I think this is pretty well said, honestly. I’m not sweating the change, but I don’t see the point in it, and the things being said to justify it just don’t ring true for me.
If the portal hubs were too crowded, there were other ways to go about resolving that – PTRs and betas have long since had teleportation options wrapped up in a single NPC. If the idea of the world feeling smaller was a concern, that’d be something to ask the playerbase about.
This type of change feels like an overcorrection, much like the GCD change and ability pruning that followed Legion.
If there is one thing I can say is a consistent mistake on Blizzard’s part, it’s that they frequently overcorrect on design decisions. Every decision made seems to be either not touching things, or nuking them from orbit.
Ironically I’m reminded of a quote an author dished out. Can’t recall which one.
“Once you release a story to the public, it is no longer your story.”
The audience will read the story and develop their own opinions on what the story means, ones you yourself never considered. They will call a villain a hero, a hero a villain, hate characters you love, love characters you hate. And they will challenge you during every step.
A good author will listen to their feedback, analyze the feedback, and be willing to admit that perhaps the way they presented things created an interpretation they never considered. That the grim and dirty “hero” is actually not a hero but a villain with good PR.
And if they create a sequel, they’ll take this feedback into mind.
Send your water-tipping cat to restore order. Or, start order, if there never was any. Or don’t, cats are chaos-aligned.
While, as an engineer with loads of doodads to teleport me and the required rep for the Shat CoT port, I’m not super affected by these changes. Still, like you, I seriously disagree wit these changes. They were changes made out of the blue - portaling was, in Blizzard fashion, not an issue til they made it one. Now you have posters outright trolling, white knighting, or just refusing to see the other side of the tracks. I feel like they’re trying to kill WoW but trying to hide that they’re doing it.
Interestingly, I just got my computer back up and running a day or two ago. New GPU. Not as good as the old one, but also not waterlogged. Thanks for remembering.
Sad thing is, there are good ways to kill something and bad ways to kill something. They’re taking the bad route.
Picture this, the developers announce the final expansion, a major big bad to defeat, lots of hooplah, announcements for the first team on each server that defeats the big bad.
And then a final farewell as they close the servers.
Yes, its sad, but it leaves people with positive memories. Because you took them out with a bang.
You’re more likely to get players to join you in your next game because you left them with good memories.
Or, you can simply burn the bridge and watch the players fall to their proverbial doom, with only a few climbing back up to see the light of day. This results in far fewer willing to cross the next “bridge” you create.
Well… yes… it is. And one more thing, doing old content isn’t overkill easy for everyone. Some bosses have mechanics that people can’t grasp. It’s not really an issue for me since I’ve seen a lot of those already, but for a lot of people it’s a lot different than auto running/flying or waiting to land at a flight master.
The only similarity is that you are playing the game either way.
Fair enough. Great reason. I really enjoyed M+ and pushing keystones in Legion, not so much now because I’m not a fan of BfA dungeons but I can understand enjoying it (this is what I meant by empathy btw).
Okay, but here’s a problem. You never actually asked my opinion on the loss of the portals and added travel time. You’re diving in too quickly.
I’ve played this game for a long time, since day 1. Admittedly I take it for granted in some ways. A lot of the little nuances in the game, like running around, traveling, flying, seeing the same sights over and over… it’s sort of like white noise.
A lack of a Caverns of Time portal isn’t really my issue… I don’t care if I have to fly from Uldum. I’ll still do the run. But in fairness I resonate with the principal of the thing. Removing the portal seems silly, and I don’t see the point in removing something that’s been there for a long time. …Just leave it in. That’s how I feel about it.
I also think that organizing a bunch of portals in one place goes against their argument of “making the world bigger.” It makes the world smaller when you can suddenly go to one place instead of having to find the portal or go to the spot you remember it is in.
As for your question about increased drop rates - I don’t believe I have a problem to be solved by that. I wouldn’t complain, but like I said earlier I have things that are rare or unobtainable and it feels good to use them. Perhaps that is a little vain but that’s just how it is.
