Seriously why must you mess with the portals... they were just fine

Community General Discussion
81

I cannot fly, I have quests in Tannaris, and the new portal will not allow characters of my level to use it.

82

The new portal situation is a BIG IMPROVEMENT over the old one. As an altoholic playing 3 or 4 characters every day I use portals a lot. It is MUCH easier now to get around the world.

That is “why they mess with things” – to make them better.

83

They weren’t perfect, but they weren’t a problem either.

I think this is yet another example of the devs thinking of an issue exclusively from a development POV, rather than a gameplay POV.

84

It doesn’t particularly bother me, now that I’m used to it. The only one that really bothered me was the removal of the Caverns of Time portal, which was more a matter of nostalgia and tradition than anything. Ion did say a portal would be put back to Caverns of Time at a future date, but not when. Possibly 8.2?

There are portals in Org and SW going to both Broken Isles and Pandaria. It only takes a couple of minutes to fly from the Pandarian one to the other side, I tend to tab out and read stuff inflight anyhow.

Frankly I think there are much bigger issues to worry about than a few portals.

85

How kind of Blizzard to provide you with an opportunity to be so bored you have to go do something else instead of playing the game you’re paying to play.

5 Likes
86

You think four months is long enough? Maybe they need another year to make sure they can build a simple portal. I dunno, it’s new code, they’ve never done ANYTHING like this before… can’t be too careful.

Yeah, better take another 6 months, make sure the clicky part isn’t underground like 10% of the mining nodes usually are, despite being reported time and time again.

Seriously.

4 Likes
87

[MOLL*E] is the engineer only mailbox toy.

Look up [Katie’s Stampwhistle]. Unlock it on one alt, it’s useful on them all, unlike the engineering toy or garrison consumable version called [GUMM-E].

88

This is sheer nonsense. It used to be that each individual server had blades dedicated to the different areas (i.e. Moon Guard would have a blade for Eastern Kingdoms, one for Kalimdor, etc). A loading screen indicated you were moving to a different blade. So under the old way of doing things, there was no connection between servers. One server having a bunch of people in EK wouldn’t affect another server at all.

The various things they’ve said in recent years indicates that the old way of servers working is no more. Servers basically don’t exist now. Hardware cycles up and down based on need and load. It doesn’t matter how many people are in an area. If there are a bunch, a new shard is created and some of them are phased over. People go away, one of the shards goes away. It doesn’t matter what kind of load there is in an area, because the server farm will make as many sections as it needs. There aren’t “legacy compute services.” There are just the unified server farms that make and take away stuff as needed. There isn’t any way that people not going into older content areas would somehow help load in Classic because the servers are just going to make what’s needed anyway. The Classic servers at launch are even going to have their own version of sharding (called layering, I don’t know why they’re giving it a different name, maybe because of the way people get angry over sharding even with plenty of things that have nothing to do with sharding) until activity stabilizes.

Some of the conspiracy stuff people come up with is so stupid.

89

The fact remains that the cloud resources they allocate to support demand are (or better be) partitioned and balanced so that there are virtual shards on standby ready for players to enter an area where there may not be anyone already.

Higher demand areas (islands, dungeons, cities, garrisons) may have -several- virtual shards on standby. Or not enough, considering people still regularly have trouble teleporting into their garrison.

The point is, that anywhere there’s a player, there’s at least one virtual shard server dedicating to mediating their activity. The more spread out players are, the more low population virtual shards you have running concurrently. Even if they’re 50 to a blade, that still adds up. And there’s OVERHEAD associated with every active virtual shard that consumes additional resources.

If they can push higher density into newer and no doubt more optimized virtual shards (like raids where instead of multiple shards, they put teams into the same shard and phase them apart, not sure if old raids/dungeons were updated to do that).

If you can reduce overhead by stuffing more players into fewer virtual shards, that frees up capacity to have them serve a new demand. In this case, Classic, with it’s own brand of ‘layering’ which sounds like ‘special restricted mode CRZ’ if you ask me.

Anyway… It may have been a few years since I last worked professionally in the field of cloud computing, but it’s pretty easy to see that they’re doing some social engineering to help them do some pre-emptive load balancing. If you have a different opinion? Great. But from here, that’s what it looks like.

Because ‘portal clean-up’ across the last 3-4 expanions should have been beneath the lowest priority change on their to-do list unless they had a reason that comes down to money for it.

The other one is: “Hey, removing portals makes levelling even more awful… and we’ll sell more boosts!” Which I certainly wouldn’t rule out either.

2 Likes
90

You can’t use flight paths?

91

I say get rid of all portals other than the challenge mode portals and mage portals, item portals like orgimmar cloak etc. and go back to using boats/flight paths. I want to see all the whining after that happens.

1 Like
92

beep boop.

Fun detected.

Beep boop.

Fun removed.

This unit will self destruct when sub numbers fall belo-BOOM

3 Likes
93

didn’t you quit … months ago?

how is it even impacting you?

94

There are plenty of MMORPGs including several AAA titles from major studios that offer things like instant travel, while not in anyway taking away from the game’s core experience.

This outdated theory that somehow pointless time spent watching a taxi fly across an empty world is critical to an MMO and somehow adds to the experience needs to die.

It is just an empty excuse peddled by lazy developers and cheap studios as a way to pass off empty time sinks as content, and only supported by the sycophant players who defend such nonsense.

8 Likes
95

Still waiting for my sub to run out.

Haven’t finished the Kübler-Ross stages yet, but posting here helps.

What’s your excuse? :wink:

1 Like
96

^ 1000x this. Perfectly said!

2 Likes
97

Indeed… each and every player (at any Lvl) should have to ability to port themselves to anywhere they want to go, just click on the Map and there you are!

98

Exept when they make things better for one group and simultaneously make them worse for another. Leaving the old portal hubs in place AND adding the new portal hubs in SW and Org would have made things better for one group and would have NOT made things worse for another.

Thank you! I had no idea that existed. I’ll add it to my list of old content things I still want to do. :+1:

3 Likes
99

Well what am I supposed to do while inflight? Stare fixedly at the screen? Assume a yoga position and meditate?

100

Honestly, I’m not sure what Blizzard intends for us to do to keep ourselves entertained while on flightpaths.

Maybe they assume a lot of their WoW players are getting older and need pee breaks every 5 minutes?

2 Likes