Auto-learned flight paths.

We’ve seen a bit of confusion over the removal of automatic flight path discovery for characters leveling in patch 5.2, so here’s some background on the whole series of events that lead to where we are.

Players have always been required to visit a Flight Master in order to unlock transportation to and from that location. We’ve always viewed this as a fundamental element of exploration in World of Warcraft. Players should feel like they’re in a massive world with vast continents to explore and thousands of adventures to embark upon (because there are!).

With Cataclysm, every zone in Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms was changing, flight points were moving, being added or removed, and we needed to make sure people didn’t log in to find they were missing large portions of their flight points. To solve this, characters exploring the world below level 80 were given every flight point automatically to ensure no edge-cases were missed. It was supposed to be a one-time changeover in the old-to-new world transition to resolve what could be numerable bugs due to the vastly altered landscape in the expansion. However, when the change went in, we didn’t realize it was implemented in a way that would affect all characters forever. When we found out it just wasn’t an immediate priority to fix. We began implementing new tech in 5.1 and (more completely) 5.2 to resolve it.

We understand it was very convenient, but it wasn’t an intended change for flight path discovery forever. Over the course of patch 5.1 and 5.2, we implemented new functionality to remedy the original implementation issues. We’ve improved our tech in a way that allows us to remember what flight points a character has discovered, or determine what paths a character should/shouldn’t know on a case-by-case basis. In some cases you’re provided flight points when we’ve determined a character’s foreknowledge of them is important to the experience, but in most cases you will need to brave the wilds, seek out adventure, and visit a Flight Master before you can unlock flight to and from that location.

And you didn't tell us this ahead of time because?

Cheers.

We were on our way to tell you, but then we ran into Chuck and he was going off about his landlord and something with his sink smelling like something super foul, and while we was relating the smell to something between rotten onions and and an ogres feet we saw this cat run by that totally looked like our sister's cat that she just lost, but then this big scary lady picked it up and was all like "Don't you look at Chairman Meow!" which took us aback mainly because we didn't think cats followed any particular political ideology, and as we pondered the implications of such a possibility an ice cream truck drove by and so we chased after it because Big Sticks and when we caught up all they had were like the character ones with bubble gum balls for eyes which are all totally gross so we said thank you but no thank you so we left, and then when we finally made it to your place we were just SUPER exhausted so we went home...

Anyway, we meant to. Sorry. :(