At this point it just seems like passive aggressiveness

Community General Discussion
145

Flight paths count as play time.
This is just to inflate investor-friendly metric.

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146

I used those portals all the time

A lot of people in these threads clearly use those portals… All the time

Just because you hardly go there doesn’t mean nobody does

Like honestly, some of the changes Blizz has been making are just baffling. Absolutely baffling.

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147

They knew the playerbase would not like it. Hence the age-old tactic of releasing bad news on a Friday and hope it blows over the weekend.
The no flight they tried to bury on a 3rd party interview on a Friday as well

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148

Lots of items will give you ports also.

149

It makes perfect sense, if you know the angle to view it from.

Us, the players? Hah, no. This change is for the shareholders. Because companies love touting the time-played metric. It’s become the god of stats for online games. Just listen to any of the public investor calls, where they spout glowing prose over how they’ve, once again, increased time-spent from the previous quarter.

So this change makes perfect sense to them. Unfortunately, this kind of thing is typically short-sighted and made in an apparent vacuum. It’ll have the OPPOSITE effect they expect.

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150

Couldn’t fit in enough time gating with world quests, have to grab em by the balls. Because if we don’t hit their participation metrics for world quests, we’re not being time gated enough for daddy Activision!

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151

With all of the anger over the various issues with BFA this actually has motivated me to post on the forums for the first time or at least the first time in a long time. I think it’s just the fact that that this isn’t something new they added that people ended up not enjoying. It’s not a new system they are trying out that didn’t work as well as planned. It’s taking the time to remove something in game that people use and enjoy and NO ONE was asking them to remove. All this does is make it more inconvenient. Also seriously that one community manager needed to ask why people need the CoT portal? For me it’s to do the already annoying weekly runs for the Blazing Drake that at this point I’m not even sure actually exists. I definitely don’t want to make an even longer trip to get to the long raid filled with RP to make another attempt. If you remove these portals for no good reason then at the very least they should all be immediately available in the new portal room.

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152

I mean, no. But it would be novel.

153

There is absolutely no reason for them to take the time to remove these old portals that people still use. Also I enjoy visiting the older zones. I like Pandaria and enjoyed having a reason to visit there. I found it very annoying they decided to decimate the portal room there. At the very least they need to replace all the portals removed and add them to the new portal room.

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154

Why were the cata portals spared?

Time to eliminate them all.

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155

Is this just another way for them to inflate their time played metric?

This is horrible.

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156

Don’t forget CRZ! Oh, the world just seems so full because of all those asterisks around that you cannot interact on any meaningful level at all with. So very sick of competing with asterisks for nodes, kills, and all the other nuisances that come with them.

Also, I bet my lily-white tooshie those new allied (I just rolled my eyes SO hard in real life) portals will be reputation locked behind some tedious time-gated world quest humping trickle grind. With the way this game is heading there will be reputation for the launcher and login screens soon. /meh

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157

The players stomached grinding reputation for new races and some are even daft enough to defend it. It’s only going to get worse…

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158

Sorry I am posting twice, but, why to make the world feel bigger instead of making it feeling alive? How many time have you seen, in the actual wow, poeple playing below you fighting or doing quest, meanwhile you fly over the map? I can answer: zero. How many times have you seen a crowded place, aside from AH, with people doing their daily routine, or lowies running around in the capitals, or taking the zepelin/train?
Now, it’s feels like you are chained to a 40 yards range aura, that let’s you see what is happening in that sharding. Is so easy to go away a couple of yards and watch eveyone and everything dissapear, and you be teleported to an different place. And happens again and again. Just jump into an assault and finish it. You are going to be teleported to a different map zone (mostly empty).

This is what is killing world pvp, or making it unfair. And no, there is no reward big enough to balance this. Because is in the system that you are traveling alone in the map, and in one second, you are ganked by a just zoned enemy raid (or you have been zoned into an enemy raid).

We already have toys to make the world bigger, and they aren’t so fun. If you want to travel long distance using a lot of your time, take the long path.
Let’s us, the players who are here to play (not irony), play the game doing our own choices

159

My bad, I conflated city hub with portal hub. To clarify, I meant portal hubs and assumed the inference would be obvious :upside_down_face: :llama:

With shard/CRZ/phasing tech they should rethink taking away portal hubs from Vale and new Dal. Maybe it made sense when old Dal was the only Dal, but there were/are portal hubs that are still relevant to the leveling experience now. Immersion! City of magi who don’t know how to portal!

They left the Shrine portal hubs up for so long, why remove them with 8.1 and not give lowbies a portal hub until 8.1.5? We finally have a date for 8.1.5, but for months my lowbie alts did not have a portal hub. They still won’t have one until 3/12. That was definitely annoying during love is in the air when I was farming cards for tokens and XP. The devs just didn’t think about it very hard or didn’t care.

Yes, I exaggerated by saying lowbies do not at all have any portal hubs. However, during love is in the air, I certainly did not have access to the portals I wanted. And now even more portals are being removed. It’s just stupid and makes the game feel like a waste of time. “Here’s another helping of extra steps!”

It’s fine that some players never used those portals, but did their existence detract from your gameplay? Because their removal certainly detracted from my gameplay. The removal of new Dal’s portals is going to feel way worse. I guess this is their soft cudgel way of nudging us to level cap.
:thinking:

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160

not like they were using that time on something worthwhile like tier sets or class balance…I’ll see myself out.

161

What starts with Por- and ends in -Hub and gets everybody worked up?

It’s PortalHub!

162

No portals are not removed or they would have already been gone. Portals were removed in old Dalaran, but then were returned later. MoP was over two expansions ago and those portals weren’t removed when WoD launched, or when Legion launched. So why now? To extend time played, obviously.

As for your suggestions, why should people have to buy things and grind reps to get portal stones, instead of - you know - using actual portals that were there before they’re removing them?

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163

So adding flight and travel time to many locations that people want to go. If you work outside the home, would you care if all of a sudden you had to drive out of your way to get there? Like the Shrine portal is being removed and Alliance players are going to be dropped off in Jade Forest instead. And Uldum to CoT is annoying when we used to just be able to walk through a portal to get to CoT.

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164

This makes no sense. There are legion quests which tell you to use those portals. Will those be fixed? Or will new (or forgetful) people endlessly wander around legion looking for something that no longer exists?