Forcing people to do absolutely nothing for extended periods of time is an odd choice. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be a choice, but rather that it shouldn’t be the only choice. We all know how irritating it is when you have to take that flight from Winterspring to Silithus (or whatever the Northrend equivalent might be). “Gee, what shall I do while in flight? Perhaps discover usable cold fusion?”

Seriously. It’s boring. Offer some alternatives to just waiting it out.

A Few Solutions: Free Hands, In-Flight Entertainment & the Express Lane

Solution one: Allow crafting and such stationary things mid-flight.

Solution two: Add an optional mini-game to the flight. Maybe if you help the (gryphon/wyvern/…copter?) catch some snacks mid-flight (…or motes?), it’ll refund some of your fare when you land. It might still be boring, but at least it adds some sort of control to the situation, even if it’s just to save a few silver. Maybe add an achievement for amount of gold saved / things snacked, which would yield the BOE recipe for…

Solution three: A gnomish air-fueled wormhole generator (or, FlightZapper 9001). Equip this trinket before flight, and it starts casting when you take off, and after 10 seconds it creates a wormhole that teleports you to your destination, about 10 seconds before you land. Maybe even have a Stargate-esque animation between locations. For a mere 2,000 gold, your flights can go from 6 minutes to 20-30 seconds. Make it 3,000 gold for an heirloom version so the player can switch mains / use it on new characters.

Man, that third solution would be higher priority than dual spec, flying mounts, and northrend flying combined. It’d probably even save on bandwidth from the servers having to send the player every single item on the route…

The thing I hate about blogging about this stuff is that I end up craving the solutions I post. It’s kind of like discussing donuts, and thereafter having a deep and almost spiritual need for tasty donut goodness.