The executives aren’t the ones ordering these things, though. They’re undoubtedly giving the dev team objectives - cut costs, increase player engagement/time played - and in all probability serious questions are going to come from the higher-ups if the metrics show that high-level players are not spending enough time in current content. But how those objectives are met are going to come from the dev team; the bosses don’t care how they’re met, just that they get results.
2 Likes
Technically, aye…
This is kind of like drowning, though…drowned is drowned. You can’t…like…-super- drown. Hehehe!
Lmao, yes.
Even folks for whom English is their primary language can make some serious mistakes or use the wrong word.
I had a friend who was Mexican by birth. You’d never know English was his second language as he spoke it that well. Until you used a colloquial term. Then he’d look at you all confused. Once you explained it, he’d try and start using it as well.
So don’t sweat it, English can be a very backwards language. I studied Spanish when I was in high school, that’s how I know that compared to the rest of the world, English is backwards.
2 Likes
Here! Here! I’m out of “Likes.”
![:+1:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/+1.png?v=6" ":+1:")
3 Likes
Except German. ![:stuck_out_tongue:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/stuck_out_tongue.png?v=6" ":stuck_out_tongue:")
I used to make the same mistakes after I learned Arabic (retired Army). I got laughed at because of so many colloquial terms from the different regions and dialects of the arabic world. I had never really thought about how many idioms and such we use in english.
1 Like
I tried what you have on the PTR and I don’t like it. I was on the PTR today and collect farming routes are pretty bad. The time discrepancies will increase my personal time to complete raids up to three to four hours per week, couple days per year of lost time collecting instanced items. The drop rates of the dungeons are not being increased. I am not collecting 32 days for $15 sub prices. The sub rate is not going down to $10. All in all, the portal changes increase the time of flying over irrelevant grey mobs for the 500th time is not fun. What I want to do is collect xmog and mounts, none of which 8.1.5 aids in doing. It is a huge set back of my personal enjoyment of the game over the past few expansions.
CMs if you want feedback here goes mate. The best thing to do is implement a trophy book case that you can clear an instance four times, this is inline with your raid skips. Then you get a trophy to put on display in a shared room in Orgrimmar that allows you, and possibly your party to make it sharable memento, to travel back to the zone of the instance to quickly run it again on alts. You are retelling your triumph over evil, by revisiting the memory brought to you by looking at the trophy on your bookcase.
As a compromise you can keep the portal room and destroying all of your old capital cities in a single patch, but there needs to be more portals for karazhan, caverns of time, legion dalaran, thunderbluff, vale of eternal blossoms, hellfire peninsula and wyrmrest temple. Prove that you can listen by reducing the travel times. Deploying patch 8.1.5 as it is today will cause a detrimental problem for returning players, other collectors, and me.
The most important ones are vale of eternal blossoms because the jade forest idea is really dumb to portal to the corner of the continent. The azsuna one is pretty dumb, because you again are portaling the population to the edge of the continent. Players that need to go to dalaran from 98-110 for their allied races are going to be super confused why you changed it up from the cleft of shadow and sw castle. The next most important is the caverns of time for the mag’har orc scenario. You added content in four expansions for the caverns of time, why are you keeping people out of it? “don’t make it too inconvenient to get from most places to most other places”.
Wyrmrest temple is the next biggest time saver and you have the chromie scenario taking place there, but there is no longer a portal in the city of mages, Dalaran. Pretty messed up to take away portals from the mages IMO. The karazhan portal is very useful for the STV fishing event, running ZG for mounts and running karazhan for mounts. The final portal to hellfire peninsula is very helpful because you have two instances of the blasted lands and a portal directly to hellfire is the best way to help new and returning players get straight into the content instead of losing them. It helps running the thrallmar dungeons and tempest keep dungeons by removing more unnecessary portals and load screens with a direct portal to hellfire. Thunder bluff is a beautiful place to visit, so I cannot see why the orcs and the horde would not want to include a portal there to visit the darkmoon faire.
Why are none of the cataclysm portals included in the portal room if you are, in fact, supporting it unanimously and trying to rearrange and remove portals? Additionally, why are you not moving the portal to undercity to the portal room from the zepplin tower? Is the zepplin tower not too crowded or the cataclysm area? You should bring those portals in if you truly wanted to support the mage tower, but I think I have a guess why the decision was made. It is because there were defenders of returning players in the portal room discussions pleading on their behalf that the players may not be able to find it. New players would never have to think to look on a high ledge or lake for portals to travel to a zone if you were true to your first design philosophy, so you do see there is reason to leaving stuff as it was implemented. Maybe the removal of those portals went against the lore of the expansion and what that special area had to offer players was magic in the world of warcraft. What about the magic portals being removed in 8.1.5? What about our world?
