No.
Traveling places is such a disengaging part of the game that I’ll go out of my way to avoid it. Even something as simple as taking the portal to the auction house - I’d sell stuff twice as often if there was an AH in Boralus.
Whether it’s flight paths, or boats, or auto-running through zones on my mount, travel isn’t so much a part of the game for me, as it is an opportunity for me to do something else in between playing the game. (I used to keep books around for long flight paths, because my computer didn’t like alt-tabbing very much.) It’s like a loading screen that takes longer.
The zones in BfA feel significantly bigger and more vibrant than zones used to - it’s one of the expansion’s strongest points, if you ask me. When I’m going into zones to experience them, I appreciate that. But when I’m going through zones they’re just a waste of time.
PS - if you want people to go explore zones and engage with them, add more exploration rewards!
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Yeah, it’s disengaging content versus engaging content. I have no idea who is doing the metrics at Blizzard but the idea that minutes spent in game is the metric instead of activities done in the game is mind boggling.
Plus, they’re releasing classic WoW. The people that want a ground mount only, slow flight path only game will have it.
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I think that speaks of more how they’ve turned gear into the only carrot. Remember when there were multiple rewarding things to do in game?
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I don’t really care about the definition per se. The fact that they want to generically increase traveling speed in the game for no real reason is ridiculous in my opinion.
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I have a mage alt, thank god I’ll have my abilities mean something now…
/facepalm /sarcasm ![:roll_eyes:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/roll_eyes.png?v=6" ":roll_eyes:")
The mage argument is silly. Whomever feels sad that people can use portals everywhere and not just their Mage needs to be reevaluated.
I have no issue with the Portal Room on paper, the design looks cool and all but guess what…
Bornakk, the Company you are working for is constantly removing options. That is becoming nuisance’s and not improvements.
They are not improvements to any problems that needed to be addressed nor any changes that will make the world feel ‘‘larger’’.
You are ultimately not creating towards your current audience but instead justifying it as per creating towards some future audience that will never be here because this genre is past it’s due date.
I think the replies by you CM that echo Blizzard’s stance is sounding very disingenuous. There is this twisted sense of reality for the group over at Blizzard if they believe in their justifications for said changes (past changes as well but that’s off topic).
To paraphrase Lewis Black: One developer leaps up out of the chair, jostling the table and knocking over water glasses, coffee cups, and Big Gulps, and shouts “I have a crappy idea!!!” Another developer looks across the table at him and leaps up onto the table shouting “And I can make it crappier!!!”
Thus are 1,000 lines of code born …
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It’s not that. I think they’re just chasing the wrong ideas. I don’t think a portal room in and of itself was a bad idea, but the idea of removing portals that we’ve had for 3 years is a bad idea. I don’t know why Blizzard’s idea is let’s give the players something and then take it away and that’s what they’ve been doing over and over again with WoW since WoD.
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I honestly wonder what WoW would look like if we had a voting system. The number of months subscribed = weight of your vote.
I made a comment about that above. Blizzard has mastered a skill nobody should want to even learn.
They create the most wonderful ideas. But then somehow, some way, they botch it. In fact, they often botch it so bad it ends up being seen as a horrible idea.
“Excellent Idea. Piss Poor Execution.”
And this isn’t the first time Blizzard has done that. They have a history of doing just that very thing.
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Very true. Unfortunately.
Such a great IP and ideas that on paper are awesome but the execution rarely gets a passing mark so to speak.
WoW caters to old-timers too much already (and I say this as someone who’s played since 2005). It needs to encourage fresh blood in order to stay afloat, and - to get back on topic - it won’t do that by wasting their valuable time on additional walking.
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I mean, it was really apparently in WoD. We’re going to remove flying. Also, we’re going to give you no real reason to leave your garrison outside of raids anyways.
The game died in my heart a bit on that day.
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Yeah, it does. I’m an old timer (played since beta, got the orc statue, etc) but I welcome the accessibility changes. I want a more accessible game. The more accessible the game is, the more people will want to play. The more people that want to play, the more features and development time we’ll get even if we don’t enjoy all of them.
