Yes and No.
I’ll take time gated rep grinds, over time gated… everything. Or at least it felt like it.
(I stopped playing a week or two ago. I’ll wait until 9.1 maybe this 
will be fixed.)
Why no whistle?
Same reason we cant mount in the maw, same reason you can’t fly directly from one covenant zone to another, same reason the portals from our covenant to the hub is behind a huge timegate / currency grind.
Because F you, thats why.
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Bastion is the easiest to navigate. Lots of high vantage points from where you can use goblin gliders to fly to other places on the map. It’s like the Highmountain of Shadowlands without the mountains.
Revendreth is simple if you picture it as a city map. You don’t get faked out by terrain because castle walls are not scalable. In maps with mountainous terrain, you can get fooled into trying to go over hills and mountains which aren’t scaleable.
The only real timegate that annoys me is the maw. Would really like to spend more time there, I’m sure it will be increased as renown progresses.
Everything else is gated it a good way. It sort of saying hey you can do other things now.
Blizzard has to time gate at this point. Why? Because of all the money they are spending on voice acting and other fluff in addition to a dwindling user base there is simply not enough funds left over to build enough content.
Blizzard is rationing out content like there’s a famine.
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I love when everybody complains blizz is trying to make them stay subbed longer when most of you nerds probably haven’t let your sub lapse in the last 15 years.
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time played metrics
Soon, as in Renown level 40? At 3 a week for the first few then 2 a week, that’ll take a bit still. But hopefully a lot sooner than previously.
You either complain it takes too long to complete content, or you complain there isn’t enough content to do.
Choose one.
Animal Crossing? The game that is entirely about doing chores and is just RNG on top of RNG? That Animal Crossing?
Same reason why we lost the ability to mount in maw.
Same reason they took flying away.
Same reason they limited our use of mounts in random arbitrary spots.
Same reason the flight pathing doesn’t go directly from zone to zone but instead hits up oribos first and slowly goes through.
They want us logged in longer.
Btw - anyone notice death run is incredibly slow now? Is it just me or did they slow us down when dead too?
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I noticed everyone was sped up at some point. Did they bring it back to the speed it was originally? Most races, +25%, nelfs, +50%? Because for a while it was +50% and +75%.
Feels like Normal run speed with no boost.
I actually enjoy the verticality of Revendreth. I think all zones should be designed like that. I thought high mountain would have been better in legion if it was literally just a massive mountain with a single winding path to the peak that had cave networks as you ascended
They want the game to have friction, be less convenient.
That’s it. They were pretty clear about it.
They probably wanted to increase playtime metrics, and also that way they could make the reward of faster travel in your Covenant zone seem meaningful… but they only have to give you this option in 1/4 of the places.
The Flight Master’s Whistle will not be in Shadowlands. Some of this is due to the way Shadowlands is laid out and the way that our quest wrappers at max level are laid out. We don’t have emissaries any more and instead, we have Callings that will send you to a single zone. Navigating within that zone there are transportation options, especially if you are a member of that given zone, through unlocking your covenant’s transportation network.
What spawned the Flight Whistle was things like the Warden and Kirin Tor emissaries in Legion, or the War Campaign objectives in BFA, where you’d look at the map and the game was telling you ‘hey you need to visit these four zones and criss-cross thousands of yards in game in order to complete this single objective.’ That turned into an onerous amount of travel time, but in Shadowlands, we’re not asking players to do that in the same way this time around. Plus…there’s a little bit of the fantasy of the whistle in the Shadowlands and all that.
Personally I can careless about the flightmaster whistle… what excites me more is that Blizzard stated that we will get flying by the 1st major patch (x.1) of Shadowlands, unlike past expansions where flying was given to us only after the 2nd major patch (x.2 or x.3).
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The first comment answered this well.
Basically, I would place money on the fact that developers and designers and heck maybe even the janitors who work for Blizzard received a memo, at the early stages of planning for SL, to the effect that:
"Winning means adding even a few seconds, twenty seconds, a minute to every activity the player will have available to him. This increases time-played metrics, and this in turn pleases the investors.
“P.S. don’t bother play testing the game yourselves to see what effect this has on game play and entertainment experience. These are unimportant, and in fact testing would be a waste of your valuable time.”
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If you look at the time played metrics without any reference to anything else because you don’t play video games, it makes perfect sense. If you combine this with a desire to spend the least amount of money possible on development resources, it makes even more sense. If you’re an executive who will get some sort of short term bonus, the logic is almost inescapable.
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Flight whistle was not available immediately on BfA.
Why are you acting surprised?