Should a Portal to Timeless Isle be put somewhere in the game? [Feedback]

Community General Discussion
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So I notice whenever MoP timewalking is up (its up this week), its really a bother to take a portal to Jade Forest then use a Flight Path for around 10 minutes to get to Timeless Isle so you can access the Timewalking vendor.

I looked online and it seems there is no Portal anywhere in game to just take you to the Timeless Isle instantly.

The only way you CAN get to Timeless Isle instantly is rather unique and somewhat bothersome to get and keep on each alt/character.

Basically, you need to farm a trinket on the isle itself called “Time-Lost Artifact”. This trinket is associated with the Islands “Emperor Shaohao” Reputation. The vendor which sells it is right behind the Timewalking vendor.

So what do you need to buy this trinket? You need to gain Honored with Emperor Shaohao as well as 7500 “Timeless Coins” (island currency, drops off every mob) until you can buy the Time-Lost Artifact trinket.

So whats the fastest and easiest way to do this? Well, you need to buy Emperor Shaohao Rep tokens from the Timewalking MoP Vendor when it is up for 50 Timewarped Badges each. Each token will give you 500 Reputation with Emperor Shaohao. You begin the reputation at 0/3000 Neutral. This means you need to get 3000 Rep until Friendly Reputation and then an additonal 6000 Reputation until you hit the required Honored Reputation.

So now you have the required rep for the trinket. Well, you still need 7500 Timeless Coins as well. This can be rather annoying if its a character who either didn’t play the game in MoP or has never set foot on the isle itself. You’ll likely have 0 Timeless Coins or very few.

The easiest way to gain 7500 Timeless Coins is to loot various “1 time only” chests on the isle itself. These chests can give between 100-300 coins each. Looting nearly every one of these on the isle will yield you around 2000-3000 Timeless Coins.

You then need to grind another 4000 or so coins. The fastest way to do this is to kill the Elite Frogs on the isle which spawn quick. Each Frog gives around 20-30 coins per frog killed.

All in all, to gain the Trinket which will let you instantly teleport to Timeless Isle whenever you want too on a 1 minute cooldown, is to do a rather annoying and bothersome old grind. And you need to do this on every character or alt you would want the portal for.

Should there just be a Timeless Isle Portal somewhere in the game? What do you think? Considering it takes around 10 minutes per character to fly to the Isle from Jade Forest, for the sake of saving time, should a portal be added somewhere in the game?

Similar convenience portals were added in the past to places like Caverns of Time or Karazhan, annoying to reach areas of the games past.

Another potential solution is to make a new modern version of the Time-Lost Artifact trinket which gives a portal to Timeless Isle but costs maybe 250-500 Timewarped Badges to buy. Or maybe an Account wide Toy item?

Anyways, there is my long ranting and feedback about Timeless Isle. if you made it this far, you rock!

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Make the time lost artifact a toy gets my vote.

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You can just slap on a easy to get trinket that ports you there.

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Yes. I did mention the trinket itself. The issue is though you need it on the character itself. My Rogue and Mage have the trinket. But many of my other later game, post MoP expansion characters, don’t have it however.

I point out that its a rather bothersome old grind IF you want it on more characters or alts.

You CAN farm it on every alt/character but it’ll take like 1-2 hours per alt. Also if MoP Timewalking isn’t up, Emperor rep is really annoying to grind without those Rep tokens that give 500 rep each!

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This complaint pretty much sums how how awful the playerbase can be.

A 3 minute flight in an MMO is such a burden.

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I agree. I also think that the m+ portals in the city hub should not be a thing. They were introduced in SL as a convenience. If people want ease of portalling, then they should have invited a mage to their group.

Now the question is, am I serious or am I being facetious? :thinking:

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:S
Well excuse me for trying to save some time across like 5-10+ alt characters who have to waste time traveling to an island from an expansion released 11 years ago man. Maybe they can just move the vendor to the Cities instead. ;>

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10 minute flight path?! What the actual heck?

