Mudflation I definitely agree with, progression I'd tend to disagree though.
A players without Veeshan's Peak key can't do anything with a guild who wants to raid it. He can't zone in for rotting items, he can't help them out on events, nothing. He is forced to sit out and work on the long boring quest by himself or with other unkeyeds while his guild does VP (or any keyed zone for that matter).
Whereas in PoP if you were just a fresh noobly app who had no keys or flags, you could still tag along in that gimp space with the 85/15 rule or more specifically 5/1 flag:unflagged ratio. The problem with PoP was the layering of it. Missing one flag from say Bertox meant you were screwed for the rest of your flagging through until your guild went back to kill Bertox.
Had they figured out a better backflagging method (IE doing a raid a tier above, flags you for all the previous tier raids) that would've been excellent. PoP raiding encounter wise, was easily the most vast amount of raiding available in a single expansion. Ranging from 2 group events to events that guilds would get over a full raid (72+) and still wipe to due to failures of CC / Tanking / Healing / DPS etc.
Another minor issue I had with PoP was the lateness that they came out with the relaxing of the flagging rules. IE when it was new only PoJustice / Innovation / Nightmare / Disease were available to non-raiders.
Later on they opened up CoDecay, PoStorms, PoValor, Hall of Honor, Bastion of Thunder, and PoTactics based on level requirements (keeping the elemental planes and Sol Ro's tower still locked). Had they done that off the bat it would've been much better off. Instead of making those require raid flags to enter.
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