Al

The only way to make flight-paths "part of the world" is to have something dynamic happen. The Thunder Bluff zeppelin has the cloud Troll, what do Griffins/Bats/Manticores have? A sped-up view of things we've already seen.

A wild pack of whichever creature you're on fly over to see what your 'mount' is doing, or a pack of other flyers watch it warily while it's in their territory.
A passing Dragon eye-balls you for using a Drake as a taxi (unlikely Northrend update).
Should we get weather effects back, incorporate those. Dodge a storm, go through a cloud.

As is, they're static breaks from the game and not part of it. People will still alt-tab or "go bio", but do something.

Give it a few weeks.

"We've noticed a drop-off in city visits on the PTR. As we want (two of) the cities to feel lively and populated, we are removing town Class Trainers in favour of the City equivalents."

The battle-plan gets drawn up by the geniuses behind Andorhal and Stonard?

Saurfang still has his vow from Wrath - maybe he comes in while Garrosh is hunched over to deliver the coup de grâce.

Oh yeah, he's totally involved in the game beyond cashing the royalty cheques.

(Granted, BioWare screwed the pooch on Mass Effect 3's ending, but that's another rant for another site..)

Hell, I'm an Oceanic player so I became well used to Blizzard not giving two craps about me or my opinion in the last 5 years. Cataclysm, though, just wasn't up to the standards they've set since they began making games.

I'm just playing out the time-card I was given for my birthday (my brother still has faith), but I suspect I'm done after that. SW:TOR local servers and latency only in the double digits is a glorious thing.

Archaelogy.
Storylines they didn't try to wrap up and/or explain (Gilneas, Al'Akir's motivation, Neptulon's fate, Malfurion's return, Alliance Twilight Highlands intro, Southshore, Andorhal and Stonard retreats, Uldum magically moving from a cave to a world zone).
The "Epic Thrall questline" of getting ported around and farming elementals.
The "Who wants to see old-world NPCs return when we can make TV references" approach.
Forcing everyone into cities even more.
Awful, awful rail-roading.
Ramping up the "buy our books to know why anything happened off-screen" tie-ins.

Maybe I'm a grouch from the 2600 generation, but I prefer a late release with polish to rush-jobs (Dragon Age 2, I'm looking at you). Especially when they really should have done the revamp and the expansion separately for breathing space and better quality control. The whole thing was a giant falling from their "when it's done" mantra, and I just can't view it as something that was given the necessary time to make it work.

"so we want to make sure we give the devs time to iterate and explore and try to figure out what's going to make this game great, and going to make the expansion great, because that's a core philosophy at Blizzard."

I admire their ability to still say that with a straight face after Cataclysm.

And that's in the wrong place.. somehow.

"I noticed the Dark Portal re-opened thanks to Illidan, so Alleria and I snuck back through to see how things were. We kinda boarded the wrong boat in Booty Bay, got shipwrecked with The Skipper and Goblligan, and finally a Pandaren ship found us. Then you noticed me in this inn and came over."

That sounds ... kinda stupid.

"Yeah, well, they forgot about us in Burning Crusade despite saying we'd be in that expansion, so we'll take what storyline we can get."