Rearranging and Removing Portals

Taienna:

It is a joy to actually see DAYLIGHT in FF14. Actual, honest to god sunshine. How long have we been asking them to fix the night and day cycle in WOW?

Two years?

Three?

Its still broken and its still being ignored. FF14 have a rotating night and day cycle.

Why cant Blizzard do that?

3 Likes

Correct.

Change which is really not necessary. It is nice to have a portal room but is it priority #1? IMO no but others could argue otherwise.

Hmm, just tried it in Chrome and it works fine, Firefox is just being obstinate for some reason.

This is just blizzard doing things for the sake of looking busy.

Current game is a raging dumpster fire and this is where they choose to spend time. Explains a lot

4 Likes

Yup this is a theory I have on how they keep justifying development costs by rearranging talents and regifting an ability you had baseline an expansion ago.

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Blizzard, are you actively trying to drive subscription numbers into the ground? Right now, you should be doing everything to please the customer and entice people back. As I said in the other thread, do not introduce a bunch of helpful portals and then take them away. Total bait and switch. I thought that the portal rooms were going to alleviate the problem of jumping through hoops and portal-hopping, not make it worse! The world gets bigger every expansion; I do not have time to harass a mage when I want to go somewhere. Mages do not have all the portals to Caverns of Time, Karazhan, etc. These portals will be severely missed. I use them a lot for holiday quests and farming.

“B-but…do you guys not have portals?”

Saying “just get a mage” is such a cop out.

7 Likes

This is one of the most awful, foolish, out of touch decisions Blizzard has ever made. I haven’t unsubbed in over 12 years, not during content droughts, not for anything. But something like this just makes me furious and if getting around to do things like world holidays, farm old content, visit places for RP (my little joys) is made that much more difficult maybe I just won’t expend the effort and withdraw my sub (for someone who spends a lot of time RPing and doing old content especially this is a real slap in the face, I can see why people who log on only for progression and maybe trade chat might care less but they’re not a majority and most people who do progression supplement it with doing old content for various completionist purposes).

This is a slap in the face to those actually trying to enjoy the decade plus of work the dev team has put into old content on their journey.

This makes me angry. It is going to make playing WoW a bigger chore. Maybe the devs have tons of free time in their lives with no responsibilities and it’s no big deal for them to deal with the time gating of new content plus wasting extra hours of time on traveling to far flung, old locations to do old content. I can’t see this as anything but an attempt to stretch out the content that currently exists and force players to spend more time doing old content for things like mogs, rep, etc and staring at what the devs think are apparently museum quality renderings of Azeroth worthy of study for days on end. (In Wrath I’d frequently end up dead in the barrens from auto-flying off the edge of continents while alt tabbed, so bored was I by sitting there staring at my screen for 5 minutes of my character slowly moving over a vast, incredibly familiar and downright memorized landscape trying to get to where I wanted to go).

It isn’t about the absolute amount of time it takes either but how it feels. Many people who’ve been stuck in stop and go gridlock traffic can attest it is more frustrating to deal with 10 minutes of that than 30 minutes of country highway driving, because you feel like you’re not getting anywhere, you’re stuck on a journey that you aren’t interested in. I feel the same way staring at zones I’ve seen a thousand times or more as I spend 7 minutes flying over them to get to a destination to then spend 10 minutes clearing some content before hearthing and doing it again to get to another location and repeating this for for hours with the hearth soon turning into just being forced to spend 12 minutes traveling by zeppelin and boat and air on a journey I’m zoned out of. I’m not appreciating your design work on zones when I’m doing this Blizz and I promise most others aren’t either.

This is not going to make people appreciate old content more, it’s going to make them avoid it.

When it’s a struggle to access things less people access them.

With more people feeling cooped up in Zul and Boralus this is just going to lead to more people ending up bored with the game. Ask any transit designer, any city planner, anyone who owns commercial centers how important accessibility is to them and they’ll tell you getting people to a given location is very important and travel times are an essential part of that. If you make it difficult they won’t bother, if they’re on the fence they’ll stay home or in this case sit around wondering why they’re now so bored and what happened to feeling engaged.

