And that’s fine… but for me, shaving a few moments of time off a run here and there by having a special set of ‘Movement Speed’ gear or various tricks and skips were what made the attempts -fun-.
I’d start at my hearth, hit the stopwatch and BANG off to the races to see if I could beat my previous record.
Not everyone plays like that, sure. But I did, and it was fun!
Now, it’s like why even bother anymore? Blizzard took all the thrill out of it by basically erasing all the efficiency I’d worked so hard to build up.
So 6-10 minutes of travel where nothing remotely interesting can happen is better than being where you want to go that much faster? I’m not understanding.
If you’re running old content and this is the only point then you could take that time and take another character through that old content.
like many issue with wow 1 problem is most of the time part of a bigger problem. I avoided talking about it so far since i just wanted to know if ppl that were unhappy with those change were unreasonable. But my stance is based on something greater then “it takes 1 more minute to reach Cot now” The problem im refering to is the world is small ,useless and empty now and a 1 reason of this problem is portals that lets you get anywere very fast. Again that problem wont be fix by only removing portals and im not asking blizz to remove them but i beleve that if we want for solve that issue we might have to do this at some point but seeing how blizz is doing with BFA i dont think they are going to solve this problem anytime soon if ever.
True, but we’re talking new portals. That’s not regression or downgrades.
And my point is that if you skip the content that this style of game offers, perhaps it isn’t the right type of game for you. Travel is a part of MMORPGS, even if boring. Skip the travel, get everywhere instantly, you’d might as well play a game with a lobby instead. And that is the only flaw to the new portals…that they are slightly less convenient.
That’s not because of portals. The world is small, useless and empty now because the PvE world content has little diversity. “Kill that thing, kill those things, deliver this thing, fetch me those things” is like 98% of the questing experience.
At some point putting new faces and new settings around it becomes meaningless… and as I said earlier, it becomes less about the journey and more about JUST THE REWARD. Heirloom armor, a rare mount, gold, achievements, whatever.
tl;dr: It’s not portals, it’s the content that make it ‘small’.
And that’s why I unsubbed. The shallow attempts at innovation that Blizzard made this expansion failed to breath life into a stale game. The art, awesome as it is, isn’t enough to carry it.
They’re just phoning it in at this point, bean counters telling them where to add pinch points to steer metrics this way or that way.
They’ve lost the ability to deliver a sense of wonder, of potential, of mystery, of content worth doing and seeing FOR IT’S OWN SAKE.
I worked to earn the ability to get places faster. That was part of the reward I was playing to earn. I’m an Engineer, getting there FASTER is part of my profession fantasy… and as with so much this expansion, Blizzard dropped the ball on that too.
I don’t need it just handed to me, I like having fast travel as a choice which I must invest in to obtain. It gives purpose to a lot of content.
But once I HAVE access… JUST RESPECT IT. Don’t slam doors in my face that I earned the right to use without making a very compelling reason for why a path I relied on is no longer available to me.
I, the paying player outside of the game, can speculate on why the devs want this or that… but that ruins immersion.
My character should understand why he’s not able to get where he’s going by a path he’s used a hundred times.
And there’s no internal consistency or explanation for it.
And when the world doesn’t make internal sense… THAT ruins immersion and makes it feel trite and small and makes me feel like I’m not a part of it.
No, the world is useless and empty because Blizzard has chosen to gut and abandon the world outside of current content. The world feels small because it’s been rendered useless and empty, not because of portals.
I can teleport to every major location in FF, but the world doesn’t feel “small, useless, and empty” because all of those locations have things to do in them. Blizzard didn’t need to remove portals on some spurious claim about the world feeling larger; if they want the world to feel larger, they need to stop gutting it in order to push players into current content, and make the entire world relevant again.
While I agree that most of the game world is useless, it’s far from “small”. If you really think so, you obviously don’t travel anywhere outside of current content. We have seven expansions worth of planets to travel. The few portals we had never eliminated travel, they just made it reasonable.
As others have pointed out, the “uselessness” of the older expansions is entirely on Blizzard and their insistence on funneling everyone into end game ASAP. The portals are gone and the old world is still useless. In fact, I would argue it’s even more useless and empty now that fewer folks are trying to farm stuff because travel is too tedious.
It’s rare that MMOs get this big. You can’t get this big and expect every piece of the world that was created over 15 years to be as exciting as it was when it was relevant.
The portals solved the tedium of uneventful travel.
thats absurd. ESO has portals from everywhere TO everywhere and it AINT a flipping problem in any conceivable way.
No…sorry but they took the portals so they could drag out play and funnel everyone thru Ogrimmar / SW to create a false sense of population.
This game is HUGE now. It needs MORE portals and MORE ease of travel like ESO has, not less.
Then why take the old out at all it didnt hurt anything, the only reason given was they wanted consolidate portals, WHY? the only thing that makes sense is they are funneling everyone to the same place so they can see each other, why add the random npcs running through, its meant to seem lively with people running through. Again we ask the question of why? and the only answer that makes sense is, well ill let you fill in the blank
Except they don’t have to make another trip out to the village. The water shoes are absolute dirt cheap. If you feel like you are going to be switching often just buy in bulk.
You can’t. They’re currently considered unique items so you can only carry one at a time. No stocking up from the vendor to avoid making multiple trips.
Now that is just plain stupid. Bad enough that the equipment are consumables, but if you can’t carry extras, what’s the fricking point of there being more than one type? I’m going to put on water walking and forget it.
Seriously. If one of the main benefits for me was that the water striders immediately gave all of my alts level 20 or higher access to water walking, water walking mount equipment in no way even comes close. It means I’ll have to drag my main with the Angler’s rep out to the vendor, buy one, go to mailbox to mail to alt, go back to vendor and buy a second, go back to mailbox… repeat some 40 odd times just to get a similar level of functionality that I have now.
Here’s hoping it’ll change once it’s live since this is just how it is on the PTR, but I’m not holding my breath. I could see them doing it that way to differentiate it from the crafted water walking equipment items. It’s cheaper but you can only carry one at a time. There goes the perk of having access to a cheap version if you already have the water strider mount.
Edited to add that at the moment, I’m planning to use the increased run speed on as many of my alts as I can afford and just stock everyone with water walking potions to use as needed. May change that to the anti daze on characters in current content if that ends up being a problem whenever I decide to come back to the game.
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