There is so much wrong with cutting portals from old cities and making them shells of their former glory to pass through. You can call it rose tinted glasses, but there is still important content in these old places, and cutting the portals from them make it far less accessible to farm the old content on lots of characters.
Final point I will make to appeal this ban on convenient portals. It takes two minutes to go back to legion dalaran from orgrimmar. It takes 1:45 minutes to fly to the vale from jade forest. It would normally take 30 seconds to reach Caverns of time after portalling to orgrimmar. It has gone up to three minutes to reach it from the capital. This is a six fold increase. This is not a lot of extra minutes if you only run it once a month, but if you make the run 10, 15, 20 times a week to collect rare achievements, reputations, and armor it is like increasing the difficulty of purchasing a ticket to win the item by 500%. Kaivax and the Wow team, Can you really justify raising the price to enter the transmog lottery if the cost to play goes up 500%?
9 Likes
Am I the only one who sees this:
Too many eliminations of the distances between places can diminish a sense of the world having a meaningful size.
and hears this?
and this
Our goal is not to make travel time consuming or painful, and with players on ground mounts we know we’ll have to do more to try to ensure people can get to where they want to go quickly
and remembers this familiar phrase?
“Flight trivialises combat”
This is the same language they used when they tried to remove flight.
11 Likes
Feedback threads with tons of feedback. Looks like none of it will be taken into consideration.
Seem like minds were made up long before the first thread was started. The conversation was started just to leave the illusion that blizzard is involved with it’s players.
When was the last time major feedback had an effect on development? WoD and the flying fiasco? And that was still only changed on terms blizzard could benefit from.
13 Likes
Ergo, “Public Relations” done poorly.
“We communicated!”
No, you didn’t. Communication is a two way street.
“We told you that you wouldn’t get Karabor as a city!”
“Yes, you told us late friday night and tried to hide it on Twitter.”
This was not communication. This was not listening to feedback. This was spin doctoring and nothing more.
12 Likes
So you make this announcement, ask for feedback from your players (who pay your salaries so you can still have your 24k gold lined swimming pools), and then when the feedback is unanimously “ARE YOU FREAKING JOKING!!!”…you do it anyway?
Your response to the feedback is nothing short of telling your players (who I remind you of yet again, pay your salaries) to simply bend over and let it happen.
You say “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”…but by removing the portals I have seen listed, you have BY DESIGN made a lot of Azeroth inconveniently inaccessible! For example:
Caverns of time: Portal under Legion Dalaran was a great idea. Protal in Northrend Dalaran equally so. Removing it means now Alliance players have to go to Darnassus…ooops, you destroyed that flight point. So that means we now start somewhere in North Darkshore where we now have ZERO flight points in, go all the way to Ashenvale to the closest flight point, and have to fly all the way to Tanaris. A trip start to finish that lasts over 12 minutes!!!
Legion Dalaran: Great move…Truly brilliant here. Remove ALL portals in the city!!! I mean seriously!? WT actual F?! And give us a portal to Broken Isles…but make it go to Azsuna?! Even BIGGER WT actual F??? Why the hell would you NOT put the portal going to Legion Dalaran!? Instead we get it going to the ruins right smack in the middle of the map constantly being attacked by Naga!!!
Portals to Pandaland (yes I know it is called Pandaria, but I have always called it Pandaland)…personally, I don’t care about this one. Having the one in Stormwind only open in Jade Forest made sense in the beginning because that’s where we started out in for that content. Keeping it there vs moving it somewhere else, I could care less about it. It’s not that big a map. But…removing the portals going to the Shrines and leaving ONLY the Jade Forest as an entry point is a bit of a d*** move.
This is a pay to play game, not pay to ride around on flying mounts. If I wanted that, I would play Flight Simulator X. I don’t play like I used to where I would spend 8 hours a day on a computer at work then come home and spend 8 hours a night on my raid toons. I get to play maybe 2 hours a night now, if that. And if I have to now spend half that time just having to navigate from place to place like this was Vanilla WoW (Which I will NEVER go back to), then I will seriously have to revisit the idea of continuing to pay your salaries.
13 Likes
Just my own take and anecdote…
Glossing over why me being in the kitchen nuking a burrito on a FP is not immersive or awe-inspiring or makes the world feel anything…
If the time played metric is actually being used as a yardstick of success- Why? I have 2 accounts, but I’m rarely on both at once. It’s usually to slap an alt through Ramparts and/or Blood Furnace so they can be 60 and flying before they bother with Outland or Northrend. Or, it’s one of my mages blipping them to Legion Dalaran (because portals…)
Why, in a subscription-based game, is the metric anything other than subscriptions? One person with one subscription playing 18 hours a day is less money than someone with two subscriptions playing for 4 hours or someone with 5 subs not playing at all.
You present “making the world feel bigger/more alive” as the reasoning, but we’ve demonstrated how that isn’t so. It just makes getting places take longer. The considered nerf to waterstriders would make things take longer. Gating flying, gating races…if every change makes things take longer, people are going to start thinking that’s why you’re changing it, even if that isn’t the case.
