Here’s the problem. The decision looks like a classic Zanaga style move and 8 months down the line we’ll be able to buy the portals back for money on the cash store. Make the game intolerable to sell the players the solution. The decision looks that bad. What’s mind boggling is I don’t think you plan to sell the portals back to us.
Personally I think the problem is Blizzard WoW has devolved into a culture of juking the stats. If you have 10 players playing 15 minutes a week, and you can get one of them to play 5 hours even though 5 of them drop their sub, internally you consider that a win. It’s hard to quantify “good game play” so you devolved to a culture that pushes another metric, which may or may not equate to good game play.
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Really the worst part is that it feels like they didn’t even read the other thread and completely ignored EVERYTHING we said.
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Same here. tired of them doing s**t just to increase time played metrics. I was already getting tired of pathfinder and devs like Lore acting like douches (calling us d bags) so to hell with this
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the absolute asinine aspect of that is that IF they’d stop playing these childish games we’d be more likely to play.
I dont want to quit. But Ive had it with their crap at this point.
I play a GAME to have FUN…not for their Days of our Lives drama they are CONSTANTLY stirring up
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This is a great response that I feel captures what’s driving a lot of the incredulous responses to that mission statement.
So what you’re saying is you can’t show me a single person who was arguing for the removal of the portals to CoT, the MoP Shrines, Wyrmrest Temple, Dalaran Crater, or Karazhan.
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So you’ve come to the forum to complain about a 3 minute flight. 3 minutes. 3 minutes… Think about that. 3 minutes…
Think about people with 10 alts. Other people play this game differently than you.
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It’s nice to get a reply that’s more than just “uh, don’t you want the world to be big again??” — except that’s still pretty much what the explanation is.
Thank you for a more detailed response, yet all you’ve said just exposes a more serious issue: the world is simply not engaging enough to warrant our exploration and revisiting of it. If the world feels small, it is not because we have portals to go to places. It is because we have virtually no reason beyond mount and mog farming to go elsewhere.
One of the best changes you ever did was the zone wide level scaling for old-world content. That actually made it so it was meaningful to stay and fully enjoy a zone. That attitude was a good one with a good, well executed solution. You identified a problem – everyone was flying through zones, leaving quests and chains unfinished because they were outleveling them – and then you came up with a proper solution.
Here, once again you have isolated a perceived problem… but instead of making a meaningful change, you just switch off a few buttons in the hopes that our sheer disappointment will eventually, what, turn into us “enjoying” the world again?
Your old world is meaningless right now – beyond mount and mog farms.
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uh…then go play classic and leave OUR game alone?
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3 minutes per character per attempt. It adds up very quickly. And you’d know that if you were here to engage in constructive discussion. But you’re just another member of the peanut gallery that pops in to defend Blizzard whenever they do something controversial.
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But it’s not a Day 1 philosophy.
In Wrath, Dalaran AND SHATTRATH had all their portals. It wasn’t until Cataclysm that, FOR NO REASON, capital city portals were removed from both (AND Shatt removed from Dal).
This game’s Day 1 did not begin in Cataclysm.
It is quite clear that their development team just does whatever activision directs them to, “listens to feedback” and then promptly ignores it.
THIS SO MUCH! It’s such a simple concept. If it’s frustrating and inconvenient, people minimize how much of it they have to do.
There’s already going to be a bunch of folks in the new places, why make everywhere else into a ghost town? Seems like a poor way to attract new players.
It’s both. The Portals are just another layer of the stupid No Flying bit.
Removing Flying (even if it’s “only” for half of each expansion) makes players frustrated, especially when you have to romp all over a zone for spread-out WQs.
Dailies feel like a chore, so folks do them less.
Not having Flying for Alts makes people play Alts less.
Playing less makes people continue to play less, until they eventually quit.
People don’t tend to suddenly quit games, it tends to happen over time, after spending a long time playing less and less. And these changes directly correlate to that.
In the time of typing this reply, the thread has gained another 50 posts.
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Moving these portals to the new portal hub would have made perfect sense.
Removing them doesn’t.
Hell, an acceptable middle ground would have been having a requirement to unlock them. For instance the CoT portal could have required you to complete every instance there at least once (not a big deal really) to unlock it. Same for Karazhan.
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Blizzard: our players are not enjoying this game… If only there was something we can do to make the game more fun… I got it!
Patch notes: Portals removed.
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Yes I can. I can show ME specifically complaining about travel time in WoW breaking the RPGs immersion and world. I can share it again. I shared it in the other thread and people downvote bombed it within 3 minutes. Was quite hilarious really.
I wonder why they did that. I can’t think of a reason.
Caverns of Time, can you please give us a Caverns of time portal somewhere ?
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I don’t have a terribly strong opinion on the portals topic (um, see my class 
), however, I do want to take a moment just to thank Kaivax, Bornakk, and others behind the scenes for engaging the community and clearly stating their reasoning.
Not everyone may agree with the reasoning for this or other changes (there are certainly BfA changes that I don’t agree with), but this type of communication is what we’ve really been missing lately. So, thank you for it!
I hope this is a sign of some coming communication improvement to a point where we start to see more regular insights into reasoning behind certain dev decisions, particularly in the area of class design.
This a certainly a step in the right direction.
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I have 14 110+'s and 7 level 120s right now. That IS how I play the game. I still believe time should be a currency in an MMO.