Oh wow, very nice catch. That didn't even dawn on me, when reading the news.

Yeah, just added this in. Makes sense to me! Good catch.

Ah, that makes sense. Make it a skill and set a nominal fee so it remains Cata-exclusive.

Not only that, it prevents players without Cataclysm from entering Hyjal, Uldum and Twilight Highlands without having to make those areas artificially barred to flying into from outside. I don't know if they currently are blocked off somehow on the Beta, but there you go, now it won't be necessary anyway.

That is exactly what I was thinking. It's not the 250 fake gold they are after, it's the 60 bucks of real money they are "encouraging" you to pay up for.

Sounds fair to me. You want the Cat features? buy Cat

250 gold is piddlin's to a 60. Heck, it cost me more than that to learn fast riding! :\

@ Nonette,

What if I take my freeloading friend into Hyjal on my rocket mount?

What a load of crap. 250 gold PER CHARACTER really adds up after the first couple of characters that have to buy it. Why not just have it automatically applied to all characters on an account when you buy Cataclysm, then? You get a free pet when you get an Authenticator, so give free Azeroth Flying when you get Cataclysm.

Like it wasn't bad enough that to go from 280% flying to 310% was 5000 gold PER CHARACTER, now we have this to make us waste our time. This is the biggest mistake (and one of the only) Blizz has made with this expansion.

Wow vanilla account, lvl to 60, get some gold, get all 3 expansion trials... will you be able to buy it then?

Actually you can run into Mount Hyjal via a tunnel in darkwhisper gorge south end of Winterspring (which Ive looked through on live), so for that region anyways flying isnt necessary to get there, so if you have Cataclysm but can't afford 250 gold somehow, no worries, there is a tunnel door for all the poor!

Ok trying for 4th time to send this now since wow.com comments seem to bug a lot!

You can just do dailies in wotlk and get 600g PER DAY with EACH 80 YOU HAVE. If you start doing dailies now and lets say cata comes in 90 days: you would have 54 000g in start of expansion with 1 alt doing dailies 20+ dailies everyday and if you have 4 80s like me you would have 216 000g total. Gold really is not the issue, now is it?

People HAVE to realize that while the this skill is available at 60 theres NO reason for leveling alt/main to get it at level 60. This is important part of the announcement!
First of all, from my understanding, this ONLY applies to old world and cata zones and you would STILL need to get base flying skill.
When you are 60 you wont be leveling in old world for pretty long atleast, even if its totally revamped. Unless you are making loremaster alt and that really is exception: In this point you most likely have mains with atleast 5k gold combined, because you are bored or have too much spare time, 250g is no problem.

This is only meant mainly for 80+ characters who want to fly in old world and Cata zones. Just because its buyable at 60 it wont mean you should get it, you will be in outland by the time you hit 58-60.

With this announcement as fact it pretty much says that you would still need to buy flying skill if you wish to fly in Outland or even fly AT ALL. But you can just get "Loaned mount" for free if you are just breezing thro northend in cataclysm times and even in outland.


So to recap:

You need to get flying skill+this one to fly in old world and cata zones. There is no need to buy flying when you are doing outland and northend as they are easily done by land mount like they were designed and done before the whole mount revamp. The saved time is only marginal when you do LFG and are decked in helmet, cloak, chest, shoulder, weapon, trinket heirlooms.
I had chest and shoulders and was 65 before I even left hellfire as I was also doing dungeons thro LFD with my recent alt and I had ZERO need for flying mount during that time, I never needed to cross hill to save whopping 2 seconds or 20 seconds to "not kill 5 mobs near the quest item".

When you are done doing quests in outland and northend you easily have more than enough gold just from questing itself. Northend questing gave easily one thousand gold at first time without LFD, as that didnt exist that time. Since you are did not spend that on northend flying or outland flying, you can get this 250g flying without hurting gold flow you are never going to use for anything else, anyway.
By the time you are 85 you prolly have gotten 2k gold from questing itself, just like in northend.

Aww man. I know i'll be getting the expansion anyway, but it means we'll have to wait 'til release to explore Azeroth, which is when we'll probably be leveling in the new zones.

I was hoping we'd have a coupla weeks to hunt down all the new tauren pallies and gnome priests.

@Valkry:
I'm not sure, but I don't think you can get a trial over a trial. So you can ask: a lvl 60+ char, WotLK xpack and a trial of Cata. Can I buy it?

That I don't know. I don't believe so, though.

Well...it's a good catch, but one that should not be surprising. Since we had to pay for the other expansions in order to get our flying priveledges, why should this be any different? The only real differences this time is that they're not taking us to the gold sink cleaners in order to aquire it.

@Moorit
I'm pretty sure that mount has ejector seats(at least according to the in-game mail you get with the rocket), so that'll explain that nicely. Get too close to the Cata zones and they'll be thrown off the mount(also note that no parachutes are included with the mount... ).