My WoW life yesterday started out pretty well – I beat Blackhand (and I did it in style – top of Recount, baby!) and I was feeling pretty good about the future, about 6.2, about my alts, and so on.
Then, after I logged out for the day, Blizzard dropped the bombshell which I’m sure most of you have heard about by now: We’re getting no flying for the rest of this expansion, and don’t get your hopes up about it being a thing in future expansions, either.
I probably should have seen this coming, but it still felt to me like a punch in the gut. Partially because it seems like such a weird step backwards in regards to content accessibility. Partially because the announcement came right after I was feeling really good about the game. And partially because of the fact that this was all apparently first mentioned offhandedly in some interview with a third party site rather than, I dunno, on the WoW forums or something. It all just came out of nowhere and felt weird.
On to the topic itself – I have written before about why I wanted to see flying in the future, so I won’t recount all of my reasons here. Suffice to say that flight was one of the big things I was looking forward to seeing in the future. I was looking forward to exploring Draenor in a whole new way. I was looking forward to doing archaeology properly rather than starting a dig, looking at a big mountain, and promptly changing my mind. And I was really looking forward to being able to finish those Treasure Contract garrison quests, which I’ve done ten million times by now, in five minutes instead of twenty.
But now it looks like none of this is going to happen, and, silly or not, it put a big damper on my mood last night. And I say this as one of the most hopelessly optimistic video game bloggers you’ll probably ever meet.
It got me wondering about my future with the game and my motivations for playing it. For the most part I have been a staunch supporter of Warlords of Draenor and of garrisons (beyond a few annoyances), and it was weird to feel negative about it for the first time. I wondered – and still wonder – how long the feeling will last. I wonder if I’m being melodramatic. But I also wonder if I’m not.
That said, I still have a blog to write (and I am having a blast being back, by the way), and as of writing I still have something like two and a half months of game time left thanks to WoW token. So I suppose for now the best I can do is continue to play until then, and then see how things are and how I feel about them.
We’ll just have to see!
Keep your chin up. Decisions like these aren’t set in stone. Blizzard does whatever Blizzard wants to do, but even they can change their mind.
The key to dealing with no flight is to change your viewpoint. Go into Draenor with the notion that being grounded is a transitory thing, and you tend to think like that. Go into Draenor with the notion that you have to take topography into mind, and you’ll start thinking that way.
Three-dimensional thinking is only useful when one has three dimensions to use. Khan would have kicked Kirk’s ass if the Mutara sector was two-dimensional. 🙂
Like Tyrannodorkus said, Blizzard is Blizzard and doesn’t know what they want to do, even after they’ve done it. 😉
That being said, however, regardless of how you feel about WoW, or if you continue, please do keep up blogging! Even if it’s just “I dabbled in x game today.” every day! I love your writing style! ^_^