Just fly there! lol. Its a 2 minute flight tops from the portal.

Save time? It’s so close, it’s a non issue. It’s literally touching the jade forest. It takes longer to fly from Valdrakken to the forbidden shore.

We don’t need portals every where. Especially one that really only saves 2-3 minutes… Seems like a huge waste of resources for a first world problem.

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Yeah, I very much enjoy 3-minute intervals of not playing the game while playing the game. Why would I ever complain about that? /s

Now if they made me AFK for 4 minutes. That would be a different thing entirely, right? CAuse THAT would be too far.

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It’s a mmo. It’s also one of the shorter flights in-game. It’s also way shorter than OP was claiming of 10 minutes. You probably spend more time flying to ICC and TK every week for mount farms.

Just stop being lazy and complaining about non issues xD
I’d rather them add portals that make sense. Alliance portals to hillbarad so we don’t spend 5+ minutes flying from Iron forge (since they removed our super convenient new dal portal).

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Yeah, I think this would be a decent solution. I have this trinket myself, but I would prefer that it was a toy at this point.

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Yes, it’s an MMO. So what? Would it no longer be an MMO if there was a Timeless Isle Portal? A better, more interactive way to travel there than afk-fly? Would it be less of an MMO if the vendor was in Vale of Eternal Blossoms with the MoP portal going directly to Vale of Eternal Blossoms? What does “it’s an MMO” even mean when talking about this?

I wouldn’t describe afk-flying to ICC or TK to be interesting or compelling gameplay either. And I think that strikes at the heart of the matter. I’m not looking at whether the flight lengths are “enough of a burden” to be “valid complaints”. I’m looking at “does this flight path add anything enjoyable to the game?”. And for players flying to the TImeless Isle to turn in an event quest, my answer is “No, it really doesn’t”.

Those aren’t mutually exclusive. They SHOULD add portals for the Alliance to hubs in Northern EK. Aerie Peak for example, is right there as what should be a major Alliance Stronghold. Horde should also have good travel options around Badlands. One way to get there might be in convincing them that smaller inconveniences are, in fact, inconveniences that don’t add to gameplay. That might help make the case for larger inconveniences too. A rising tide lifts all ships, and all that.

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The point being, it’s an mmo. Having portals every where would defeat the purpose of having a massive world. Especially ones where the flight is inconsequential.

Do you really need to save 2 minutes to every destination?

This would be the most logical, as well as an actual solution to the problem.
It honestly doesn’t make sense why they added the vendor to the isle to begin with when the rest are in the capitol cities of each corresponding xpac.

One is across the map. One is a stones throw away. So I disagree.
Portals should make sense, not get thrown up willy nilly.

We also have to remember dragon riding will be coming to old world zones soon. So a 2 minute flight will be less than a minute when that is live.

But that still doesn’t change the fact that that vendor is in a dumb location.

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A portal to Timeless Isle is not “portals everywhere”.
And even then, the purpose of a massive world is to ensure that there’s content everywhere, not just for the sake of afk-flying to get to content.

Your framing is still a bit the wrong question imo. THe question isn’t whether the player needs to save 2 minutes to every destination, but what is an arbitrary 2 min delay to the destination adding?

Dragonriding doesn’t really change that equation much either. I don’t know about you, but when I get a group to run Nokhud, or Brackenhide, I’m certainly not thinking “Yay, I get to enjoy this open world by flying to my destination before I do the actual content I want to do”. That’s even literally part of the reason dungeon portals are an attractive reward, so much so that they’re attached to the “highest” reward.

Disagree about what? THey’re not mutually exclusive. Blizzard considering a Timeless Isle portal doesn’t take away from considering a Northern EK portal. The 2 aren’t related, and having one doesn’t take away from the other.

It’s also not like each portal takes a massive amount of resources to implement. Hell, all of those situations have actual pre-existing code/functionality that can simply be re-used. We’re not going to lose an entire raid tier over “portals”.

