…you must be a new player who wasn’t around on the forums for the two insane years prior to the release of this Polygon article:
~https://www.polygon.com/2015/5/22/8645293/world-of-warcraft-no-flying-tanaan-jungle-warlords-of-draenor-mmo-pc-blizzard
The fact there was no firm release date for flying in WoD cost them an average loss of 1million subs per month for almost 5 straight months prior to the release of the above article.
WoD launched with 10million subs. Does a loss of half the player base seem like a marketing ploy ruse to you?
19 days later they reversed their new policy, and have never released sub numbers since.
Imagine how many more sub numbers had to hemorrhage before some suit in finance finally woke up, attempted to administer triage, and the devs came up with their, “oops, our bad, we had no idea so many of you would quit over flying. So we’ll put it back but [we resent that you don’t want to listen to us tell you what’s fun, so we’re going to make flying so hard to earn, you won’t bother with it anymore, and in a few expansions from now, you won’t care when we don’t have it at all, so] you’re going to have to earn it with a quest chain we’re working on.”
[imagined color commentary my own]
I agree with you that removing flying is financial suicide, and should never ever have been considered, let alone spoken about as serious. But it was, and they did, for two years. Not weeks, not months. Years. Then said, “no more flying in future expansions…” not on their own website, but in an interview, released on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, on a third party website, because they didn’t have the courage to release it on their own.
And apparently, they thought it would save them enough development money in the long run of not having to finish the landscape for flying (like both the Draenei and BElf starting zones), and the players would eventually accept no flying and move on, that it would be worth that kind of a financial hit.
That was five years ago. If they had since gotten those numbers back up, they’d be announcing them not only in weekly emails to shareholders, William Shatner would be back doing WoW commercials, only this time with Henry Cavill.
As for Pathfinder, I do love that it unlocks my entire account to flying in that expansion, and I don’t have to slog every alt to level cap to access it.