Hold the phone, chuckles! The part is bold was quoted from Kaivax, not from me.
Make no mistake people, I know full well that removing the portals is a bad idea, and so there’s no mistaking, I’ve quoted below what the individual quoted from my previous post,
And below is my response to the OP’s skewed logic.
Just so there’s no mistake.
Semper Fi! ![:us:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/us.png?v=6" ":us:")
You have made precisely the bad argument that i used as an example in your last two responses.
I am asking you to give specific examples of when it is listened to.
The third time’s the charm, as you finally stopped tying “and changes were made” to it.
The PTF forum, however, is thataway;
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/c/in-development/815-PTR-General
scroll through, and read the threads with blue responses, I’m sure you will find what you’re looking for.
When people respond to you, they explain to you the various and sundry reasons why they oppose the change, detail the objective negative effects the changes have on how they play the game, and work with your objections to explain better how these changes are negatively affecting them.
When you respond to others, you get enraged that anyone would dare disagree with Blizzard, fail to explain the virtues of your own opinions, refuse to engage with their arguments, and pretend their arguments are different than what they are so that you can pretend you’ve won.
Please, tell me, who is in the right about how to deal with opinions you disagree with here?
Ok, so I have a question. If you remove all the old portals from all the old locations, how are the new players suppose to complete their quests? For example: The portals in New Dal are there because the quest lines require you to use them frequently. Are you really going to expect new players to know how to navigate around with new portals in a strange new location? This changed seems to end up having many new players quit the game out of frustration of not being able to complete their quests in a timely manner, if they complete them at all.
Why would you punish new players like this?
There was actually a massive in-game protest throughout Suramar, but you missed it bc you flew over it with your lazy, game-shrinking flying!!! /s
No I didn’t make that argument. For somebody who is telling others to read, you have a very bad understanding of how to do it yourself.
That’s not what I asked for. I asked you specifically for you to name 3 changes that were slated to be in the game, and they were removed due to feedback.
See, the reason people think that it doesn’t happen often is because…well it doesn’t happen often. Items in the PTR where they say ‘we want feedback from this’ isn’t the same thing as this portal discussion, or class pruning, or a myriad of other issues.
It’s clear at this point, you don’t really mean to have a civil discourse. You mean to obfuscate like a certain lawyer does.
You mean all those Horde and Alliance members rallied at the gates of Suramar weren’t there to take it back from the Grand Magistrix and free the mana-starved people of the city…but were actually there protesting the portals!?
Today I learned!!! /s ![:stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye.png?v=6" ":stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:")
^ Would actually make the world feel bigger.
I believe that in the other thread Blizzard said the portals in Legion Dalaran will be available for people doing those quests.
LOL sorry, I highlighted his quote from yours and didn’t notice it was attributing to you.
Phy, the guy you’re arguing with is a troll that’s been poking at people in both of the larger threads about portal removal, just flag him as a troll and ignore him, sooner or later he’ll just go away.
Semper Fi!
The funny thing about the Suramar portals is that, like the Legion Dalaran portals, they made sense with regards to the world they inhabited and even expanded their lore.
When I heard that Suramar had a myriad of portals to its different districts, my first thought was that Suramar must be HUGE, because why else would this civilization develop a unique strain of magic and WoW’s first-ever modern infrastructure system just to travel around it?!?! It was so cool, and so was going to New Dalaran to find that the Kirin Tor had finally taken steps to establishing a centralized travel hub, considering their important business.
My doubts on Blizzard’s sincerity on this matter are just getting bigger and bigger. They claim to increase immersion, but somehow don’t notice that removing a huge component of magical societies is detrimental? What???
Np amigo, I clarified it. Just didn’t want there to be any mistakes about where I personally stand on this issue. ![:+1:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/+1.png?v=6" ":+1:")
Semper Fi!
I love the lore behind the Suramar portals and maybe even have a small crush on Oculeth the Chief Telemancer. I felt really invested in helping him restore the beacons he was so passionate about…
I even had a good laugh when he appeared in the BfA portal room snarking a bit!!
Fixed it 
Community manager starts out by saying we read almost everything here and then goes on to basically say we don’t care about your feedback because we believe we’re right.
What the waste of a thread. You ask for feedback and the community comes together in a huge way to tell you how much they really don’t want this change and gives you an abundance of reasonable arguments as to why these changes aren’t going to improve individual gameplay but impede it and you come out and ask for more feedback which will probably be equally ignored. Pointless.
Yeah. I’m not sure how being funneled into two cities (current content hub and SW/Org) makes the world feel bigger.
Portal Removal Defies Blizzard’s Own Design Principles (for me)
While I am unduly emotionally invested in this issue, this post is an attempt to describe objectively how portal removal degrades my experience in WoW and actually runs counter to many of the design principles that Blizzard has disclosed around this issue. I stress that I speak for me only; I realize there are many different types of players and play styles, and not all of them are affected.
