Rearranging and Removing Portals

Community General Discussion
3635

That’s what amazes me - they clearly have this major issue with people doing older content for ANY reason, because people aren’t exclusively grinding through the new two-island micro-game they’ve crafted in the new zones and making them “look busy” with people you cannot meaningfully interact with.

So they do silly things. They nerf the rogue pickpocketing quest into the ground, not because it’s easier to do - it’s not - or that it takes less time - it doesn’t - but simply because it is “old” and THOU SHALT NOT ENJOY OLD CONTENT.

So yeah, the Legion Dalaran portals all had to go because not only are they there BECAUSE of “old stuff”, but they also go TO “old stuff”. Double-stacked oldness, this just will not stand!

And Northrend Dalaran? Well, if we remove the CoT portal then NOBODY will go there, which means we don’t even need to spin up an instance for the city, which means a 0.47% saving on the cloud computing bill for the day! And nobody needs to worry because it’s all OLD! Brilliant!

Tell you what - why don’t we DELETE the world of Warcraft with each new expansion. Just kill it. Nuke it (ooh, geopolitics storyline!), let Sylvanas at it, whatever. Then everyone will have no choice but to bask in all that lovely lovely shiny new content that has been declared to be the new “world” of Warcraft, right down to all the cool stuff from those other inconvenient bits of the world being nerfed, restricted or outright disabled.

Think of the SSD space it would save! Think of the savings in cloud server costs!

You can thank me later Blizz. I get it now! Portals are just the beginning!

We can REMOVE EVERYTHING!

Genius.

8 Likes
3636

From reading this thread I gather that Blizzard isn’t fooling the majority of players with their justification for things like this.

BfA isn’t popular, despite your efforts to funnel everyone into it and bump the play time on the two tiny islands.

6 Likes
3637

Dear Blizzard

I remember when you listened to the player base within reason, when removing old content from the game wasn’t even a thought. You used to bug fix old content as much as the latest.

Varied play styles were a thing with people logging on to craft, twinks, the game was alt friendly with a clear progression for those casual to gear up and reach and end, as well as raiders. Jewelcrafters supplying gems for actual slots in armour, the excitement on getting a piece of armour because it was bis.

You openly boasted about these times in your game, at the amount of subscribers, you weren’t focusing on sucking time out of us like the leech this game has become. You had made a game that didn’t need such underhanded methods, I logged on and spent so many hours because it was fun.

You’ve gutted classes.
You’ve added endless rng.
You’ve shown where your gaming ideals lay.
It is no longer with your player base.

I’m off to other games, there are many with nowhere near your income that provide a far better game based on it’s players, they still aim to provide fun, and wouldn’t bat an eye at changing things when their players show such distaste, infact they wouldn’t even dream of the nonsense you’ve been doing for so long now in the first place.

You gave me the option when I unsubbed this evening to fill out your questionnaire, what a joke. You fired the people who would even read it and give feedback, a list of ticks and a little box to type into. Well here’s my Yes/No list for you.

1.Do you have any respect for your player base instead of making constant and lately consistent loose cannon developer/game choices? Yes/No.
2. Do you listen to your player base who has supported you and pay your wages? Yes/No.
3.When the biggest impact on amount of players in the game world, is ultimately made by your game changes, do you not see it’s you shrinking the world as players are clearly vanishing in larger numbers? Yes/No.
4.Will there ever be a time you look upon your ‘game ideals’ and see they aren’t that great these days, and get back to when it was “Games for gamers”? Yes/No.

Thank you for the portal removal, another nonsense idea among many, I choose not to support this and to be honest your game is only worthy a few months playtime out of the entire expansion anyway. Other companies offer something that is an actual Mmo, you know? Something fun where I can’t wait to login, that ultimately is playable month after month for years, without the frustration as Wow has become, where patch notes are a joy to read, and they don’t even need do countless undocumented changes because they know they will be flamed. You do this, and if you know it’s going to be hated it’s a good indication to just not do it.

See you when you have actual content and fun in your game again.