All this is going to do is lead to a lot of players who were interested in doing old content giving up and throwing in the towel because they don’t like the travel times. Maximizing player ability to do old content should be a priority at all times. The decade plus of work the dev team has put in to creating that content is an incredibly rich and valuable resource for WoW for player retention and engagement. Forcing players to fly through old zones is not likely to engage as many people as it frustrates. Most of your players are not new, we’ve seen this content before a thousand times and we’d like respectfully to be able to access it more easily to get to the parts we’re interested in.

WoW has so much content, but how it’s accessed makes the difference between that amount being frustrating, intimidating, and apathy inducing from the seeming impossibility of it OR it being a vast resource, easily digestible and seemingly tackle able in pieces of your choosing at your pace and discretion.

Old content is not about the journey anymore than walking to and from subway stops to go to work day after day past landmarks is a journey after a year or two of it. It’s the destination that we care about (work, a bar, an amusement park, the park, a friend’s house) and no one is being prohibited from taking those journeys if they want to, of stopping to look at it. But people aren’t subbing to look at their character flying over Arathi Basin to get to Eastern Plaguelands, they’re subbing to go into Stratholme and farm old gear and Baron RIvendare’s mount!

18 Likes

This company has become a total trainwreck. Is Activision actively trying to kill WoW? I can’t think of any other reason why flight is postponed until several patches in or why portals would be removed and/or relocated… Unless, of course, the new business plan is to whittle down to only the most obsessed players, and then slam them with micro-transactions.

3 Likes

That’s a spicy take. See what I did there?

highfive I already took away my 14+ hours a day and unsubbed. This doesn’t affect me too much, but if it was 2 years ago when I was going all over the place trying to collect pets I’m missing because I ran out of fun to do and made my own… I know I would’ve quit then.

“Punish all the players who are trying to make their own fun outside of BfA!” – Blizz probably

Players: WoD is the greatest fumble of WoW.
BfA Devs: Hold my beer!

9 Likes

I am out of likes but yes, this times infinity.

Agree 100%. A lot of people play this game to unwind… the boring and frustrating extra time is counterproductive to that. When I’m extra stressed out, I enjoy running old content because it’s laid back. If the journey there stresses me out more though… then that’s extra stress I don’t need on top of everything else. At that point I just won’t log in because sometimes I just need a break from current content. I know I’m not the only person who feels this way.

7 Likes

You aren’t alone here, trust me. A lot of people are upset about this. More so than who are for it.

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Lol… the “hold my beer” comment just gave me a much needed laugh.

Pets are practically the only thing my sister logs in for these days. That plus events like the Darkmoon Faire and Holidays. She has lots and lots of alts (whom she refers to as her “family”).

She is totally bummed by these changes but isn’t likely to come to the forums to complain. It’s totally not her thing. She’s the type who will just stop playing and cancel her sub without a word. But right now she’s just waiting to see how badly these changes ruin her enjoyment of the game. She’s always willing to give Blizzard a chance.

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I hope for her that they change them. Well, for everyone, but you know what I mean. :smiley:

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Yeah, I just restarted working on my rogue for the Class mount. Got him up to 110 yesterday. I gotta figure out all the stuff he has to do (because it feels like Legion was four expansions ago). I think he just needs to do the Class Hall campaign and the Broken Shore story line. It’s really weird doing Legion without any Artifact stuff though. I’m trying to decide whether to bring him to BfA for some new weapons, or just keep muddling through with burnt-out artifacts.

I absolutely love in game holidays and collecting pets… might not be doing them as much anymore with these changes though. A game should be fun and challenging… not inconvenient and frustrating. At least for now I will continue to play… but the current downward spiral has me questioning that… and I was one of the few weirdos that didn’t hate WoD. I hate that there’s a chance that this game will fall apart so bad that I won’t be able to tolerate it despite how much I love aspects of it and have very fond memories. WoW has such potential that it’s just painful to watch what they are doing to it now. Fingers are crossed that things improve soon.

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I think a lot of us on the forums feel this way. That’s why we’re here posting, trying to get Blizzard to correct this course they’re on.

1 Like

Yeah, I still have hope. I am unsure why but this many posts in this little time shows how much the players dislike the change.