To be honest, yes, in a lot of cases. It goes back to the “white noise” comment I made above. I don’t always need a reward to do something I’m fond of or enjoy. And that actually includes traveling. I hang out by Shadowfang Keep all the time. It’s a cool area. Silverpine is a great zone. Sometimes I’ll run Black Temple or Molten Core even if I don’t need it. I mean… I have both Warglaives on my Warlock, if that’s any indication. It’s actually the only character I’ve gotten both on. But I really didn’t need to do all those BT runs, I just like that raid!
I don’t think so. Being guaranteed something can be fun but it doesn’t always feel rewarding when it happens that way. I think that’s what you mean anyway.
But really, there are already things like that in the game. I think it’s healthy to have different types of rewards.
I don’t even think they’re trying to kill it. If anything, I think they’re trying to breathe new life into it.
I just think they’re doing a spectacularly mediocre job at that.
I feel like Blizzard really needs a few good focus groups to query. A lot of the design decisions made in the last year seem like they’re poorly thought out, and I feel like that could have been mitigated (if not outright avoided) by getting a group of 20-30 players of various stripes and bouncing the intended changes off of them.
Everything I say is my opinion. unless I specific say it is a fact. And yes, I’m completely on board with basically everything (even warfronts for some odd reason), so you are on point.
The crux of my argument is not dependent on empathy though. A player that is engaged on this kind of activity is opting in a massive hassle, a content that rewards rare items that now will become proportionally rarer.
And even if this increase in rarity is not desired, you could make the item proportionally easier to get. What I’m trying to get to, is that there are many ways to make this change have 0 impact on you.
Even though it is a bad example since it is hard to see advantages in less convenience (even though the entire game based around conveniences and inconveniences like all rpgs), the idea of blocking new content to not inconvenience old content farmers is really dangerous.
Actually its more than the past year. The past several expansions has been more TAKE than GIVE. Any healthy relationship is a balancing act of GIVE and TAKE.
The problem is Legion was riddled with an excess of RNG, not to mention cringe worthy story telling in the form of Xe’ra. Then there was the excessive grind of levelling up your artifact (made easier later on of course).
They time gated Flying far too long, and then when we got it back, we had it for such a short period before we lost it again when we went to Argus.
It was mostly seen as good because it came after the abysmal expansion that was Warlords. Anything looks good after a bad product.
Really you can make reasons for even the worst changes in the game , but thats not the point , do the players wan’t these changes & its 100% NO they don’t
That lodestar may have made sense 15-20 years ago when your playerbase was young.
We’ve aged with you. Some have introduced their kids, even grandkids, to you. We’ve learned to value our time, to value productivity. We have more to do with our time. In addition, Azeroth (and beyond) has kept growing.
I don’t think I’m alone in saying that travel time is NOT considered productive time, in-game or out. When I play, I want to sit down with goals and achieve those goals… not alt-tab and read webpages while the same old scenery goes by.
It is when I notice I’ve gone AFK at a flight master that I realize that Blizzard is failing to keep me engaged.
The world feels plenty big enough when we choose to go out into it. Perhaps we need mats for something. Or we’re doing a round of world quests. Searching for rares. Doing holiday stuff on multiple characters. I spent HOURS doing the Lunar Festival, spread out over days. With the help of what you see as too many portals. For me those portals were all that made it tolerable.
Blizzard has aged. So have we. Please let us actually play the game, stay engaged, do what we set out to do. Update your lodestars for the modern world and your audience, and quit pushing us out for the sake of concepts we really don’t need reinforced.
We know the World of Warcraft is big. We really don’t need you to push it in our faces every single time we sit down to play.
And given the track record of PTR feedback… and beta feedback… and alpha feedback… do we really think anything is going to help them?
I think not.
This Blizzard post was chocked full of hubris. It came from the overlords on high and delivered by a lowly (no offense man) messenger. Blizzard’s marching orders are clear. They aren’t interested in player feedback (only the perception) and they aren’t interested in player satisfaction (only time logged in as some metric).
You know those prove me otherwise threads that pop up in general… yeah.
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