I genuinely believe that the botting argument is baseless. The reason for this is simply put, if Blizzard cared that much about the botting problem they would’ve issued solutions to it ages ago but they won’t. Bot farming keeps the economy stable on mat prices to a degree that they are okay with. The timegating of flying is done because of engagement metrics and subscription timings. It’s not a coincidence that 9.2 flying was gated to be available 5 days after a Subscription cycle would’ve ended and needed to be renewed.
It’s purely coincidence as I could have unsubbed for a month and came back and knocked it all out within in day if I wanted to.
Edit: to further elaborate on that, for it to have not been coincidence and been intentional, they would have made it so you could only progress so much in a single day, and drawing that out to 5 days after a renewal cycle. Meaning if I took a month off and came back, it would still take me the same amount of time (true time gating) that it would have taken me from staying subbed.
But that wasn’t the case.
I am going to have to agree that flight should be something obtainable right out of the gate (of expansion release). While I like the idea of Pathfinder, it’s implementation is deeply flawed in that you have to wait a huge content patch or two in order for it to unlock flight.
I like how Flight is handle in FFXIV and would like it if Blizz handled flight similarly. But I wouldn’t mind if Flight was bought at max level as it was in MoP.
I was leveling in Ardenweald last night when I wanted to open a treasure chest that was on a root over a waterfall. I fell, and realized there was no way back up. So I either had the die and do a corpse run (luckily the game allowed rez back on top of waterfall), or hearth out. That situation could have been avoided if I could FLY.
Unfortunate for me, I basically quit the game for a good portion of this expansion so flight is a bit off for me thanks to… needing to do the Sanctum of Domination quest chain for my covenant?