Regards,

Prim

17 Likes
3638

From what I can see the main portals that have been removed (Horde side) are:

  • Eternal Vale - this has been replaced with a portal to Honeydew Village, which is significantly further away from every raid, dungeon (except temple) and world boss in the whole continent, particularly the Isle of Thunder portal, making it significantly more time consuming to get to the Throne of Thunder and Nalak. Additionally Galleon, Sha of Anger and Oondasta are further from the new portal location.

  • Caverns of Time - the removal of this portal is a big one, making it significantly more time consuming to get to any of the numerous instances in this area, including Dragonsoul which has multiple low drop percentage mounts. This also makes it more time consuming to get to Onyxia’s Lair and the Tanaris pirate farming spots for the Goblin faction reputations.

  • Karazhan and Blasted Lands - these removals make it much more difficult to get to Karazhan specifically, but also to Zul’gurub and Blackrock Mountain, which all have multiple mounts and instances.

  • Wyrmrest - this removes direct access to the Wyrmrest Temple raids and Naxxramas, along with other areas in southern Northrend.

  • Hellfire Peninsula - this significantly increases the travel time to Black Temple and the Hellfire Citadel and Tempest Keep instances and raids.

  • Broken Isles Dalaran - while we have a hearthstone for this location (with 30min cooldown), the replacement of this portal with an Azsuna portal increases the distance to almost every raid and dungeon (along with most world quests) in the whole continent, along with access to Argus.

I think in order of importance, the Eternal Vale and Caverns of Time portals are the biggest losses, with Karazhan closely behind, then Hellfire Peninsula after that. The loss of the other portals mentioned above are painful but can be maneuvered around via other portals albeit with additional travel time to the nearby locations. The other numerous portals which have been removed but are not mentioned above I don’t see as a real issue, just minor inconveniences.

EDIT 1 - After some more thought and exploration, the portal room below Broken Isles Dalaran feels extremely empty and lacking without the portals there. Dalaran is a mage city which if anywhere should have portals, it should be there.

My suggestions, which I think would solve most of the issues I’ve outlined above, would be:

  • Change the Honeydew Village portal in Orgrimmar to an Eternal Vale portal.
  • Change the Azsuna portal in Orgrimmar to a Broken Isles Dalaran portal.
  • Leave the portals in the Broken Isles Dalaran portal room - this would mean there’s still portals for Caverns of Time, Wyrmrest Temple, Old Dalaran Crater, and Karazhan. Since Shattrath is already in the Orgrimmar portal room, its portal in the Dalaran portal room could be replaced with the missing Hellfire Peninsula portal.

EDIT 2 - Why is there no portal to Thunder Bluff in the portal room? I shouldn’t have to take a portal to Orgrimmar, then a portal to Zuldazar, then a portal to Thunder Bluff just to get to my own Capital City! (or even slower, take the zeppelin from Orgrimmar to Thunder Bluff…)
Also, there is a Hellfire Peninsula portal currently in the Thunder Bluff portal area… why can’t this go in the Orgrimmar portal room (or the Dalaran portal room as I suggested above) and a portal back to Orgrimmar go in the Thunder Bluff area consistent with all the other places that have portals?

8 Likes
3639

Balance? What does removing portals have anything to do with game balance?

1 Like
3640

So you upset a huge majority of your players off to the point you even notice the reply amount, and your response is basically “Don’t care, we’re doing it anyway”. Thanks. At LEAST fix Caverns of Time. That needs to stay.

8 Likes
3641

Dalaran Crater. Getting to the northern part of EK takes forever for Alliance.

2 Likes
3642

Yes. All of a sudden they had an issue with us having fun and convienent options to get to that fun. We all know fun isn’t allowed, though.

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3643

These are the three that seem… I have to say, dumb. There’s no good world reason (as Dreadiedude pointed out). There’s no good story/lore reason either.

Thinking in terms of expansions, each of those was the main drop point for each; it was the hub. If a portal for an expansion is to exist, why is it going to not drop us in the expansion’s central hub?

