Or or or hear me out… they gave us a cool new means to fly day 1 vs being stuck ground mounted for a majority of the xpac.
Because the other option would be… no flying. And yes pathfinder has been around since wod, nearly 10 years. So based on that, pathfinder isnt going away any time soon.
So forced is a poor choice of wording, as you are still free to ground mount if you truly want the usual expansion feeling 
Players had a game that worked fine for 16 years that stopped working fine. Players got fewer options for mounts, hundreds of existing mounts had their functionality gimped (again), the new flight options made them physically ill, etc., and most of these concerns could have been resolved by making both forms of flight available at launch, with equitable means of acquiring it (because it looks dumb, not “evolved,” to make the less powerful form of a game mechanic a bigger pain in the butt to unlock than the more powerful form of the mechanic).
Having played the last 10 months, I have no idea what has been preserved by not having slow flight. The main campaign still takes less than a week to complete. Super-duper flight can be acquired in about an hour and fully upgraded completely in 3-4 hours. Zone exploration takes hours. Repeatable world content is still throttled, and increasingly worthless with all of the catch-up mechanics available at this point that leveling players can participate in that give them much better gear to start with at level cap. Renown grinds really aren’t that rewarding. You’ll get gear that’s obsolete by the time you can earn it, profession recipes that you will have outleveled, some overpriced costume bits that require rare drop mats you probably won’t have, and a handful of mount reskins. Botters and content-spammers clearly still exist despite the slow flight embargo, and the profession revamp has flooded the market with three tiers of basic mats that drove down prices anyway. The scourge of people who dare to hover is still comically overblown by those players who must have all idle players at ground level at all times in order to be ignored by them.
Those who wish to sit on their hands and ride out every bad decision this game makes have never driven a single thing in this game. They’re not pro-evolution, they’re just self-appointed conversation referees who want silence. Had Blizzard listened to them in WoD, there’d be no dragonriding at all.
I love dragonriding and know some that like regular. Both should be available so that we can play as we want. Dragonflight has been fantastic at offering lots of different options to different kinds of players. Its like they finally figured out its not a one-size-fits-all community.
Some of them I guess. This finally improved flying for me in a way I’ve been wishing for since BC.
You mean the same old start of an expansion grounding?
And what mounts lost functionality?
Except it’s way more powerful in letting you pick and choose exactly what you do as opposed to at least for a bit having to approach situations that the devs design. DR makes it easier to design around because it’s not so precise or slow that you aren’t risking aggroing stuff when you land when you don’t mean to. Not to mention the various DR skill based activities around the world.
And if old flying was a bad decision?
My goodness! Best of luck to you in your next game…
I prefer dragonriding.
But your comment is the type of dogmatic vitriol I was talking about.
What? Pointing out the obvious? That if we didn’t have dragonriding, we’d have nothing?
I don’t understand how your choice of words describe what I said in anyway other than you don’t agree lol.
Another limitation some players seem to want accept without question: Pathfinder’s happened, so it must happen again or will be okay if it does, when it is a choice with a shrinking rationale to back it up.
Every one of them that could fly at the point they were acquired and still can’t fly in the Dragon Isles.
If you don’t think players are helicoptering around quest areas, losing aggro at record speed, and questing just as fast with DR as they would with old flight, you’re delusional. DRing, particularly after 10 months, is not suffering from some great impediment to targeted landing on quest objectives, all of which remain clearly marked on the map. You’re moving three times as fast and have an airbrake, so you can screw up and still go faster than slowpokes on old flight. World content design that is still mostly “collect X of this,” “kill the special mob over there,” and “fill the meter with random acts of genocide” hasn’t changed much at all, and is all combat-based stuff you still can’t do with either form of flight. You just get to it all faster with DRing.
And I’d be excited about races if this was ever a racing game, but it’s not. WoW has had dragon races since Mists and I suspect you, me and everyone else in this thread had the same level of motivation to log in to do that content on November 26, 2022. Dragon races in DF are a mini-game. Gimping the slowest form of flight so you can enjoy a mini-game that requires you go as fast possible, provides an appropriate mount if you’re not mounted, and lasts like 2 minutes? The racing mini-games in the Dragon Isles are going to be safe from old flight. Players who have trouble accessing open world content because dragonriding triggers vertigo or something other issue are not going to be cheesing their way through dragon races on old mounts.
