When World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor was released people who played the game noticed one big concept missing. Flying. The concept of flying had been dispatched for the expansions release with no tell tale signs of it coming back. Long time players of the game were almost miserable, stating that they had played the game for years trying to earn specific achievements to get new mounts only to now have no use for them.
Ain't she a beauty.
It wasn't until a few weeks ago when Blizzard announced Patch 6.2 that players started to get antsy. Patch 6.2 opens up a new zone within the game called "Tanaan Jungle," which adds more quests and objectives to the current expansion. It also releases the final raid zone for the expansion "Hellfire Citadel". Though it is not the last patch for Warlords, Blizzard has turned more of their attention to the next upcoming expansion.
As more information about the Patch was being released one major question was still left unanswered. " Would there be flying in this expansion?"
After much consideration Blizzard Dev Ion Hazzikostas in an interview with Polygon announced, "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 game play in a whole lot of ways, while there was certainly convenience in being able to completely explore the world in three dimensions, that also came at the expense of game-play like targeted exploration, like trying to figure out what's in that cave on top of a hill and how do I get up there."
The summary is a big fat whopping, "No."
This drove the community mad, forum posts from angry players started to pile up. Players were commenting on the amount of content they had already seen versus what they had now and could not see the same viewpoint. Mmo-champion which has been a website dedicated to major MMO's for years had its comments section on the initial news release flooded with negative comments from players who were just plain upset. Some stating that they never even left their new garrison because they couldn't fly.
Apparently this amount of backlash had not gone unnoticed. As of a more recent post to the Blizzard forums, Hazzikostas come forth saying that they will now be implementing flying. However, it's only for those who earn it.
By earning I mean, completing a series of achievements and grinding out reputations with in-game factions.
This post has seemed to calm most of the community.
These achievements basically take the player through all the content that Blizzard wanted each person to experience without flying when the expansion was first released. Mmo-Champion posted a current graph of the percentage of players that have already earned the Meta achievements required, and skeptics say the rest of the achievements aren't going to take much extra time either.
As for me, I'm going to be spending my time leveling my fishing. See you in a few years.
As Always,
~Tisnight
