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

Community General Discussion
122

Why not put the Pandaria portal to the Shrine? It’s a beautiful central location but instead we’re dumped in Jade Forest…for what reason exactly?

It just seems like arbitrary changes that serve no purpose other than to slow us down.

3 Likes
123

I actually agree with you on that. Panda portal should take you to main city.

If I had to guess, it would be that they didn’t want new players progressing through Pandaria to take the portal to Shrine and be like…where are the quests???

Still think Shrine makes more sense, but /shrug, just not that big of a deal.

124

I’m not foaming at the mouth about it but it just feels bad when better options existed before the change.

2 Likes
125

As many have stated, the idea of a central portal room in the capital makes sense, and had it included all portals that existed previously in the capital and not included removing portals from other areas, it would have been a huge welcomed improvement.

But no, they didn’t just add a portal room - they removed portals from capital city (e.g, Blasted Lands) as well as removed most portals from other areas of the game (including portals that existed in Shrine, Ashran, and Dalaran).

2 Likes
126

Warframe is FREE and they let you instantly “teleport” to any mission you’re trying to do.

No traveling across a continent - no getting toyed around with to “inflate a time played metric”.

You want instant access to the game where you kill stuff - click a button and you’re there.

It’s odd how a free-to-play RPG game can make their world feel pretty big and be successful - and yet, Blizzard continues to impose changes that cost us time while “making the world feel bigger”. Portals was a perfect example of this. Not having instant access to places in the past where we grind for rep/xmog was one thing - but to then objectively add time to what we’ve already been doing…for what? To make the world feel bigger when adding time to people’s travel isn’t necessary? Just never made sense to me.

1 Like
127

As the content drought worsens each expansion, I spend more time farming legacy raids for mounts that I didn’t get. Sometimes ‘mount farming’ takes up a whole day of game play.

I did enjoy them. but now that there’s more delay getting to them, for no sane reason. I find myself annoyed enough that I no longer enjoy them enough to bother with. So I don’t. And one more thing I used to enjoy doing to kill time is gone from the game, just like that.

And for what? Some mysterious unstated reason… or no reason at all other than just “Meh, Ion thinks its a good idea and we gotta do what he says.”

Blizzard lost out on $225 worth of service fees I was going to pay for this year if I still believed this title had much of a future for me … instead that’s now money in the pockets of their competitors who’s development direction shows more promise.

2 Likes
128

Hearth (30sec)
Spirits Rising to Horde Portal room (2.5+ minutes)
Portal to Org (30-60 seconds)
figure out which portal goes to MoP & use it (30 seconds if I’ve been there recently a minute if not)
figure out where the flight master is (it’s up and around or something I forget and the mini-map is cluttered) then fly to whatever’s nearest to the angler’s (6 minutes-ish, iirc)
mount and fly the rest of the way to the rep vendor (~1min iirc)

So yeah, around 10 minutes for the total trip.

2 Likes
129

I felt the same way and stopped doing any farm runs for the same reason.

Been playing a few other games that I’d rather spend my money and time on.

I’ll likely keep my sub for 8.2 - but without a change in respect for our time, I think I’ll just find another game to play.

2 Likes
130

I think a lot of people feel like the increase was only a matter of a couple of minutes.

What I feel is missing is the accumulated value over a longer period of time - especially for these farming runs that some people do for years.

It’s small, but adds up to a substantial amount of time - without even a clear understanding of the benefit it’s supposed to provide.

3 Likes
131

Its the classic “It ain’t broke fix it until it breaks” blizzard :slight_smile:

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132

Part of the whole portal vs flying time debate issue is that WoW is designed in a way that all you ever really want to do is get from point A to point B. You don’t want to be interrupted and there’s no reason to be. Even if they added world content to feel interactive and not just an afk while you fly the vast majority of players would just see it as a roadblock and headache on their path from point a to point b. The thought process would be: “I want to travel to ICC to go for invincible again, I don’t want to be stopped and forced to do dynamic world events 5 times on the way there”.

