^ This ^

I agree with Clegane's point that Blizzard is making you pay twice. Frankly, I'm very unhappy with the way they've handled the whole fliers-in-Northrend situation. I do not feel they should be grounding players, first of all. If people want to fly over content, I just don't see how that hurts anyone. I mean, they're going to have to land and quest at some point if they want to make it to 80, so the "no fly until 77" rule seems artificial and arbitrary.

With the quest, at least you had some content ... some in-game-justification to try to sugar-coat the stupidity of the aforementioned, but now they're just going to make it another gold sink after you've already paid a lot of coin for it? That's just asinine. Why can't we have a quest? What was wrong with that?

"If people want to fly over content, I just don't see how that hurts anyone. I mean, they're going to have to land and quest at some point if they want to make it to 80, so the "no fly until 77" rule seems artificial and arbitrary."

Sigh.

Look, the /real/ reason Blizzard is grounding players until 77 is because they want to slow the leveling process. If people could use their epic fliers from day one of release, people would level faster because they could travel more quickly between quest hubs, destinations, mob spawn points, and so forth.

Blizzard does not want people to level /too/ quickly because WotLK won't be complete at launch. As with Burning Crade, all the end-game raids most likely will not be implemented, and other content may be missing as well, because the thought process is, "Well, from release until at least half our player base dings 80, we have X number of weeks (or months), so we can implement X Raid Dungeon or Y Daily Quest Hub at that point."

So the 77 fly cap is a way of ensuring that most players do not reach 80 too quickly, thereby requiring Blizzard to speed up its timetable to release end-game content.

Sorry to be so flippant with this reply, it just drives me crazy that people genuinely think that Blizzard is concerned about us "skipping content" or "not experience their hard work." While some game designers at Blizzard may be concerned about players skipping content, I can damn well guarantee that the overriding reason for the 77 sky cap is to preserve their content implementation timetable.

I agree especially because i am a relatively new player. Blizzard seems to forget about us in all this(the new player). I'm currently 68 so with any luck will hit 70 in time for wotlk, but they forgot that there are new players coming into this game that dont have 4 different 70 characters that they can spend an hour doing dailies on each to get that 1kg.
Its a complete shoot in the foot, sure the money for a flyer isn't cheap but its not supposed to be but and thats my goal, now its not my goal its my goal +1k and thats just not right. its my first character and i dont want to constantly be left behind in content/features because i joined the game late, and havent hit 70 as quick as others so i can go grind masses of gold.

Exactly! couldn't have said it better myself. It's not like the epic flight skill doesn't cost enough. What is Blizz thinking with that? ''Oh hey! You bought gold from that farmer? BANNED! Hey! we suspect you MIGHT be botting. BANNED! Hey! What do you mean we overcharge for stuff? 5 grand? thats nothing..just do the
.mod gold 5000..oh yeah..thats right..you don't have that abbility..HEY! YOU SAID '.mod gold 5000' YOUR TRYING TO CHEAT BANNED!!!!!!''

Thank you. i have said my peace. Good night.

"it's probably easier to just grab cash on your main than take a relatively undergeared alt through a quest over and over" - erm, what? How difficult was this quest that they had us originally doing to get flying in Northrend? Did we have to down Illidan or something? Win 100 AV's in a row? No? - it was a soloable quest that took a few minutes you say? Oh well yes, that sounds a lot more difficult than spending a week or so grinding 1000g for each alt.....

And also - "how hard is it to farm up 1000G on your main?" - for those of us who haven't got 2 hours to do all the dailies every single night, 1000G is still considered to be a quite large sum of money, and not just pocket change.

all you new guys that aren't 70 yet - remember it took many of the existing people several months to save 5000 for their epic flyer - this was without many daily quests available.

Whereas, the quests and mobs from 70-80 give more gold than anything anyone else had before. Furthermore due to inflation and all these existing 70s having access to loads of cash via daily quests, farming ore/herbs/leather pays much better than it did at this stage of the previous expansion.

So you have much less work to do to get your flying mount.

Rhyn - I know. It was a deliberate understatement on my part in the vein of "we see what u did thar, Blizzard." In other words, of course it is artificial and arbitrary -- obviously so.

I'm afraid we don't know one another in real life, so I hope you'll take my word for the fact that my tone of voice and cocked eyebrow would convey my meaning better. :)

@ Juliah.

I hate it when I correct someone who is saying the same thing as me but in a different way. Sorry to have bitten your proverbial head off!

i lol'd

Gold sinks help new players. The reason they're trying to bleed gold from the economy is so the low level materials and armor become cheaper, and new players can buy themselves level appropriate greens to keep up, they can buy level appropriate crafting materials, they can buy quest things they need.

As servers age, players tend to accumulate more and more gold, and as the wallet groys and the length of the day doesn't, players are much more likely to spend the gold they don't care as much about than the time they do care about. If someone has to decide between buying goldthorn for 40G a stack or get all the way to the areas it drops and farming for an hour, they start thinking a lot less about dropping the cash. A level 35, though, isn't going to have that kind of cash laying around for the herb. If they need one, and aren't an herbalist, they might as well forget about it. And that's not fair.

Honestly, if this cost 10000G, new players should rejoice.

This.

Having to pay another 1000 gold per character is very... very irritating. I have 8 70s so far, 3 of them have the 5000g epic mounts, all of them have the 1000g flying mount (except for the druid who has flight form).

That's 23000 gold so far. Isn't that enough?