Legion - Not centralized New Dal, not even the centralized Broken Shore, but a non-centralized starting zone. Sorry, but perplexing. Side note: so Argus is now a portal to a starting zone, then a trip from that starting zone to the expanasion’s hub? Sorrier, but perplexinger.

Mists - Not the Shrines, but a non centralized starting zone. Even if there are to be no portals there anymore, it’s a still the expansion’s hub… that’s centrally located. Same as above: what?

BC - Just the fact that a portal to an expansion doesn’t exist. It was fine how it was: new characters about to embark on the BC content didn’t have a portal; however, characters that have completed necessary portions of the content had a convenient way to quickly return. Again, dumb.
As long as there’s a portal to Shattrath, then this last point doesn’t apply, thus I’ll rescind it.

9 Likes
3644

I think the new portal room has a portal to Shattrath. And new characters will still have a portal to Hellfire once they get to that place in the quest line.

1 Like
3645

Ah. If that is the case, I will buy that. I won’t have any issue with a quick run across a room.

And you’ve reminded me of BC’s central hub. So as long as a portal to Shat exists, my “BC” point above no longer stands. I’m going to edit it.

1 Like
3646

Couple more things I can point out that are flaws in how you and the dev team have been reasoning this change.

This one contradicts the claim you made in the other thread.

I also think they help keep the world of Azeroth feeling alive

So yes, the devs admit that they prefer the world of Azeroth feeling dead and keeping everyone funneled into the same place. If they wanted the world to feel alive, then every capital would be viable for transportation (perhaps all having portal room access), meaning players would be free to spread themselves out as they please, and thus populate the world.

Instead, the devs focus on funneling people into one area, which is directly serving to push people to stay out of older areas.

And just to expand on a point I made in my other post: this isn’t true. This is only the second time portals have been removed. The first time was in Cataclysm with more or less the same reasoning and response. I think people assumed that the devs had learned their lesson from there on out. Evidently not.

I know there’s really no point to giving feedback on this subject at this point. The devs are clearly set, and this statement

Is rendered fairly meaningless by the rest of the post, which mostly comes down to “we’re doing this, deal with it”.

10 Likes
3647

They should leave one at the shrine for MOP and a portal pop up for Honeydew Village for leveling toons. After all that is what they did for hellfire peninsula. So there was really no reason to do anything in MOP.
Northern eastern kingdoms is still going to be an issue for anyone not able to use the twilight highlands portal on the alliance side.

2 Likes
3648

I just play a lot of alts. And I like to do a ton of old content. With that said. I have a family, I am older than when I first started. I simply don’t have time to do the things I do without a majority of the portals we have now. Just from Pet Battles alone I use 3 portals in Legion-Dalaran. It will make the grind for items, pet battles, transmog, mounts more tedious, thus making me less inclined to play. But I WANT TO PLAY BLIZZARD! Why would you create a deterrent for players who enjoy old content in this manner?

11 Likes
3649

Yea I haven’t thought about that doing the daily pet battles is gonna suck.

1 Like
3651

It reminds me the sudden blue post about canceling the XP lock for characters above level 110. Completely disconnected decision based on developers logic that even if it make some sense, ignores the major downsides of the changes players will suffer from. Luckily the XP lock change has been cancelled.

3 Likes
3652

Removing too many portals can diminish the value of going to those parts of the world, if something is too irritating to get to then why would someone go there?

2 Likes
3653

Anyone remember when they tried to limit water striders to walking only being able to walk on water in the expansion they were earned in? That was another example of them thinking they knew best, thankfully we were able to convince them to revert that change.

6 Likes
3654
  1. They want to time gate us more
  2. They don’t want lowbies having the convenience of quickly getting about the world. (goes with time gating.) They’ve already slowed their leveling to a crawl. if it gets any slower we’ll be losing levels when we aren’t playing instead of getting rested.
4 Likes
3655

I would like to upvote you, But blizzard limits the upvotes so the reading public doesn’t know the true extent of our opinions.

4 Likes