That means you need to know a little about me before I start:
With 400+ days /played and 26000+ achievement points but generally eschewing instanced progression and PvP, I guess you could say I’m a “hardcore casual.”
Most of what I love to do in the game is collect stuff: achievements, mounts, pets, toys, xmog, and rep.
In particular, I have the crazy goal to learn every item of xmog, of every armor type, from every instance. I may never finish, but I actively pursue this lunatic goal and enjoy doing so.
Occasionally I do harder things, like raid progression during MoP, the Brawler’s Guild, etc, and those have been some of my most memorable times in the game, but in general I prefer the more relaxed pace of outdoor content.
I enjoy BfA.
I love the entire world, old and new, and adore exploring and rediscovering places in the game.
I am adamantly pro-flying under the current system, where I get to know places well from the ground and then get to explore them from a whole new vantage point. Sometimes I enjoy aimlessly swooping around familiar geography just to experience them from a new perspective. I hate that I can’t have this same freedom in places like Bloodmyst Isle and the Isle of Thunder, but oh well.
I main a Mage, which is relevant here, but play 8 alts almost just as regularly, and a few other alts less regularly.
When you add up the above, I’m someone who goes to places a LOT, and while I still enjoy exploration, I only enjoy it on my own terms. When I’m grinding the Greench on a dozen alts every day, the flight from Ironforge loses its wonder REAL fast. But given the freedom to explore when I want, instead of being forced to when I really want to do something else, I absolutely do make use of that freedom and enjoy it.
With that in mind, here are the design principles (as I understand them) that I believe are being violated with portal removal:
1. It makes the world smaller, not bigger.
First, let me state this: You do not need to make the world seem big. It is big.
This wasn’t as true 10+ years ago, but the world is enormous now. Even if every place were conveniently accessible in any given moment, it takes forever to visit any significant percentage of them. This becomes apparent every Lunar Festival, Midsummer Festival, and Hallow’s End, when we are incentivized to revisit most of the old world, which, by the way, I truly enjoy, because it rewards exploration and travel directly (rather than travel being an unrewarding prerequisite to do something else).
With the Legion portals, which I felt were smartly chosen to alleviate most of the worst travel woes, I would take the portal and “actively” travel to my eventual destination. Blasted Lands or Karazhan portal to Booty Bay had me cover some nostalgic ground, where I remember old World Bosses, where I caught the seasonal Summer Bass and Qiraji Guardling and finally got those achievements, where I ground the ZG achievements with friends, where I first discovered the beautiful Stranglethorn Vale zone for the first time and was awed by it, where I woke up early in the morning for two weeks to grind out the 12 Gurubashi trinkets for that achievement (because I’m bad at PvP and need a slim crowd).
If I have to take a flight path from Stormwind, I’m clicking on a flight path and probably going afk until I come back and am suddenly there. Or if I don’t afk, I’m watching the scenery scroll by underneath me in exactly the same way every time, like rewatching a cut scene, without any power to swoop down on something I notice on the ground, or slightly vary my path to experience the landscape differently, or take an unscheduled detour because something cool catches my eye.
Either way, the world becomes less accessible. When I’m on a flight path, whether or not I afk, I cannot interact with it. Even if I were to fly up from Stormwind, point myself at Booty Bay, and fly there manually, I’m a lot more likely to mentally zone out, because it takes so long in the first place, so there’s less time to waste.
Thus, as I said, the world seems smaller: I engage with less of it, and only one of its many cities ultimately matter.
Again, the world doesn’t need to seem big, because it is big. What it needs to be is fun, immersive, and interactive.
2. Portals available only when on relevant quests is the wrong way around.
Nothing else in the game works this way. Flight paths, rep-locked teleport gear, MoP/WoD CM portals, and achievement-gated flight – they all require you to navigate the world organically first, then reward you later with a shortcut you can reuse after you’ve already experienced the wonder, danger, and vastness of the world.
It’s really odd that you’d zap somebody somewhere first, but then time-gate them with every return trip. The wonder of exploration wears off if you have to do it too much, and if you allow someone to skip it the first time, much of the magic is killed immediately. I remember when I first discovered Booty Bay: I found it after questing through Stranglethorn Vale, and the way that city opens up to a questing lowbie is awe-inspiring. Because I’d spend all this time in a zone that, while beautiful in its own right, saved the best for last. If I’d seen Booty Bay first, THEN quested through it, I would have been deprived of that sense of wonder.
