Originally Posted by
exochaft
I think that has more of an impact on how flying works within certain expansions, exactly because the design philosophy is very different. Vanilla, for example, was never designed for flying, which is pretty evident when one flies over the world and sees how coarse it is (since they assumed everyone would view the world from the ground and designed around that perspective). It was fairly easy to guide and determine how players would enter areas or how they would likely interact with the world because it was mostly 2D movement.
Once flying is in the game, Blizz started designing expansions around its existence, and that requires more work than if the game did not. Not only does one have to make the world look nice from high up in the air, there's considerations to be made for intended pathing and how players will advance or tackle content. Can't remember if it was specifically a Blizz video for zone design or not, but players likely are being lead to take certain paths without them even thinking about it, but the tools used for 2D controlling of player direction don't work well in 3D or are much harder to implement. What they found out was that flying was in the game, people almost always took the path of least resistance by going directly from point A to point B and skipping everything in between, which kind of trivializes or makes anything in between point A and B pointless. There's also that the world shrinks quite a bit since flying lets you fly as the crow flies, as well as much faster than ground mounts. The result is that Blizz designed earlier expansion areas around having flying immediately, but the time/effort to do so was likely way too high while keeping the experience for players up to par.
Without getting into the weeds too much, Blizz ran into an issue because of the existence of flying and has had to adjust content to account for many of the issues (Pathfinder being one of the solutions). Basically, the solutions Blizz implements are trade-off solutions to appease everyone. To counter how small the world gets when you add flying, they'd have to massively expand zones to make the world still feel big, but there's a substantive investment cost in blowing up zones while keeping the detail at the same level we've expected. If we reverted to vanilla or early expansion area detail, the time investment would be much less. To put a finer point on things, if we had flying immediately, Blizz could just make the world less detailed and bland as most of that effort is ignored, and there's probably a larger population within WoW that would hate seeing the detail/quality of the zones drop versus those wanting flying immediately. So the solution is a compromise: we get a smaller, detailed world to enjoy at ground level from the start, followed by flying eventually where people can ignore the world (albeit a relatively much smaller one time-wise).
More specifically to the OP and how they're handling such flying things... I imagine it's akin to hard mode in Ulduar. Being able to activate hard mode versions of encounter was pretty popular, but in terms of being able to constantly keep it fresh and relevant to the content, it turns out the task was pretty hard. Even the iconic big red button for Mimiron was jokingly thrown about as an activation method for hard mode because they couldn't come up with another idea, yet ended up implemented. Similar process probably comes with anti-flying, either from an RP perspective and/or methodology. In BC, the flame cannon turrets made sense in the area due to the presence of the Legion. On Mechagon, having machines flying around shooting you down makes sense, as well. If we tried to implement something like that for Stormsong Valley... now things start to get a little more complicated, as there's not really an RP reason to have something to keep you from flying. Maybe some giant killer bees flying around at this point, that would make me chuckle a bit, but anti-flying mechanics only really make sense in specific areas. This is probably why purchasable flying skills in certain areas were referred to as licenses, as there's no threat in the air to keep you from flying... but if you don't get your license from your faction, you're breaking the law as an unauthorized flyer!