What if every hub had every portal? What would be the downside? I’m in NR Dal, I wanna go to CoT, zoom. I’m in-game doing stuff. I’m in Legion Dal and I feel like going to Thunder Bluff. Oh no, some level 100 might see me in Dal and ask me a spec question? Someone in Thunder Bluff might see me and ask me for help killing a harpy nest? I’d be places, doing stuff and possibly interacting instead of waiting around on a FP or leaving Orgrimmar or Stormwind as quickly as possible to escape General Chat.
Shattrath to Wyrmrest. Ironforge to Exodar. What is the problem? If someone doesn’t like it, they don’t have to use it.
I play a lot of WoW, but I haven’t even logged on today. I was playing Elder Scrolls Online. Their “flight paths” are Wayshrines, and they are free and instant travel to any other Wayshrine you’ve discovered (and a few you haven’t). You can teleport to your free houses at any time with no cooldown. The world is just as big as it is big, there’s people everywhere, I feel -more- engaged since, if I forgot something in town, I can just zip back, do it, and go immediately back to where I left off with minimal hassle. The world doesn’t feel smaller…and if you’re wondering about the metrics, I’ve been playing for maaaaybe a little over a month, and have 423 hours logged. I’m seriously considering letting my 2nd WoW sub lapse and putting it towards ESO.
You’re shooting yourself in both feet, we’re telling you that you’re shooting yourself in both feet, and you’re covering your ears.
11 Likes
This is definitely a good example of what I was talking about earlier regarding overcorrecting.
Revisiting a problem at a later date and adding back functionality that was removed is a bad action plan, plain and simple. If there is any question about the usefulness of any specific software function, that functionality should be maintained until such time as it can be concretely decided to be without use.
I have to ask, was there any data pulled from live servers to determine how often these portals were used on a weekly basis? If so, what conclusions were drawn from that data?
I doubt I’ll get answers to these questions, but they’re certainly pertinent, and as long as there’s an intent to present this as a two-way street between the game’s community and Blizzard itself, providing answers to them should be considered.
4 Likes
Dear Blizz,
Here is a proposal for you. I, like many of your customers, enjoy running old content/instances/raids etc. By removing and “consolidating” the portals you are not making your customers happy. A lot of us have limited time a day to play and by doing what you are doing with the portals you are going to actually be taking away play time from your customers. So I propose this;
Go ahead with your portal “consolidation”, but, in exchange add portals at the end of every single instance/raid/dungeon that take us, your customers, back to the beginning of that said instance/raid/dungeon. If you are going to make us lose play time by forcing us to use flight points to places that we want to run through then you can give us, your customers, back some of that lost game time by adding those exit portals.
If it could be done in The Botanica, then it can be done in the rest of them.
And yes I made “Customers” bold because I think you need to be reminded that we are paying you. We are the ones that hand over the money and when a business doesn’t offer what the consumers want then those customers leave and take their business elsewhere.
Remember that.
10 Likes
I don’t have any likes, but I just want to wildly cheer this paragraph. The idea that it’s somehow going to make the world more alive if they funnel everyone into two cities, while leaving previous expansion hubs as mere shells of their former selves, makes no sense at all.
10 Likes
To be honest? This really isn’t good enough. There are just better ways to consolidate travel options. A Goblin/Gnomish teleporter (already modeled in-game) with a dialogue tree that teleports the using character to locations previously provided by portals and can be changed in the future to add additional locations for other expansions would solve this handily – portal rooms no longer have to be cluttered and huge, and, let’s be realistic here, with the number of teleportation matrices built into Azeroth itself (which Magni has access to and we have used), there’s plenty of lore justification for Goblins/Gnomes tapping into those matrices to get us around the world.
The solution Blizzard has presented may resolve their stated goals of redirecting players into more current content locations, but to try to imply that there’s some kind of limitation preventing actual consolidation of portal functionality is just silly.
Portals are interactive game objects that cast teleportation spells on the target player character on interaction. There is no reason a dialogue tree cannot select the spell that is cast on the target, and no reason to reduce freedom of movement of player characters.
3 Likes
That’s what you call a solution looking for a problem. If a player is happy doing level 60-80 content, so long as they’re paying their sub and not being disruptive, who cares?
8 Likes
Bad change no need to make any old content less easy to get around. The portal room should be an IMPROVEMENT not an excuse to make me spend ages more time doing transmog runs for absolutely no reason. I hate this decision and I’m baffled at why you thought this was needed, the incredible amount of negative feedback makes this even more obvious jesus blizzard we aren’t trolling we just don’t want this change.
4 Likes
Oh I agree that it wouldn’t nearly be enough. But it would be something at least. And I like your idea about the use of the teleporters that are already there. That is a great idea.
1 Like