Portals... click them, walk-thru etc

Community General Discussion
1

I’ve always wondered…

Why do various portals function differently?

Some you can just walk into. Some you have to click. I swear I’ve even seen some that have a “dialog” cursor and you have click a text option as if you’re speaking to a person to invoke travel. There may even be a fourth or fifth type out there. Heck, I think some you have to click on have the new ‘hand’ and some still have the old ‘gear’ cursors.

Plus, Dornogal’s transit portal now shows a neat screen-fill effect… that hopefully the other portals will be retrofitted with their respective versions of. I get that this is a recent convention, though.

I’m not saying it’s anything game-breaking but boy, I’d like to know why there was a design decision to make some function differently than others. It’s not even a matter of “oh this is how they worked in TBC and this is how they work now” because we still have clicky portals and we still have walk-through portals.

(And yes I get that mage portals should be clicky otherwise you can grief people with them).

2

People forget the Portal Wars.

The blood shed on both sides… were you a ‘runner’, or a ‘clicker’.

Everything changed when the mad man spoke aloud and said
“No clicking. No running. No collision volumes. We do everything through /command texts now.”

His execution was swift, bloody, and brutal, and we all vowed to speak of it only to inform others of our bloody history.

Never again.

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3

This sort of thing generally happens when some feature is created independently by two different groups whose work then gets pushed together into one product.

It’s the same reason that in our natural language we have synonyms and homonyms.

4

It’s the mages. Some are jokers and love to leave portals lying around where people can just run thru them and fall to their deaths or maybe into a pigsty for those with less lethal humor.

Others were created by thoughtful types that want to make sure people Really want to step thru, so they make them clickable.

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