3. Portals available only when on relevant quests discourages progression.
Not all of my alts have done all the various Legion class quests, Chromie, etc. If they get portals when on certain quests which disappear afterwards, they never will. For example, only four of my alts did the Chromie scenario (so I could get the four different xmog sets). If they get a Wyrmrest Temple portal on the Chromie questline, all my other alts will be picking it up and NOT doing it, so they can have that portal indefinitely available. This is surely not the design intent, to start in-game activities and be discouraged from completing them.
4. Grinds are incompatible with forced world travel.
I would actually support the removal of portals if the game incentivized travel and exploration for its own sake (such as the aforementioned holiday world tours), but for a collector like me, the incentives are all about repeating content. 1% mount drops, rep grinds, Raiding With Leashes, and the whole xmog system demand near-endless repetition. With repetition, the world graduates from being beautiful and awe-inspiring and becomes tedious and annoying. I actively fight against myself becoming jaded in that way, but sometimes it’s a tough battle against the game itself.
This is particularly true in the northern EK, where Alliance toons (a couple classes excepted) have an awful time getting to. But I go there for the Greench, for the Love Is In the Air dailies, for the xmog in Scholomance, Stratholme, Zul Aman, and Scarlet Halls/Monastery. There’s a mount in Strat and rare Scarlet Crusade xmog, and so on.
I don’t mind the long travel time to see the Nether Faerie ceremony, or to kill Lor’themar for my Big Battle Bear, or to tame wild pets. Because those are one-time activities. But the grindy ones make the travel excruciating, especially the ones that ask for me to do something on 12 toons every day. The reality is, I’d be more likely just to log out and find something else to do that feels more rewarding.
5. The portal room will actually introduce MORE portal hops to get where I’m going.
The intent was that by consolidating the portals to one location, we’d have to portal hop less, but with portal removal this isn’t what my experience will be.
Currently, all of my alts have their hearths set to Boralus. That’s where I usually need to be. If I want to go somewhere else, the Boralus portals or New Dalaran portals suffice. Two total hops to most places. But now, with such places as northern EK and western Pandaria being excruciatingly far, I will have to set my Hearthstones to those sorts of places whenever I want to do a dungeon or raid grind over a period of some weeks.
How, then, will I get to Boralus which, as I say, is where I usually want to be? Dalaran Hearth -> Stormwind -> Boralus, I’m afraid. Or Garrison Hearth -> Stormshield -> Stormwind -> Boralus as a backup. I’ll be doing that after every emissary every day, because as convoluted as that is, it’s better than (for example) Boralus -> Stormwind -> Jade Forest -> long flight to Shado Pan -> Isle of Thunder -> hike to Throne of Thunder whenever I want to grind the mount drops and xmog in there, which, when I really get going on a grind like that, is multiple times per day for weeks on end.
I know, I know: I don’t HAVE to do these crazy grinds, but that’s kind of my point. I do these crazy grinds, and even enjoy them, but this portal removal, adding 2-10 minutes per run, adds up quick for me and basically means that I can’t do this stuff.
6. My main’s Mage class identity is unthreatened by portals.
Mages don’t have portals to most of the ones being removed in 8.1.5, but even so, what’s great about Mages is they can teleport from anywhere, whereas other classes have to get to the portal network first. There are also Mage-only destinations like Theramore/Stonard and the individual Legion zones. I love my Mage’s teleports, but they don’t supplant the need for some of the removed destinations, and I obviously can’t use my Mage to farm non-cloth xmog, among other things.
Possible Solution?
Unlock account-wide portals after certain exploration-related achievements, much like how flight is unlocked now. If Keepers of Time rep got you account-wide CoT, for example, there would still be plenty to do there (DS mounts, xmog, achieves, raid pets) for both main and alts.
You’d force exploration for a time, establishing the vastness of the world and immersion of navigation through unfamiliar terrain, but once the world becomes familiar and old hat, you get a reward and incentive to keep the grind up.
Summary:
Threatening to quit the game is old and tired, and I’m not making that threat, but my frustration over this very issue meant that I didn’t even log in yesterday. I might not this weekend either, and the portal removal hasn’t even happened yet.
I don’t want to quit the game. I’m trying to find a way to keep enjoying it. Although it seems like a small thing in the grand scheme of things, this portal removal thing is making it really really hard to do that.
Unlike many here, I don’t care about class balance and other things that have bothered people, but gating what I want to do behind repetitious travel time is profoundly unenjoyable.
So the new players doing the quest lines will be “phased out” from all the other people? /eyeroll Because phasing people out from higher level helpers is always a good idea, right?? RIGHT? It is totally good to isolate new players from experienced players. /lesigh
Sorry Amandiel, that rant wasn’t toward you. I was just ranting (at bliz). Thank you for your response.
I wonder how long that will last when people leveling new Zandalari and KT pick up a quest that opens CoT or Dal Crater port, then just never turn it in and grind BGs to 110 to keep the portal.