Great, you’re capable of acknowledging/understanding that it is actually a problem, and that it doesn’t make sense, which is the reason someone is asking whether a TImeless Isle portal should be added into the game.

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Fast travel like in elder scrolls games is the superior way to get around in a video game. No matter the game genre.

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Ffxiv called, they want a word with you :joy:

WoWs devs insistence on long travel being part of the game has no place in modern MMOs and peoples reluctance to let go of this outdated feature need a wakeup call, it is literally nothing more than a waste of time.
If people want to fly and enjoy the scenery and smell the roses then thats fine, but for those of us that don’t and just want our objective completed need portals (or other instant travel options like ffxivs atherite system)

I flew to TI around 10 times today and I saw 0 other people flying there around me. So much for ‘what makes it an mmo’ lol

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I wish we had portal tomes like Guild Wars 2 or Ultima Online. We have a really nerfed version of that in engi wormholes and other similar limited scope items.

Would be nice to have some unified account level system where every char can use wormholes, the different types of wormholes are just cosmetic variants, and every zone had some kind of travel toy or quest objective to complete that upgraded your wormhole with teleport locations.

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I love these engineering thingies, I got level 1 engineering on all my alts for SLs because that was a real PITA to get around without it.
I just wish they’d have a perma wormhole toy for everywhere and have no engineering req

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Imagine this, merge the hearth system and the wormhole system. All wormholes are converted into hearth types. Instead of engis using wormholes, they make hearths and hearth upgrades to sell on the auction house. When you click your hearth you open a wormhole type window. Top option is your home inn, next options is racial/class teleports, then the rest of the options are expansion sub menus with the old wormhole and keystone hero locations.

Add to the old engi craft skills tradable hearth upgrades for zones that previously didn’t have wormholes. Merge the entire system down into a single button and revitalize a whole segment of the economy.

Oh, and instead of garrison and legion dal hearths being separate stones, they unlock second and 3rd hearth charges. Free up everyone’s 2 bag slots!

This would bring Blizz up to 1990s standards of MMO travel, they’re a few decades behind the curve. This is pretty much how travel works in Ultima Online, and Guild Wars 2 has a very much Ultima Online inspired secondary travel system that works like this as an optional thing you can work on to reduce your fast travel expenses. WoW has all the infrastructure and code in place to accomplish this, it would mostly be minor Lua adjustments to implement everything I said.

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Why would you choose to debate over the word “everywhere” when you know what I mean? Literally a pointless quote.

It is a massive world, so why waste portal on a 2 minute trip?
You keep using afk flying as the reasoning/example, but if you are going to afk fly, it’s going to be any destination. Especially with dragonriding.

So I don’t understand this argument.

Dare I say again, literally every destination in the game.
Need to go to the cavern for some dailies… Guess how long that flight is?
Dragonskeep for assault? Guess how long that is.
Tuskarr for cooking weekly… Forbidden reach… Sounds like most destinations are arbitrary time sinks.

Dare I ask, why this portal debate is the hill you have chosen to die on when simply moving the npc is a far better, and more logical solution to this problem?

Distance plays a factor in all these types of decisions. Why would they add a portal, when there is the jade forest portal in the mage tower then you take a very short flight.

Northern EK, double/triple the distance. It’s pretty easy to see which is the more logical to add a portal.

Regardless, if they haven’t added them yet, chances are they won’t until a new major city pops up or major focal point.
And blizz already has a track record of removing portals or relocating them to worse locations.

Well yea. I never said it was in a great place. My point was, adding a portal would be silly. It’s old content. There is no reason for a portal. The only reason to go there is for achievements and the tw vendor once every few months.

Again. Simplest and most logical decision is moving the vendor. I don’t know why we are arguing about this xD

Shame wow devs don’t think like ff xD

They remove ports, not add them.

The problem with that island and most old zones like it, there is no reason to go there. They don’t update old zones like they should to make them relevant. The zones just die or sit vacant until they blizz logic place an event npc there xD