Rearranging and Removing Portals

[anon23092290]

6527 posts total now.

[Sádonör-the-forgotten-coast]

Which portal being removed is everyone upset about? As i posted in the other portal rage forum, it takes a total 2 mins to travel from Ramkahen (the spot the port drops you) to the CoT. It takes 2 mins and 45 seconds to go from Blasted Lands to Blackrock Mountain. It takes 1 min and 5 seconds to go from Blasted Lands to Kara. Is everyone upset about these insignificantly different travel times? Is there a port I’m forgetting?

[anon23092290]

It is the fact they removed them when they didn’t need to.

[Hunteryx-burning-blade (Hunteryx)]

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.

PTRs are no longer for feedback, they’ve flat-out admitted this now. And I mean this quite literally. Last year they made a big deal out of a large Overwatch patch hitting the PTR and put up a video asking people to login and give them their feedback.

Well, the feedback was not kind. They had made radical changes to multiple heroes in a classic Blizzard knee-jerk reaction, and the biggest current issue on the live servers at the time (Roadhog being grossly OP and being a fun-sucker for every match) was actually made WORSE. People flooded the PTR forums about it. Countless threads on how they broke stuff. Plenty of in-depth theorycrafting on them, and no end to suggested fixes. End result? Absolutely. Nothing.

Patch drops and promptly breaks multiple heroes while Roadhog still ran rampant. The forums were livid. Why make such a big deal about feedback and literally asking for it when you don’t listen at all?

In response, they actually released a super-condenscending video titled “What the PTR is For” and went so far as putting it on the launcher itself. The tl;dr of that video was: “PTR isn’t for feedback or bug reports. Changes that hit the PTR are already a go. The point of the PTR is testing to make sure there’s no large client-server incompatibilities. Nothing more.”

So yeah. PTR means nothing anymore.

[Sabbia-moonrunner (Sabbia)]

It has little to do with the extra travel time and more to do with it being just another example of removing things from the game that never hurt the game, adds more inconvenience to the players, and isn’t going to bring about their intended result made in the post. It’s change for the sake of change that does nothing to the overall game.

There is literally no positive result from this change.

[Sincubus-moon-guard (Sincubus)]

PTR is just to preview things for themselves and give wowhead fluff articles, not change things now. Since WOD the design of wow has been, more than ever, about forcing an idea through whether its received well or not and then restricting or “pruning” everything else.

[Babylonia-kirin-tor (Babylonia)]

Yeppers and I pushed mine to the limit

[Aillian-area-52]

So now i have to carry old transport items in my bags to move around like rings, tabards, cloaks, and trinkets? Bag space destroyed, and what game on earth do you play that gives warlock transporting abilities? Give me a break Blizz just leave it how it was, literally no one was complaining about portals existing. Sheeesh!

[Sádonör-the-forgotten-coast]

They’ve explained why they’re removing them, and their reasons are justified. Why all the rage when it would still take 1 - 3 mins to get to anywhere you’re trying to go? Is there a portal I’m forgetting? Or is all this rage over the 2 additional minutes to the Caverns of time. Not trolling, i genuinely want to know.

[Nagaina-hellscream (Nagaina)]

As we read most everything posted here (and elsewhere) about next week’s content update, we can’t help but be impacted by the subject of transportation portal removal. It’s a subject that’s approaching 5000 replies in one thread alone, and the question raised there, repeatedly, has been, “why?” Here’s the answer to that question.

From the beginnings of World of Warcraft, game designers have had a number of guiding principles. Sometimes these notions change quickly, and sometimes they evolve slowly, but a few guiding principles have remained more or less the same throughout WoW’s history. One such lodestar has been “don’t overuse portals between locations in the world”. Too many eliminations of the distances between places can diminish a sense of the world having a meaningful size.

Of course there’s an equal and opposite design consideration—“don’t make it too inconvenient to get from most places to most other places”. Some amount of convenience is vital. Not every visit to a wondrous landscape is your first. We know when it’s your 100th visit, you don’t want the flight over to be the bulk of your time spent. And of course, some players have chosen to play as Warlocks or Mages specifically because those classes offer unique means of transport.

With new expansions, we’ve made a tradition of removing some of the portals from the previous expansion’s cities. The goal with that is to encourage transportation flow through newer places where players are more likely to interact with other players. We neglected to do that initially following Legion (and we never did that following Mists of Pandaria for various reasons), but we feel that we should have. We’re correcting that now.

Boralus and Dazar’alor will continue to offer portals to a full range of capital cities, as well as to Silithus. The portals to Cataclysm zones will remain intact, and many other modes of transportation, such as Dalaran Signet Rings, Karazhan’s ring, the Timeless Isle trinket, Coordination Cloaks, and boats and zeppelins between many regions, will all be retained and functional.

However, we’ve seen how updates to the game can leave the means of accessing different areas feeling increasingly chaotic. For example— today if you go to the Cleft of Shadows in Orgrimmar, you’ll find it dotted with portals in a way that almost looks sporadic. We’re cleaning that up, and we see this as an opportunity to consolidate a lot of travel into a consistent venue with a consistent look and feel, and room for future growth when needed.

We’ve processed a lot of feedback on this, especially feedback about specific locations that feel like they’re going to become disproportionately inconvenient to reach, and we’ve followed that feedback through to the conclusion that you’re seeing on the PTR. We believe that the numerous remaining means of quick access in the game make most locations quite reachable.

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.

That was a very long-winded way of saying “We read your feedback but we don’t care.”

[Redhound-thrall]

With changes like this and flying the reasoning always seems to be to make the world ‘feel bigger’. But no one ever seems to be able to tell me why the world needs to ‘feel bigger’, or even how these changes are suposed to do that.

I am intimately familiar with how big the world is. For the last decade and a half I have traversed every part of this world in every conceivable way. I’ve ran on foot the length of Stranglethorn. Being able to ride that road on a mount didn’t make it feel smaller. Being able to fly it either by FP or manually with my flying mount didn’t make it feel smaller. It just gave a new perspective.

And should a portal from Nessingwary’s camp to Booty Bay be added, it would not diminish my knowledge and memmory of just how big the zone is. Making me run the length of the zone, or ride, or fly it will not make the zone feel any bigger than I already know it to be.

So I ask, why does the world need to ‘feel bigger’?

[anon23092290]

They explained nothing. What was there explaination other then Tradition that they hatch out of reason generator? Which is a false reason and a lie.

[Sabbia-moonrunner (Sabbia)]

They’ve explained why they’re removing them, and their reasons are justified. Why all the rage when it would still take 1 - 3 mins to get to anywhere you’re trying to go? Is there a portal I’m forgetting? Or is all this rage over the 2 additional minutes to the Caverns of time. Not trolling, i genuinely want to know.

I mean at this point you actually are just trolling.

[Sádonör-the-forgotten-coast]

I want to know what exactly is making people so mad.

[Sabbia-moonrunner (Sabbia)]

I want to know what exactly is making people so mad.

I already explained it? Learn2read.

[anon23092290]

I’m mad cause Blizzard keeps taking things away…

[Wrathhoof-wyrmrest-accord (Wrathhoof)]

their reasons are justified

Thats cute and sad if you honestly believe that.

[Sádonör-the-forgotten-coast]

So an extra 2 mins of travel time to CoT? Is this what all the fuss is about? Or is it the extra 60 seconds to go from BL to kara?

[Sabbia-moonrunner (Sabbia)]

Alrighty, I’m reporting now.

[Havia-exodar (Havia)]

Same crap, different issue. Playing WoW for years certainly starts to feel like Groundhog Day after a point.