Rearranging and Removing Portals

[Stormwings-moon-guard]

Oops, didn’t realize an acronym with a letter representing a curse word would get my post mildly edited and then locked from being edited again. Yikes. XD You can tell I don’t use the WoW forums for anything any more (though I came back for this debacle).

[Sogra-thunderlord (Sogra)]

We should be talking more about the sheer laziness of Blizzard in regards to travel up to this point. You want to talk about immersion-breaking issues?? How about the fact that you now have Zeppelin towers that don’t even HAVE zeppelins anymore, but portals. That the way you have dealt with the issue of updating certain zones is to plop down a bronze dragon with a toggle switch in her dialogue. That your current idea of “making the world seem bigger” is to once again, for the umpteenth time, shovel everyone and their mother into one section of Stormwind and Orgimmar, making about a half-dozen other cities completely useless in the process. How is taking a flight path from Uldum to Gadgetzan and then flying south making the world bigger than having your hearth set in the Shrine, porting to Nortrend Dalaran, and then porting outside the Caverns (where you STILL, by the way, then have to spend at least a minute getting to the bottom)?? Nothing about the difference in the two methods I described changes anything about the game but the fact that one of them takes 5 minutes longer than the other. So the only reasonable assumption is that is, in fact, the goal. To make certain things take longer.

[Nillah-uldaman (Nillah)]

Oops, didn’t realize an acronym with a letter representing a curse word would get my post mildly edited and then locked from being edited again. Yikes. XD You can tell I don’t use the WoW forums for anything any more (though I came back for this debacle).

Yeah they don’t mess around anymore. I said the c-word once (the one in between poop and the big S-word) and it got edited out. It’s not even a cuss word!

[Enived-thrall (Enived)]

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.

These points are SO IMPORTANT and I’ve never thought of or seen them in this thread so far, thank you for your contribution.

[Vhx-kiljaeden]

I believe that in the other thread Blizzard said the portals in Legion Dalaran will be available for people doing those quests.

Which means the obvious workaround to not having those portals is to never finish the quest that uses the portal. Thereby you’ll always have it active for that character. Until Blizzard realizes this creative use of game mechanics and makes further dumb changes to alienate their playerbase.

[Hocksy-emerald-dream]

Stop feeding the troll. Tarc has argued from both sides of the feedback issue in the past. From stop giving feedback, it isn’t a way of voting (which it isn’t and nobody was saying at the time), to customers’ giving feedback deserves an escort out the door of the bar, to now.
He is only here to stir you all up while he has no customers to serve drinks to.
Still waiting for my whiskey sour by the way.
(Disclaimer: he has made a ‘few’ good points like people not understanding that ‘gold to pay subs’ is not ftp.)

[Stormwings-moon-guard]

At least it means my post was read! Hopefully.

[Hardwire-velen (Hardwire)]

(Disclaimer: he has made a ‘few’ good points like people not understanding that ‘gold to pay subs’ is not ftp.)

Except I believe he misinterpreted that post. A game can be run on a F2P model without actually being free to play.

[Hocksy-emerald-dream]

Tbh I don’t think it was even a Dev level call. It was probably decided at a higher level to boost “player engagement” or some other such nonsense having to do with a metric.

Higher ups very seldom give specific instructions like that, though. They give the dev team objectives to meet - cut costs, increase player engagement - and the devs figure out how to meet them.

The most specific it’s likely to get is someone higher on the food chain going, “Ion, why does this report say that (major budget line item) only has a 17% adoption rate?” Then the dev team decides how to bribe more players into war mode, or island expeditions, or Shrine of the Storms.

Woot had a like to give for this.
Here have a thumb as well.

[Brennie-shadowmoon]

I agree! For example: If I wanted to get to Shat quickly, I would hearth to New Dal, take the portal to the Shrine, then port from there to Shat. I have then gone to two extra (old) locations that reminded me of a bigger world.

With the new portal changes, I will only go to SW to take a portal, completely eliminating 2 jump spots – the trip to New Dal & the Shrine. I don’t get that brief moment of “oh yeah, I remember this place.” So it might be quicker in this example, but it certainly didn’t make the world feel “bigger”. It is now much smaller because I can totally ignore and forget about all the other cities. I will also forget about old content that I would like to go back & explore or poke around in. It is now just current zone & SW. Bam! Two places. Two is a small number. Four is twice as large.

[Hocksy-emerald-dream]

(Disclaimer: he has made a ‘few’ good points like people not understanding that ‘gold to pay subs’ is not ftp.)

Except I believe he misinterpreted that post. A game can be run on a F2P model without actually being free to play.

Yes. If anything though Wow has turned into a ‘pay to win’ game.
Buy tokens to pay for carries in raids/dungeons/arenas/rateds.
Tradechat is full of the spams.
To say nothing of the ability to move ‘money’ back to bnet accounts and out from there.

[Spanko-kiljaeden (Spanko)]

We’re going to hit another 5k posts at this rate. Who wants to bet they give us another lame excuse when we hit it?

[Vhx-kiljaeden]

Nah this time they’ll just let it grow. They’ve already given their reasons for this change. No amount of feedback on a forum will change that.

[Tarc-fenris (Tarc)]

When people respond to you, they explain to you the various and sundry reasons why they oppose the change,

Some do, and they do so rationally and maturely. Those are the ones I will tend to interact with more. The more vitriol that one composes their responses with, the less likely I am to engage. Kinda how life works, y’know; honey and vinegar and flies and all that.

When you respond to others, you get enraged

There is a a marked lack of truth to that statement, which is so easily disproven with a simple forum search. There has net been a single instance of a “enraged” response in this topic, by me. There have been plenty directed at me, with liberal uses of the word “troll”.

Now, really, try discussing the topic, and not the person, flattered though I am.

[Spanko-kiljaeden (Spanko)]

The sad part is that is so true.

[Lancers-area-52]

With enough of an outcry I think it can change. The whole no flying thing in WoD didn’t last. But maybe I’m just being optimistic.

[Hardwire-velen (Hardwire)]

I loved being able to get from the Shrine to Shattrath and Northrend Dal during timewalking weeks, and I frequently would go, “Well, since I’m right here in Pandaria, I should go kill the Sha of Anger and Elegon and see if either of them will drop their mounts.” That’s a bigger world and more time for their player engagement metrics, right there, without the devs having to do any additional work.

[Tarc-fenris (Tarc)]

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.

Your feedback was heard; they literally said that. But just because you are heard doesn’t mean your opinion will be accepted.

[Jose-blackwater-raiders (Jose)]

It did last, though. Their “compromise” was to give us flying way later in the expansion than they should, and gate it behind all sorts of things that shouldn’t require it. It’s even worse for players returning to the game–pathfinder is weirdly MORE difficult to get for WoD/Legion than it was when it was current content.

The fact that we don’t have flying yet if we’re exalted with the current WQ reps (outside of incursions, which should have anti-flying imposed because “flak cannons will nuke you out of the sky or whatever”) is absurd.

[Nillah-uldaman (Nillah)]

“Well, since I’m right here in Pandaria, I should go kill the Sha of Anger and Elegon and see if either of them will drop their mounts.”

I used to do that a lot, too. I would often run old raids for transmog if I happened to be nearby doing something else.