Or they might know a bit more about game design. Because…
This isn’t the issue. The speed of which you can complete a task isn’t a negative in this context, at that point all you need to do is to add more content to do. Which is what has happened ever since TBC with each expansion bringing in more and more things for players to do.
This isn’t the issue, but rather it is how these activities are done.
TBC flying promotes afking and a complete disconnect from other players around you and even the world you are playing in. We can use DF as an excellent example of this in fact:
Compare the activities of something like the Tuskarr cooking event and Time Rifts. Because … since you have to land and you gotta participate, why not participate more? It is way more fun than to merely sit around. If you are doing something else and will afk then sure, but you’ll still have participated some amount.
Whereas the Time Rifts have you get reputation and currencies that increase for everyone the more people participate. However, for most folks who have done these ones a few times, all you care about is the big portal. So… you flew up to the pillars in the middle of the event, afked there, and just waited.
TBC flying allows you to have one of these “AFK podiums” with you wherever you go. In DF, prior to TBC flight being reintroduced, Time Rifts were unfortunately located in a place where you could afk within the region but outside of harm’s way and… very few people liked the folks who sat afk up there. Of course they had the right to sit afk, and they could they weren’t in anyone’s way, and they were just after the big portal at the end, and since there wasn’t anything for them to do they could just … sit there.
This is the basic principle that forever changed how people interacted with one and another since the introduction of flying in WoW. Each cavern, each Timeless Isle, each phased zone, no flying zone, each Pathfinding achievement, and so on and so on has been an attempt to naturally limit people’s desire to afk and not engage with other players.
Literally all that is different about Dragonriding/Skydiving is that you will need to land at some point. And that small difference is enough to have made DF one of the most interacted and active expansions since… at least WoD. So about ten years.
There’s other aspects of it that changed flying from being a necessity in Vanilla and Cataclysm, to being a hinderance in quite literally every single other expansion. Which has to do with travel time and distances, something which again, Dragonriding/Skydiving found a better solution for with none of the issues that TBC flying brings to the table. Both systems have flaws but TBC flying’s type of flaws is what has made it one of the most detrimental additions for the game’s overall health.
And that’s the reality of it.
