Probably not because the zones are tough to navigate constantly by foot and mount. 
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I’m not sure I believe in that gametime stuff. It dosn’t make sense anyway because even if you save a little bit of time with the flight master’s whistle that doesn’t mean you are going to stop playing sooner.
For me if travelling is more convenient I play longer because I don’t get as annoyed.
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SL has the worst terrain to navigate on ground and the fewest flight points of any expansion, meaning 2 or 3 per zone. The WQs also currently take ~20 minutes each.
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They’ve put it in their shareholder reports in the past, so believe what you like but it doesn’t negate the facts.
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Those 1-2mins you spent riding to a nearer FP becames huge when you got 1 million+ players, it adds up over time and makes them look better.
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Damn… In that case, I’d prefer to have a whistle.
I guess more “Played-Time™” for Blizzard then…
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I recognize it’s in the reports, I just don’t think that they make things more inconvenient just to increase the amount of time we spend in game. I think they would recognize that making the game more fun will increase the amount of time spent in game rather than annoying roadblocks.
Good luck with that opinion on these forums. 
Yeppers.
Sad but you are right.
1 Like
Okay. Why do YOU think they make the game more inconvenient, then?
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Sounds more like going back to the original vision of the old devs who just made a game they wanted to play and didn’t have Activision telling them what to do?
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I’ve been worried about that from the zone previews. It looks like Argus on steroids. I had hoped that they were going to start moving away from this claustrophobic, hostile terrain design soon, but I guess not.
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A vision of diablo with small disconnected maps?
The old devs actually made full zones that were connected with one another that you could navigate by foot or mounts.
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Nuts, I hadn’t even thought about that aspect…
OH MY GOD the covenants even have Waypoints…
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I’ve been playing the beta for months.
The zones are fairly straight forward and by design you always know a flight path between them.
Maybe if you have the directional sense of a potato or don’t know how to use a map you could get lost.
Rivendreth would be the only more difficult zone because it’s actually built like a city with many keeps. So you just use your eyeballs to find doors or the elevators. Because you know, buildings and all.
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Bastion has a lot of hoofing back to a flight master after doing a lot of its world quests. It’s generally faster to just hearth and fly back to the zone, which takes quite a bit of time and is just a sad statement in general about how long doing world quests takes in shadowlands.
Just to be clear: Bastion, with its THREE flight points, is the particular problem, here.
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Yeppers this is what these devs wanted all along.
They have telegraphed this from the start. Argus was a preview of this but with Argus they at least used teleports.
These zones in the upcoming expansion are disconnected from one another and they require you use flight paths to reach them.
BFA was the most instanced heavy expansion in WoW’s history with warfronts and island expeditions.
How did that work out?
This is the long game these devs are playing…they want to turn WoW into an action RPG slugfest from point A to point B.
But that works in isometric or side scrolling games and not so much in MMORPG oriented games like WoW. But like the little engine that could these devs will try to force their square vision into a triangular slot.
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If I had to venture a guess on why they wouldn’t be adding a new whistle for this expansion it would probably be that having fewer world quests and having the world quests themselves take longer to complete makes the whistle feel less necessary as the pressure to hop from point to point quickly is lessened.
That said I did enjoy the whistle as a part of Legion and BFA and I wouldn’t mind it coming back if they did decide to do that.
I like having lots of world quests to do but it might be okay to do less world quests that take longer, with less travel time in between.
Travel time is what I really dislike about WoW. Sometimes it feels like you spend more time travelling than doing anything else.
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Considering the Maw does not even allow ground mounts, this doesn’t really come with a shock or surprise to me. Then again, from everything I’ve seen about the Maw is that there’s literally nothing to do there and that it’s a husk of anything that looks like even closely being near done.
I don’t complain often and am the easiest person to please, but seeing all of these things just doesn’t give me much faith.
This end-game zone really is going to be delivered in the state that it’s in now? you can definitely see the difference between Suramar, Legions end-game zone and this one, talk about light years apart.
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