areas and at other times you greatly loosen it in order to let player better milk (their knowledge regarding) those means of quick travel.
I think that's too ambitious.

I'm thinking something smaller scaled like designing objectives that require you to do so on the ground, like for example that quest during Legion where you go up a mountain using grappling hook. Just make it so you can't complete the objective if you simply fly up the mountain.

Or if you want to have a quest where you ride a specific quest mount that travels in a controlled way, you can still do that without allowing the player to just use their flying mount.

It's not a matter fixating on this or that. Unless you want to say that exploration and travel are not and cannot be an intended element beyond purposely wasting player time, then they will be part of the open world content. As a part of said content that changes the way you said content, both ground mounts and later flying mounts reshape that experience.
Like I said, you can have no flight during the leveling process so you can control that exploration experience as you're leveling. Once you're at max level and have completed the leveling story, you should already have gotten a chance to explore the zones on the ground.

If I don't want to kill the boss, but merely want the loot, is overgearing content to the point that it poses no challenge a good thing? It isn't -- loot aside -- content that I am trying to do, after all, so surely it must be, no?
Whether or not it's a good thing, that's what happens in both FFXIV and WoW. Can't kill a boss to get loot? Just overgear/overlevel it (or get help and get good, I suppose).

There's always going to be some split between design intent and the far narrower matter of what a specific player wants from that content. To say, though, that exploration can only be a time-waste, so long as it increases the time until rewards received, but the same cannot be true for combat alone... is disingenuous.
Exploration does not have to be a waste of time, but exploration only happens once. The part of unlocking flight in WoD, Legion, and BfA that I have problem with is not the exploration requirement, but the timegating and reputation and grind requirements. If you were to make the requirements simply be quest completion, exploration completion, find treasure chests, and maybe doing each world quest on the map once (or the major daily quest for WoD), that would allow you to have seen the zones and "completed" all the contents in the zone without flight and potentially made you see the entire zone on the ground.

You and I both know this has no bearing.

For one, you switch flight to not automatically trigger even on flying mounts, and that ground mounts aren't outright removed from your mounts collection upon acquiring flight does not mean that they are intended to be of use thereafter in zones in which you've unlocked flight. It's just not a world that suddenly allows every non-winged creature to float through the air or propel itself along on flatulence.
I'm not sure what the problem is then. Just because you unlock flight doesn't mean the zones have changed. If you can be grounded before flight unlock, you can be grounded afterward. I've done it in BfA because I unlocked flight late, so I still had to be on the ground for a while when doing world quests and other objectives.

Consider also, say, what portion of Party Finder groups will accept minimum ilvl fresh runs in week 7+ after a tier's release. It matters little to most players that it was doable at release at min ilvl and with a blind party because there is comparative loss for doing so at that point. That a player enjoys the open world doesn't mean they won't feel obliged to simply directly teleport to the dungeon's stone to more quickly summon their friends, etc., because it's still, in the end, a multiplayer, treadmill-centric game. We do feel obliged to play not only around our own preferences but also around those we play with and even to occasionally sacrifice our preferences outside of group contexts alone so that we can increase the range of content and players we can engage with.
That's the problem I mentioned earlier. That WoW is designed so that people don't feel like they can choose whether to enjoy being on the ground or flying and have to want everyone else having the same restrictions.

That said, in truth, the open world is still the part of the game that is most solo friendly in terms of current content, in my opinion, and you can still do a lot even if you enjoy being on the ground even when everyone else can fly.