Rearranging and Removing Portals

[Xyrtran-medivh]

so the tl;dr: we want to increase the time travel because it keeps you logged which is the main goal for our shareholders.

[Grumbles-hellscream (Grumbles)]

Thank you for your well written feedback, however I politely disagree. Essentially, you’re hearing but not listening to what people are saying. While I understand wanting to put in portal rooms in SW and Org, nowhere in your reasoning is there any logic behind removing other portals. Your main point seems to be to make the world seem bigger.

These changes to not make the world feel bigger - they make it feel more bloated and cumbersome. I’m honestly not sure anyone on the dev team really understands this.

Edit: oops, this was supposed to be to the thread in general not Verdre, bad gnome!

[Spanko-kiljaeden (Spanko)]

Same here honestly. Not sure why I play this game to not get listened to. It seems to me that basically everyone who posted in the last thread hated the change.

[Taienna-aerie-peak (Taienna)]

I’m having a ton of fun leveling a catgirl. She might not have horns and hooves, but it’s still fun.

Got a mount the other night, and it was nice to relive that exciting moment I don’t get from WoW anymore.

Considering how the Blizz devs act now, I don’t even feel guilty.

I looked at FF14 a while back when some other crap they pulled had me irritated. I think it was when they nerfed both my druid and my hunter within a week or so of paying $120 to boost the two.

I was hoping for more variety in the races, but at this point I really dont care.
TODAY its a few portals. Tomorrow we’re removing flying mounts and then next day we find out that OUR classic zones have been turned over to the hardcore classic players because Blizzard is too cheap to run two versions of the game.

[Capital-garona]

Didn’t even have to finish reading the first paragraph of the Blue post to know where this was going.

YTYDBYD.

[Taivora-dark-iron]

A lot of the convenience of travel that you’re trying to control is for old content. Why should you care about how we’ve been traveling to old content? Traveling is NOT something for which I play this game. I play it to actually do things. So do others.

I don’t understand why you’re still pushing through this change. So many design decisions reek of trying to control how players actually play the game. We are constantly getting pigeonholed; it’s so freaking frustrating! Let us do what we want. All you had to do was add a hub. Literally nothing else should be removed. I understand and am glad that you’re considering the portals people are concerned with being removed. But what the heck. Just leave things alone!

[Daranador-ravencrest]

This is incredibly disappointing and does not remotely answer the criticisms raised in the previous thread, and I have to imagine the community managers know that.

The portal room as originally announced was very exciting, because it was seen as an increased convenience. Instead of having to bounce around to three different locations in Orgrimmar/Stormwind, Dalaran, the Draenor garrison, and wherever else, here was a room that would take anyone running old content or trying to quickly meet up with a friend to help out wherever they needed to go.

This is so far from that intention as to be a joke. It’s extremely disappointing, and this response does nothing to mitigate it, and will likely only inflame the community by inventing some “tradition” of portal removal that never existed until the spontaneous removal of Pandaria’s portals sometime in the past year.

Please.

Reconsider.

[Nillah-uldaman (Nillah)]

Amen. Preach it, brother.

If this is the hill people want to die on, let 'em I say. It’s pretty clear Blizzard has made up their mind on this one, and they made the right call.

You guys are taking completely the wrong approach to this. The more Blizzard ignores the majority of their customers, the more they’re going to lose, and the faster this game is going to land in its coffin. But it sounds like you guys are totally on board with that.

[anon44207803]

I found it Luna

I stand corrected and I thank you most kindly.

[Chromey-stormrage (Chromey)]

Blah blah blah [Other generic lines that involve not listening]

The world already retains a meaningful size due to intra-zone travel and has so few portals that you often need to wait forever to get to a number of locations.
One of the lessons the dev team seems to have forgotten that they fixed in MOP and WOD:
- DON’T SPREAD YOUR DAILY QUESTS ALL OVER THE PLACE INTO A BUNCH OF LOCATIONS THAT TAKE SO LONG TO REACH THAT YOU SPEND MORE TIME TRAVELLING TO CONTENT THAN ACTUALLY DOING CONTENT
This is why MOP and WOD daily hubs were consolidated. That’s why BFA invasions are consolidated. The problem is that your normal WQs are not.
WQs are basically pit stops on a Flight Path & Walking Simulator.
Which, of course, is why Flying should have been available on launch after we spent an entire Loremaster grind, exploration of all zones, and then also added Rep grind appreciating the zones from the ground.

tl;dr - “We saw 5000+ posts of disagreement with us. Here’s fake non-reasons for why we’re not listening.”

As I pointed out several times before. When you make the game frustrating and tedious to arbitrarily pad playtime, you don’t get people to play more, you frustrate them into playing less and less until they quit.
And as I also pointed out. When it is a hassle to get to or from places, those places (like 2/3 of the old capitals Sylvanas didn’t destroy) become ghost towns. Imagine being a new player, and you first get to a big beautiful city like Silvermoon… and it’s a ghost town. Wow, what a first impression!

Not only does this game not need you removing portals for no reason, it needs MORE to encourage folks to visit places they enjoy for that completely foreign and ridiculous feeling of LIKING them.
If travel between major cities were easier, players would naturally use them more. Cramming everyone afk into Boralus or Dalaran doesn’t achieve anything, and only makes everywhere else in the game feel abandoned.

