^^ This, exactly. My response from the other mega-thread about portals:
Serious question here. Is this just another attempt by Blizzard to make the world feel more populated (like CRZ)? Have they lost so many players that they have to resort to this kind of trickery to make people think there are more people playing than there really are?
Keep taking away the QoL improvements that you’ve given us, Blizzard, and you’ll discover that a big chunk of your players will go with them. I’m getting very tired of you guys taking things away that we’ve had forever, that were FUN and engaging, all because you can’t be bothered to make quality content anymore that will attract and keep players. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who feels this way. From talents, to abilities, to flight, to toys that have a stupidly long CD, to portals that a lot of people use regularly, STOP TAKING STUFF AWAY FROM US.
This is going to ruin getting around the in the world. You are trying to milk more of our time… If you listened to the players at all, you would leave the portals exactly where they are, or maybe even add the portals that you are removing to the main hubs. This is not going to make the world any bigger, it’s just going to piss off the remaining players that have dealt with many of your bad ideas since BFA launched.
The mentality of “we know what you want more than you know what you want” has to die. You clearly DON’T know because you don’t listen. If you did, you wouldn’t go though with this terrible idea.
The next thing you’ll tell us is that if we want the portals back, well have to download an app called portalmon-go… Which will no doubt be monetized.
Reading this over and over again and I’m still baffled. I’m starting to think they want to kill the game off. This isn’t the Blizzard I grew up with. It’s insane how we got here from Legion (and I’ll be honest, Legion showed it’s wear and tear as the expansion progressed).
I don’t think it’s passive aggressiveness, I genuinely think that “they” believe it’s a good idea. We don’t need it but they find the idea of wasting resources on such a thing as making the World bigger which is silly.
The World needs actual things in it to make it worth while again. The travel is there, people who want to, go do it. Having hubs throughout various zones of Azeroth is not a bad idea and seemingly no one ever thought it was a problem.
Portals in general would be a bad idea if the content in said zone destination was somehow affected by it and or the design of the gameplay surrounding it. As it stands now, it’s really a nuisance if anything having to go one extra step to go say, farm an old dungeon or something.
As for the mage explanation a CM brought up in a different thread regarding this… it’s a non issue. Any mage feeling insecure about their teleports/portals being not so special anymore needs to reevaluate themselves asap.
Don’t like longer travel time?
Confused as to how to get to Caverns of Time now?
Well, we have just the deal for you!
For only $25 USD you’ll be able to have (most of) the portals that we’ve removed!
Just pay that amount per character to make them all into mages!
Every. single. one! (More money in our pockets is better!) (We provide no guarantee that at a future patch Mage portals will not be level-locked, reduced, or completely removed. We also don’t guarantee that we won’t make Mage portals into microtransactions, with a per-use fee. Our greed is our motivation for making such bad decisions. Enjoy!)"
Portals should not be removed. More portal hubs should be added in every major city, and every portal hub should include all of the convenient portals that were in new Dalaran.
This is another prime example of Devs sitting in their own echo chamber patting each other on the back fixing things that don’t need fixing and leaving absolutely broken things unfixed.
The display of utter disconnect is quite astounding. Do any of these remaining highly paid decision makers even play the game? Really really play the game as in no cheat codes and developer back doors.
What is the point of deleting exhisting portals? And moving them around? Were they costing to much electricity server side to keep them up? Were the portals really creating that much overhead?
Portals are like pve/pvp vendors… once the player made the effort to find them once… they for ever knew where they are. (Unless your drew Barry Moore 50 first dates).
This is just another display of the vast disconnect between subscribers and developers. Honestly I been bnb playing this game since vanilla, I think BFA will be my last once it’s over with, I am tired of logging in and seeing something knee jerk nerf because some dev cought feelings. Entire swaths of content being regurgitated down to the pixels being reused.
You took the FoX mount from legion dyied it blue and gave it wings then put in on the blizzard store for half the games cost.
I log on to my shaman every day in utter disgust what you have done with the class. … why do I play, I guess social loyalty, but the small circle is becoming smaller by the day. I’m 39 with two children and a wife, I been at this game since my early 20’s sort of just a part of my day part if an aspect of my life. It’s just no longer entertaining or fun, every patch all I could honestly expect is for the devs to break something working and not fix broken things.
I got enough gray hair and already bald, sooner or later I think I am just going to divert my free time else where.
Passive aggressive developers and the passive aggressive finance department pushing them around is not fun.
Because everyone is noticing the lack of players, the easiest fix is to make all but two places worthless as hubs so that the remaining players are centralized where they can see each other and thus they can claim the “world feels bigger”.
This is that slimy cooperate double speak you hear about. Where the information they convey is purposfully worded such that something mundane and worthless sounds like an accomplishment and even a reward to you. But in reality is always a loss. When all you do is take, you always have to lie and cover stuff in pretty distractions to keep getting away with it. Bread and circuses while the bank gets robbed.
No, seriously, there’s a lot more ‘MMO games’ out there now than there was in 2004.
If Blizzard wants to pull this stunt, let them. Other games such as ESO and FF14 let their playerbase freely teleport to all the zones; paying just a same ingame currency fee. And guess what. Not only do these two games have more players playing (release your numbers, Blizzard; prove me wrong), but EVERY ZONE HAS PLAYERS IN THEM. Even in the “lowbie zones” you’ll find max-level players just running around doing stuff.
So, their reasoning is utter bull and based solely on making you, the player, do one of two things: spend an extra 15 minutes to get to Point B. Just so they can release an even bigger MAU for the next quarter. The other is to herd you all into the newer zones so the game doesn’t feel as dead.
((PS: I also wouldn’t be surprised if they wanted to do this to also “encourage” players to buy WoW Tokens to transact enough gold to buy the AH mounts since (for now) Boralus and Daz don’t have any AH (even for us Engineers). Again, Blizzard, prove me wrong. Oh…wait, you can’t. Because you can’t fool a fellow puppet master.))
Hehe yeah. I still use them every now and then. I was mainly just curious if they had their teleport option removed.
I remember back in the day I would grind that CoT rep so I could reach revered and become eligible for that lady’s teleport at the Shattrath inn/bar. I always felt superior to my brother that I had a CoT teleport and he had to get there the ole fashion way lol.
We are.
The wife and I are checking out FF14.
Going to talk to her brother and his wife and get them on board to switch to a game that doesnt seem to spend its time irritating its players for no good reason…like removing master loot.
Ports to capital cities, yes, there’s that pattern; however, they have never received the portals created to access specific content.
Should they also remove the portal to quel’ danas and make everyone go through silvermoon?
I agree passive aggressive move, i would also say another way to milk money, it wastes our time and anything that takes you longer to do makes money for blizzard. This whole thing seems silly to give players access to ease of movement for YEARS then take it away for no reason. The worst part is Talesin and Eviltel will be on youtube defending this as some noble move by blizzard and how us players are such jerks how can we not see blizzard are heroes for doing this. Its little things like this that drive away the player base handfuls at a time. There wont be anyone to buy tokens when there are no reasons to play .