Rearranging and Removing Portals

[Soeroah-alexstrasza (Soeroah)]

Yeah, exactly. I don’t know why, but I never suspected we’d lose any portals out of this deal, especially with how positively they framed the announcement at Blizzcon. I thought they’d take the opportunity to tidy up portals, not remove them - and the way they said “expanded in the future” made it sound like we’d get MORE portals than we currently have, not have them cut almost in half.

Like I said earlier, IMO they should make it a tower, put city portals on the bottom floor, CoT/Kara/Wyrmrest/etc portals on the second floor and the third floor can be for quest-specific portals or special events.

[Hunteryx-burning-blade (Hunteryx)]

I’ve been playing games from this company since before they were even named “Blizzard”, and I’m fed up with this crap of asking for feedback, them getting A TON OF FEEDBACK (seriously, 5000+ responses, FIVE-THOUSAND PLUS RESPONSES) that was 99.9% negative about this, then once again getting it all dismissed in a flippant, talking-down fashion and having the gall to suggest that they’re listening for future feedback on the same topic and implement changes if necessary. How many times is this going to happen? You’re not listening to feedback. You haven’t seriously listened to feedback for years.

This is it. This is officially the moment we’ve been told that feeding the Time Spent Fairy is more important than actually keeping the customers happy.

[Soeroah-alexstrasza (Soeroah)]

I don’t even know why they need numbers in the new content, though. As long as people are playing the game it shouldn’t matter what they’re doing. They apparently don’t even think this portal change is going to change habits much, other than increasing travel time, by their measure, “slightly”.

[Orsobovus-zuljin (Orsobovus)]

Is this new? Previously there was a 255 character text box, which would have given them no usable data, unlike a survey which can be analyzed with a few button clicks. But even that was removed sometime during Legion.

I figure they probably didn’t even keep the “data”, because it would be evidence of irresponsibility to their investors.

[Ghosteroth-senjin (Ghosteroth)]

I’d rather spend my game time (which I pay for) playing content. I don’t mind grindng and working for things, but travel time in WoW was already the “worst” of any mmo I play solely in terms of the time it takes up. I don’t mind it, actually, but this change makes me mind it a lot.

I love the idea of putting all the portals in a centralized hub, but removing access points for no reason? The world is big. It feels big. This idea you have to limit what I can do and where I can go to make it feel bigger is insane. It feels smaller now, My opportunities and options are smaller.

Whoever thought up this idea probably had good reason and it most likely sounded good on paper in the office, but this is lousy.

[Cailinn-winterhoof]

It just has 5 questions…
1 is Why? money, time, the game
2 through 4 are follow ups on which one you picked in the first, and optional.
5 is a big ol’box! You know, to give them information.

[Kiwì-dentarg (Kiwì)]

They’re removing things with the lazy excuse of “It’s tradition!” instead of going “What is best for the game?”

The tradition argument doesn’t even hold water since the CoT portal has been around since before Cata, they never removed the cata portals, they never removed the Mists portals, they never removed the WoD portals, and they didn’t remove the Legion portals. That is at least 4 xpacs out of the previous 6.

[Albricksen-zangarmarsh (Albricksen)]

Regardless of if we like the change or not, explaining it thoroughly takes frustration out of it and with it arguments about the purpose of things like this and the game itself.

This particular official response to portals (the “Rearranging and Removing Portals” blue post of course) hasn’t really made me much less frustrated, to be honest. Most of us simply just want portals to Caverns of Time, Dalaran Crater, and Karazhan to be available properly. They didn’t even restore the Boralus portals on the PTR until AFTER complaints about removed portals there bled into General Discussion.

For that matter, some of these issues get frustrating precisely because feedback tends to get ignored on the PTR forums and then issues aren’t addressed until General Discussion threads start boiling over with complaints regarding issues that were in PTR builds.

Another example of a PTR issue not getting addressed until it was brought up in General Discussion was the bug where NPCs wouldn’t use their annoyed poke lines when clicked on repeatedly.

Clearly the devs weren’t interested in feedback regarding portal rooms, even though PTR builds in theory should be all about taking in feedback regarding everything that’s new. They may as well had created a disclaimer thread declaring that they’re not interested in portal room feedback.

[anon23092290]

They lied to our faces about that.

[Wolfthorn-earthen-ring (Wolfthorn)]

What I gathered: “Because we want to”

Big surprise there.

[Andros-thaurissan (Andros)]

Crashing and burning, blizz. Crashing and burning.

It’s a subject that’s approaching 5000 replies in one thread alone, and the question raised there, repeatedly, has been, “why?”

LMAO

They actually thought that people wanted an answer to this question more than they wanted the developers to realise it’s a stupid decision.

Blizz sets self on fire
Players: “Why have you done this??”
Blizz slowly burns while typing out essay-long response
Players: “Wtf?! Stop!!”

[anon23092290]

Yeah pretty much.

They completely ignore 6.5K posts from feedback constructive feedback saying it was a bad idea.

[Sabbia-moonrunner (Sabbia)]

Wow look, change for the sake of change when it never should have been changed! Welcome to BFA everybody!

[Kaendris-jubeithos]

The goal with that is to encourage transportation flow through newer places where players are more likely to interact with other players.

Why post something like this when you made something like BFA, the very expansion that promotes selfishness and single player experience?

“why?”

[Illoramoan-grizzly-hills]

Rather than typing out the long post from the other thread you never bothered to return to, I’ll summarize:

If I have only enough time to go a maximum distance of 25 miles, it won’t matter if the world is 26 miles or 50,000 miles. I cannot go further than 25, that is my world. Anything further out than that isn’t part of the world, it may as well be on the moon for my being able to access it.

Portals bring distant parts of the world into my 25 miles. They make the larger world reachable. Losing the portals makes my world smaller. I will not be able to increase my world size, I’m not as young as I was when I started as a college student----I have a job and a life now. Keep up, or get no more money from me.

[anon23092290]

Blizzard didn’t really explain why they just said tradition. Umm… What … Tradition?

[Goind-wyrmrest-accord (Goind)]

Its just one asinine spit on the players after another. Its like they just go out of their way to ruin nice things now. I would rather they clean house of the lead devs and bring in fresh blood that knows what the hell their doing

[Hunteryx-burning-blade (Hunteryx)]

We’ve processed a lot of feedback on this,

This feels like you’re lying straight to my face…

Processed = “We let people pour out their frustration and suggestions into a neat, tidy thread we ignored. Then posted this dreck about how we’re listening to feedback.”

[anon23092290]

Pretty much explains it.

[Vinel-frostmourne]

Why put yourself in such a corner with a response like this?

if you just answer with “We can hardly fill the MAU quota with the remaining players so we need something that extend player playtime somehow”

None of these 1431 + 5k backlash would’ve happened.