Acquiring flying in Shadowlands is just Pathfinder under a different name and slightly simplified.
I could swear the announcement was made by Ghostcrawler when he was a guest on The Instance podcast’s live broadcast from that Blizzcon. I certainly hadn’t heard anything about new flying restrictions until that point. If I recall, the audience in the room didn’t sound too impressed either…
Yep. They have a long history of seeding potentially unpopular ideas via seemingly innocuous posts to see what the reaction would be.
Same here, but include gold in that mix as well. That would effectively be a gold tax to make levelling my alts tolerable, and that’s just wrong. We’ve paid our “price” already - done all the content, grinded to renown 40, stayed on the ground for well over half a year. Introducing per-character payment for flight now, well, that would be an insult.
However, one of the devs did say on Twitter a while back that it would be account wide.
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… because they can. That’s what datamining is. Stuff was datamined that wasn’t released to be tested yet. Like speculation of Allied Races, based off of icons that were datamined prior to their release in beta.
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You’re more than welcome. It was literally the biggest subject on the forum for two years. Attempting to explain it doesn’t come close to experiencing it in real time.
The polarization itself is absurd since everyone has the choice to use a ground mount and not fly when there’s flying. There’s no choice when there’s not.
If not flying was popular, then there would be enough people on the ground for people to not notice there were people flying - oh wait… there are enough people on the ground to not notice people flying because they can’t quest or level from the back of a flying mount.
The only thing that makes a difference when there’s flying is people being able to say no to being camped eternally in PvP.
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No it’s not.
Yes WoD was the worst.
- Empty Karabor.
- Selfie Camera & SM integration as the entirety of a patch.
- Netherstorm cut.
Still. Nothing else happened in those 19 days between the publication of the polygon article after 18 months of gaslighting the entire player base about flying, and their mea culpa announcement/sad apology about how wrong they were about flying.
Nothing.
Your excuses are weak, hollow, false, and without merit, as I never said flying was the only reason WoD was bad.
But with everything else that happened during that train wreck, including two years of the forum dumpster fire over it, where they made zero attempt to make the players happy…
…it only took 19 days for them to change their minds about flying.
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Account wide flying for free isn’t crap. Gating it for like a year is crap.
I don’t want to pay for flying. I want it unlocked with Pathfinder. But I want Pathfinder completed by the time I get last level.
Your problem isn’t Pathfinder. It’s the time gate. And if you think they wouldn’t time gate paying for flying, you need to take another look at this marketing obsessed company.
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*Citation needed
I really don’t want to pay gold to fly, thanks. I find pathfinder rather pleasant - I get to know all the factions, explore all the zones, and doing the stuff I do anyway lets me get playing in the 2nd patch.
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You can’t datamine until that data is released by Blizzard.
Your describing open beta and PTR news. That’s not what datamining is. ROFL
Fact: Blizzard had someone come in to specifically code certain pieces of data so that it couldn’t be found, because people were finding out certain information before it was released that they didn’t want people to know about yet and it wasn’t available for testing yet.
It will probably cost a ridiculous amount of anima.
I can’t even believe you wrote this. The sheer amount of misinformation in your comments is astounding.
shakes head
Data mining is the process of finding data before it’s released for testing. It’s models, images, etc. found within the coding that can then be used to speculate about what we might or might not see during testing and release.
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37500 anima go ahead start collecting
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Yes it is, you’re attributing all the sub losses to flying, when you know that isn’t the case. You can’t even remotely prove it, unless you personally surveyed every single person who quit during that period and you have the data that shows that they all quit because of flying. You also can’t prove that an ‘executive’ put the foot down and told the developers to add flying back into the game, which is another thing you claim here.
I literally never said you did, what I said is that you were attributing all the sub losses to flying being removed, which you did. Here’s you:
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Congrats, you yourself have said datamining involves going through coding. Guess what? You can’t go through the code until it’s released. Tada!
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But looking at the PTR it states:
Use: Allows you to ride flying mounts in the Shadowlands.
Requires Riding (225)
“Teaches you Shadowlands Flying, allowing all characters on this account to fly in Bastion, Ardenweald, Revendreth, and Maldraxxus.”
Unless they changed it from 12 hours ago I doubt it was ever a thing to open up to buy flying.
I think this is better this way also, unlock flying for certain zones, than you can stay grounded for new zones and unlock further flying. Waiting until X.2+ was a crap thing they done in the past, it made the old content really boring having to wait 12 months.
This ^
100% this is the worst of both worlds. It is path finder and it is also gold sink.
Flight since BC was just gold sink, hit max level and drop some gold for every toon. Then came no flying which was changed to pathfinder. To offset the fact you can’t fly until flying is worthless they made it free.
This new system is the worst of both, not only can you not fly until it’s worthless (still no maw flying or new zone flying) we have already grinded for months but your also gold sinking per every toon you have. Hope you like wow tokens, because your about to become real close with them!
tldr: Mini pathfinder + gold cost = worst way to implement flying
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Pathfinder took weeks and far much work than this is gonna take. It was gated behind reputation even if we have to purchase it with gold on our alts It’s still better than being rep gated.
I mean I really think people are never happy because we have asked blizzard for the longest time not to gate flying behind reputations.
They finally do that and people still complain people will never be happy end of story. I’ll take the renounces to move or Pathfinder any day of the week. So I think we should just keep our mouth shut so they don’t change it back to Pathfinder
Why would they even feel the need to mention buying the riding skill, though? Surely, anyone who cares about flying would have purchased the ability at level 40. The only reason to bring up purchasing the skill needed to fly within Shadowlands is because it’s a separate skill.
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That was one of the early versions of the “but we feel forced to” stupidity though.
“Yes, we can choose to use ground mounts, but when everyone else is flying they have an advantage and I feel forced to fly as well, even though I don’t want to.”
The “feel forced” argument was utter bollocks then, and it still is now (don’t get me started about Titanforging…) 
They timegate flying until it’s worthless, as Slade said above. That’s not a gift, that’s exactly the same nonsense that’s been going on since WoD. Of course people still complain. They used to be able to hit max level and just buy it.
The benefit we gain from this arbitrary delay is the ability to fly before max level on our alts. If that’s getting changed in any way then yes, people are sure as hell gonna complain.
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You are correct there and to be honest I’m probably a bad person to give an opinion on flight at all. This is one of those situations where I probably just should have kept my mouth shut but it is what it is
I probably shouldn’t have an opinion on flight because 95% of my game play is in areas where you can’t fly like battle grounds and arenas.
As for levelling alts flying is gonna make no difference whatsoever. All the classes I play have a healing or a tank speck and to level them 50-60 I will just Spam dungeon Q them using threads of fate. Every character I have at least 50.