Yep. Nothing was fixed by the removal of portals from existing hubs. Nothing was improved. Even the defenders can’t point to one single benefit of the portal removal.
All the devs had to do was simply add the portal rooms and leave the rest alone. You’d think that would be a no-brainer, but somehow these devs just can’t give us a silver lining without sticking a big old cloud to it.
The best way to alienate your workforce and to kill innovation within your business is to demand people do it your way 100% of the time. The best way to alienate and lose your customers is to ignore complaints.
Razorstorm just posted something that gave a good laugh in the post about the upcoming Q&A, should read it
Several questions about portals in the Q&A thread already. We’ll see if they field it.
It’ll be a rehash of what they’ve said here. Or it’ll be 5 minutes of hot air where they say nothing of any value.
I would recommend that everyone go and hit Like on this subject so that
Yeah. I stopped being optimistic 2 xpacs ago.
Would love to see them actually field a question about communication, plans to improve or if they truly feel the live Q&A format is making anybody happy (it isn’t.)
Probably the second. They’ll cherry pick the questions like always and we won’t get any new, useful information.
In short, its a PR stunt. It’s not about genuinely engaging the community in conversation. It’s a PR stunt. And more and more, people are realizing that’s all it is. Once in awhile they’ll say something useful, but mostly its a failed attempt at PR.
Don’t just LIKE it, go there ask it too, and everyone like eachother’s post. Make sure they hear us.
I picture the Q&A’s as the equivalent of the dog in the room that’s on fire and “this is fine.”
Nothing of consequence is ever going to come out of the Q&As.
When Ion did that Q&A on reddit, that, in my opinion, was better. He actually did answer a lot of the most upvoted questions even if a lot of people didn’t like his answers.
That’d be cool! But I was thinking maybe a little more like outland / void elf-starter area / warlock order hall. The original caverns of time, but barely held together by magic after the rest of Azeroth fell away.
The great hourglass burned, bent and broken, the instance gateways that were there, still there but connected by treacherous crumbling bridges and decrepit stairways bridging a bottomless void.
Very loosely similar to “The Ways” in the “Wheel of Time” series, if you’re familiar with it. 
Well the benefit to Blizzard is obvious, but QFT with regards to being unable to show any benefit for US.
Blizzard basically said “Oops, our bad, those weren’t supposed to still be available. ZOT ZOT. Be grateful you got any extra use out of them, because we never intended that.”
Imagine if they started BFA with “Welcome to the new expansion. We DELETED your legendaries and artifact weapon because you’re not supposed to have them anymore.”
It feels like a lessor version of that kind of attitude.
They answer the safe questions in Q&As. They answer the ones about lore, flying (for the millionth time), quest stuff, like one class question about shaman and the answer is the same, they hate them.
They won’t ever give an answer to the questions people want to know most. It’s been like that for a long time now.
Done! And because a lot of my alts are engineers specifically for travel reasons & loot-a-rangs, I added:
Please hit like on it! =D
Oh, I don’t know. I feel like maybe the fact that they hadn’t used the network in 10,000 years probably had a lot more to do with it than Mages. Though I can definitely empathize with Occuleth’s frustrations.
p.s. My /played time is going up way way more slowly now that I’m spending so much more time fussing in the forums.
Trivial problem to fix… put the old portals back and I’ll go back to very infrequently lurking on the warlock sub-forum.
So,
No where in this thread have you stated if you like these changes or dislike these changes.
I will give you the opportunity to give us all a yes or no answer.
If you cannot provide that, then you are indeed just posturing on Blizzard’s behalf.
Go!
Wish I could come back but its this pattern of abuse that makes it impossible until Ion and crew are gone.
Even if they put them back, it’ll just be some new childish drama again in two weeks.
I’ll keep my accounts around, certainly not deleting nearly two years of work, and hope that better men and women will be on the job some day making this game great again.