I’ll believe Blizzard thinks it was a bad decision when they quit monetizing it.
I don’t understand this obsession the pro dragonriding crowd have with other people not liking dragonriding. It doesn’t even affect them. 
Or maybe I get the design decision behind it and don’t really mind it as long as the world is designed around that.
So none of them.
You can’t sit there immobile in the air and decide exactly where to land at your leisure (Or the druid shenanigans with quests items and flight form) So it’s not as simple to check out a quest area, determine where the objective is and find the spot to touch down to do the least amount of effort to get the quest done.
Personally I get people like it, I get why Blizzard isn’t so fond of it (which goes beyond just they’re mean) I could just do without the pro-old flying people that insist that I’m wrong and don’t actually enjoy the flying or am deluded for having the opinion that it’s a better system imo.
Whereas I think a game that repeatedly makes you re-earn the same mechanic over and over again is employing a lazy, thought-free design that hasn’t paid off in significant improvements to open world questing content models in the decade since it was deployed.
Yay, opinions.
Or all but 6.
I don’t need to sit there and hang in the air to decide anything with dragonriding. Ten months in, I’ve done all of it so often, I know where the quests are and what I have to do complete them. All the mobs I need to kill are outlined. All the objectives are on the maps. Rares are clearly marked on the overworld map, if they’re even worth killing at this point, which many are not. The better my gear, the easier it is to blast it all to bits. There is no mystery or challenge to open world content that DRing brings to the table other than maybe the “thrill” of occasionally running out of gas.
Others will be hovering soon enough. Open world content will not get demonstrably better or worse when they do.
None of them have lost their flying, just like every singe expansion (other than I think cata) there’s a period at the beginning where you don’t have access to flying in the new areas. Nothing’s happened to the mounts and this is nothing new.
You mean like a flight system that was just free camera mode?
You mean the reason why they have a gap before old flying? That you do the content as intended first before getting the precision flying?
You make it sound like it’s a covid vaccine debate, lol.
I was talking about your general attitude. You’re making fun of people that don’t like dragonriding as if it really matters.
Talk about some serious word gymnastics. Please quote me where I was making fun of anyone.
I’ll wait.
Spoilers, you won’t find anything because I wasn’t. I was talking about your point and didn’t attack anyone in any matter lol.
Some people are almost that extreme over people wanting normal flying. 
I’m on the opposite end. I’m disapointed in yet an other patch without old world dragon riding.
Can we please use dragon riding mounts outside the dragon isles? That’s infinitely more important to me.
Didn’t say it was new, said it was lazy and dumb and not the only way to skin the cat.
When I made my flying machine in BC it flew from the moment I got it because flight was tied to my skill, not because flight was tied to a particular sub-set of mounts. Pre-pathfinder, players were in control of how they unlocked the feature.
Now, we’re not. We are currently limited in what we can use, no idea when the mechanics for those mounts can be used in other areas, no idea when the mechanics for those mounts we can use will be extended to other mounts (or how they’d even work with some mounts), and players can be done with all the theoretical requirements for Pathfinder and still have to wait months for the feature to be turned so we can putter around on slow mounts when large chunks of the open world content will be thoroughly obsolete.
Old flight is the flight system I expected from a game that wasn’t launched with or built around flight. It was transport. That’s all it had to do: Take me to the combat bits. That’s still all it has to do. Should it have evolved? The devs themselves seemed to want to do as little as possible with flight up until this expansion. Having low expectations for the feature was more appropriate than praying for them to crank out something more elaborate when they weren’t trying to smother the feature altogether.
BC you just had to get level cap and gold. Same for Wrath and Mists. Players got that stuff sorted out in a couple of weeks, if not days, just like they do now. Cataclysm didn’t even have that much. You didn’t have to do a checklist of questlines to make sure you did everything the way it was intended, or grind reps up to a certain level, or see all there was to see, because the devs couldn’t be bothered to give a crap. The open world at level cap was an afterthought and so were the actions of the players who cared enough to be out in it.
I mean, pre-cata I could barely afford it, I only barely managed to get epic flying before cata hit so I could do the epic flight form quest once. So I’m more fond of the pathfinder method than the gold sink one.
A really hefty amount of gold for the time. Like it’d probably be the equivalent of a few hundred thousand gold now for the epic flying.
Maybe top gold makers. 5000 gold was a huge amount back then if you weren’t good at making gold.