For example, WoW in its heyday added pet battles (in Cataclysm). Was that a feature I even wanted at the time? No. But it’s a neat feature they added just because of the large subscriber base. The smaller the sub base becomes the less and less of things like that we’ll see.
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A lot of folks still go to Legion for class hall titles and mounts. Removing the Dalaran portals just make it more annoying. They were in a perfect spot and good for all afctions.
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It’s true of all walks of life. Not every idea on paper ends up working out. I mean, I write. There are ideas that sound like ten shades of awesome in my head. Once it hits paper I realize its a bad idea. Though that doesn’t stop me from going “ok, bad idea, how can I revise it to make it good?”
In regards to Blizzard, you would THINK that is what internal testing and PTR is for. Taking the “Great idea” and testing it. Then going “what were we thinking!?”
Now, every so often they DO actually make changes. I believe this was uh … Mists? Where they literally rebuilt Shadow Priests ENTIRE Mastery due to feedback.
So they’re not completely hopeless. Just mostly hopeless.
I haven’t had that much faith in them since WoD/first half of Legion. Second half of Legion I didn’t really play (because of the flying to no flying Argus islands), but I didn’t have much faith in them at all if I didn’t play and quit for about the longest time I ever have.
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Oh, Lord, NO!!! Just no!!! Over the past 10+ years that I’ve been coming to these forums, I’ve seen some of the WORST ideas ever to roll out of a cognitive species’ brain. This game wouldn’t have made it past MoP, and I AM talking about ideas from some of the longer-playing members.
The problem (as I see it) isn’t WHO is having the idea, it’s HOW they arrived at that idea. The one we’re discussing here is a prime example of what’s wrong with the “how” part. There is no logic to such a decision. The devs are having to write NEW code to establish when and where portals will appear based on the need for them for certain quests. That’s make-work, because doing nothing, not writing that code, would leave the portals there for the quests AND they’d still be available for those who use them for other things. Less work for the devs, less salt from the player base.
It’s as though a brain-storming session took place and no one brought any brains to it. The responses in this thread were COMPLETELY foreseeable, which is probably why there was no “why this is necessary” given. “The world will seem bigger” holds about as much water as Desolace does.
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Imagine Azeroth as a map. Major cities marked, destinations marked. Set a dart on the major city you want every player to be based in, draw a circle around it. The diameter of this circle is to match the distance you can travel with the time allotted to play. If you have only a few hours a day, the circle is smaller than those who can play all day. This is your world.
Now, set a dart on every location with a portal connection with that city (whether it be a moving portal or static). Also count the places with a portal connected to somewhere that city has a portal to. Each of those darts has a slightly smaller circle around it, representing how far you can travel from that location with the playtime allotted. The secondary portals will have a slightly smaller circle than that as it’s two jumps to get to that area.
A lot of area covered, eh? Blizzard is pulling the darts. That doesn’t increase the size of the circle around your origin city, you still can only get so far from it in the time you have. But now you can’t reach the areas in those other circles. Your world is now smaller.
How the portal system should work, is that one city can still be a Main Hub if Blizzard so desires. Then, each of the other capitals should have a portal to it, and to content specific to that race. Each expansion area should have its own minor hub. Like a main trunk with spreading branches, where each fork is another portal hub connecting to fewer and more specific points. Then that circle representing your world will reach its maximum size, your world will be its biggest.
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It was tongue in cheek! Or supposed to be.
But yeah, they basically added a bunch of busy work because God damn it, those players not on those quests are using those damn portals to get around in our world.
I’ll be honest, I forgot to consider the fact that the dev team took time to design, implement, and make a change to actively make the game worse.
A change based on the premise that it was “too easy to get to Karazhan” and “too easy to get to Ancient Dalaran”.
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![:sweat_smile:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/sweat_smile.png?v=6" ":sweat_smile:")
That would be something…