If there are any specific locations that feel as though they’re about to become unreasonably inaccessible, we’re certainly open to adding additional means of travel in the future.

This right here. This is where you didn’t listen.
Feedback was NOT “Some places are harder to reach”.
Feedback was “Taking away convenience and functionality for the sake of taking it away to pad playtime frustrates people into playing the game less until they stop playing entirely”.
The feedback was that your decision, your phony design pillar that contradicts with other design pillars, is wrong. Please bring back the MOP devs, they did so many more things right than wrong. Gameplay was at its most fun, dailies were consolidated well instead of spending more time travelling than actually playing, and convenience was in a good spot too.

[Valyent-thrall]

I understand-- and agree with!-- the idea of consolidating portals, but I wish the devs would actually consolidate them, instead of simply deleting them. If the Legion Dalaran portals to Karazhan and the like were simply being moved to the new portal rooms instead of being removed from the game entirely, no one would be nearly as upset.

[Vhye-area-52 (Vhye)]

You are killing this game with your rediculous decision making. Stop. Please. You realize WoW is worse off now than during WOD? That’s a feat, to be that bad.

[Taienna-aerie-peak (Taienna)]

Same here honestly. Not sure why I play this game to not get listened to. It seems to me that basically everyone who posted in the last thread hated the change.

“you want this change. you just dont know you want it”

[Rankin-shandris (Rankin)]

Too many eliminations of the distances between places can diminish a sense of the world having a meaningful size.

Eliminating too many portals can also diminish the sense of the world.

With new expansions, we’ve made a tradition of removing some of the portals from the previous expansion’s cities. The goal with that is to encourage transportation flow through newer places where players are more likely to interact with other players. We neglected to do that initially following Legion (and we never did that following Mists of Pandaria for various reasons), but we feel that we should have. We’re correcting that now.

You stopped this tradition back in Cataclysm. So we’ve had more expansions without removing portals than we’ve had with removed portals. And the portals that were removed were ones that were replaced with more convenient options. You never reduced the number of locations we could teleport to.

If there are any specific locations that feel as though they’re about to become unreasonably inaccessible, we’re certainly open to adding additional means of travel in the future.

Caverns of Time, the Shrines in Pandaria, Wyrmrest Temple, Dalaran Crater, Karazhan.

Boralus and Dazar’alor will continue to offer portals to a full range of capital cities, as well as to Silithus. The portals to Cataclysm zones will remain intact, and many other modes of transportation, such as Dalaran Signet Rings, Karazhan’s ring, the Timeless Isle trinket, Coordination Cloaks, and boats and zeppelins between many regions, will all be retained and functional.

And when will these items be made account-wide so that they can actually retain the functionality of the portals that any character could use? These are all straight downgrades, and the items all take up inventory slots, plus they have to be equipped and unequipped to use.

Quite frankly, this is very disappointing. You should be looking to improve our quality of life, not decrease it with some vague promise that you might make things better in the future. And it won’t even make things better, we’re simply asking to have the same portal options that we have right now.

[Ralanbék-frostmourne (Ralanbék)]

From the beginnings of World of Warcraft, game designers have had a number of guiding principles. Sometimes these notions change quickly, and sometimes they evolve slowly, but a few guiding principles have remained more or less the same throughout WoW’s history. One such lodestar has been “don’t overuse portals between locations in the world”. Too many eliminations of the distances between places can diminish a sense of the world having a meaningful size.

You have spent the last few days in the office to come up with this brand new mantra?

[Kyawardly-hyjal]

Hi. I know people have been talking about the Caverns of time a lot. Please highly consider this, it even makes sense from a lore perspective.

In addition, please consider adding some easier way to get to the Isle of Thunder, especially where the portals to Pandaria now take you to Jade forest. Even if there was an Innkeeper on Isle of Thunder, that would be a great improvement.

[Lorethelin-emerald-dream]

Kaivax pretty clearly and accurately states that old portals from old expansions are removed with the exception of Legion and MoP. This is just staying in line with a Day 1 philosophy. It’s really not that big of a deal and it certainly isn’t worthy of the outrage this decision is receiving.

[Spanko-kiljaeden (Spanko)]

Basically this. Reminds me so much of that.

[Hocksy-emerald-dream]

This is not good.
The ‘world’ is 8 expansions, not a single classic world.
Deleting portals instead of improving/increasing it you are in fact making it beyond inconvenient. You are driving away even more of those who follow emergent play styles and they are your easiest customers. I posted the following earlier and it holds true even more now.
“It boggles my mind to be honest.
Highest cost: raiders/dungeon runners new content required constantly, generally cyclic subs.
Med cost: pvp…requires balance updates cyclically, not much content demanded, less cyclic sub than raiders.
Lowest cost: emergent players, make their own fun, reuse old content, generally constant sub.
Who is being driven out? The least demanding, lowest cost, highest profit players. It makes zero sense.”

[anon9085514]

We’ve processed a lot of feedback on this, especially feedback about specific locations that feel like they’re going to become disproportionately inconvenient to reach, and we’ve followed that feedback through to the conclusion that you’re seeing on the PTR. We believe that the numerous remaining means of quick access in the game make most locations quite reachable.

So what are we exactly seeing? Not everyone is currently on the PTR-- So a brief Summary of the changes thus far?