I feel like part of the issue is Blizzard seems unable to make actual interesting incentives to do content. If it doesn’t give gear or mounts it’s basically not worth doing. This means anytime you force players to interact with the world and it doesn’t give them one of those 2 things it feels like a waste of time by a lot of people. cough world quests cough.

Before blizzard forces you in the world they need to make the world interactive and dynamic with things to do but even before they do that they need to figure out how to make you want to do them because if not they are just gonna be WQ 2.0.

For example, maybe take something as iconic to a spec as warlock’s green fire. Imagine a dynamic world event that spawned while you were on your way to a mount run and had stuff like that in it’s loot table. You might actually think, hey…this could actually be really cool to do, instead of grrrrrr…this irrelevant piece of content is in my way. Maybe they intro a new tier of glyphs and cosmetics that did more stuff like this and re-skinned your classes abilities allowing you to feel like an entirely new class. Ever wanted to see what a completely void corrupted paladin felt like??? Wanted to play a dark shaman? Wanna turn demo’s demons into undead and play a necromancer?

Idk that is just a single of many avenues to create different incentives but we NEED to get away from this mount/gear is the only loot that were gonna drop worth getting.

1 Like
133

Portal rooms shouldn’t even exist. That’s what mages were for.

134

Classic is getting all the hype, people love it, so maybe they are trying to toss a bit of its style in retail :stuck_out_tongue:

Less portals

More abilities on the GCD.

135

Why stop there? Let’s get rid of that flight whistle too, and hearthstones. Because they’re just teleports too.

right?

136

Then its “dark shaman xmog gated behind RNG world event. Cant farm it, no player agency. Blizz makes another terrible decision.”

137

I think it depends, there is a pretty good line between being regular RNG drops similar to dungeons/raids and “no player agency”. No player agency usually doesn’t come from the existences of RNG alone but the unreliability in the math of the RNG or how the RNG is applied to an event. For example, if the event only lasted 2 minutes and was basically, you better already be there or GG then yes, that would be the reaction as you linked it.

However if they either:

A. Lasted long enough for people to reliably get there(similar to legion invasion duration)

OR

B. Occurred frequently enough so that missing one wasn’t a big deal (would probably be weekly loot locked per char like raid farming in this second scenario)

I don’t think you would see such complaints and if you did that’s just a case of you can’t please everyone and that really sucks but you can’t hinder the game because of that group. Going to point A for example, as someone who works full time and also goes to school for full credit hours, I never had an issue logging in and making a legion event, I never felt like I was rnged out of the game when I needed or just wanted to do one.

138

Doesnt it then become another static feature that players will cordinate to do once for the reward and then ignore/become upset with if it disrupts them?

Im not even saying its a bad idea, but mainly the playerbase complains about everything. Its actully awful reading the forums and seeing what gets complained about.

139

Just a question here, why are you taking a flightpath? Flight is available by default in Pandaria now (and thus usable at lvl 60+).

140

If I were going west to ToT / HoF, yeah, I’d probably hit num-lock and coast while tabbed out or afk.

But flying south through jade forest is a pain in the butt… all those towering stone spires to navigate above/around or you get stuck on them.

It’s one of the few few times I’d rather just take a flight path and move to the couch for some netflix, come back later log-back in and pick up where I left off.

3 Likes
141

Define static I guess? Rotating events of many types and skins occuring at different points of every single current continent with different rewards per event type ideally with new event types and challenges added over the xpac with different goals of each event isn’t really static to me.

Players are going to ignore any content, the goal of adding a feature isn’t to make something 100% of players will do or to add one a vocal minority won’t complain about and shouldn’t really be the focus that stops the world of warcraft from being an actual world. The design intent is to bring meaning and reason to do things in zones that aren’t current content w/o making players feel like it’s worthless or that is required to get for current content. If we hit that but people or mad then it’s an “oh well, be mad” because the design intent was matched.