No one is actually saying this.
What is being said that consolidation and the retirement of portals in old expansion hubs is not a new thing.
Also, Legion has a plethora of non-city portals, to Wymrest, Kara, Dalaran Crater, etc… did you really expect those to persist forever?
That still doesn’t mean it’s a good or desirable thing.
Why not? What are they hurting by remaining there?
Except for the fact that Zepplins have a schedule, are not instant, and does not take you everywhere you would need to go, but yea… i guess minus those they are close to the same…
I keep mulling over in my head what the meeting was like. I can’t envision it. The only thing I can think is that a) The latest DevCon’s topic du jour was “don’t make your game a series of portals” or, b) they don’t understand the statistics.
I’m sure that the statistics show that each of the portals they want to remove only effect a “small percentage” of the playerbase.
What they have failed to take into consideration is that there is a significance attached to the act of taking those portals.
When I read a player’s path to a location, I see time invested. I can see pride involved in the knowing of a thing. When I take players to a portal that they didn’t quest through, or speed ran through, and they come out on the other side and I hear that “ohhhHHH” sound - that’s great. When a hub of a past expac provides the right setting for an event, it’s like flying to Paris for dinner! It’s great!
Sometimes, the statistics are not a direct reflection of the impact doing a thing in your game creates.
You are not cutting out portals, you are reducing our connection to your game world and our history in it.
Are you seriously for real? My best guess is you’re projecting your age. Like when 12 year olds use “like an 11 year old” as an insult. In case you missed it, WoW is an online game, the devs regularly use social media to deliver information and solicit feedback ![:roll_eyes:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/roll_eyes.png?v=6" ":roll_eyes:")
I cited several examples of exactly how customer complaints (probably largely delivered online) did actually…
make a business do things!
The way that you’re talking—like businesses are entitled to money and there’s no consumer agency—makes me think you don’t actually earn a paycheck.
Here’s a tip: a well composed complaint about a legit problem will not only get you your money back, but you will likely be comped product as a gesture of goodwill to retain your business. Well, this applies for most good businesses. Sketchy businesses who don’t value customers and aren’t concerned about viral bad press are already losing against attrition.
You may now proceed with “I was jus trollollololing joke’s on u lolol” backpedaling. I mean, I’m assuming you’re just trolling because otherwise you’re willfully ignorant. And aren’t we all here because it’s more entertaining to SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY GD than actually play the game? ![:sleepy:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/sleepy.png?v=6" ":sleepy:")
Yes, of course we did. Why would they arbitrarily take things away? It’s absolutely absurd to just take things away when we’ve been used to them for 10+ years depending on the portal.
You have to give us a reason to want to be in the World. I am on board with removing portals to make the world feel bigger and more connected sure. But when you give no reason outside of questing to EVER be in those areas. Why bother forcing us to take the long way?
Provide the content first, THEN you can remove the portals.
Goodness and desirability don’t really come in to play here; it just is. Every expansion by its definition moves beyond what came before it. Equipment, raids, talents, etc… are all made obsolete when we move on. A Dalaran full of portals should be looked at no differently.
Why not? What are they hurting by remaining there?
“What’s the harm?” is a bit of an appeal to emotion fallacy. I could just as easily, and equally without a sound basis, ask “what’s a few extra minutes of travel hurt?”
That’s what ppl told when I use to defend flying prune.
“If you don’t want, just don’t fly”
That’s not how a game works. If you give me option to fly, of course I will fly. Same for portals, if there’s a portal on every corner of the game, of course I’m using them, but I’ll find the game “empty” and tedious.
yes tedious, it’s not the other way around, because the game becomes a series of instances, instead of a world you want to lose yourself into.
Take Anthem for example, ppl like flying, so they gave them a ability to fly 24/7, and what happened ? the game is tedious. It’s not the loot, it’s that there’s no world. There’s only instances. You can fly, but nowhere to fly to. The world becomes smaller with bigger load screens. Instead of crossing a couple meters on foot sneaking between the vegetation, you fly kilometers of empty space from fight to fight.
And players “Believe” the the good part of the game is the flying, it’s not. The game has no good part. Players don’t know what makes a good game, they are not game developers, much like a client don’t know what make a good architecture project, if they give too much opinions about how things should be, the building will be terrible.
When I saw the first gameplay of Anthem, I told myself, this is game will be bad. It smell like “make it look flashy so ppl buy out of hype” but deep down the game is hallow.
Limitation is what make a game, limitations that you need to overcome, if you give total freedon to players, there’s no game.
Something they do not need to do in the case of portals. People did not like that they removed the portals from the shrine, but they didn’t complain because new Dal had an even better portal system. People would also not complain if they removed the portals from new Dal and put them all in the fancy new portal room in the main cities for orcs and humans, because they could still access what they had before.
People are complaining because for once, blizzard got it right. They put some thought into having portals that would help people get to places they like to visit, and now, for no real reason, they are removing that convenience.
If you dislike having all these portals, you currently have the option of not using them, so no harm, no foul.
Bornakk, I disagree one each of your points to the positive of portal removal. Hopefully, you can understand my stance on the removal of needed portals in each expansion’s captial city as a negative move impacting the players of the game.
flying through a world I do not care about does not make the game more fun for me. To me, this is a decision to milk more time out of the loyal, evergreen, collector crowd that stays subbed through the droughts of month 2-7 of the newest raid. It does not increase the feel of the world as a large cohesive setting. I dont want to fly to gadgetzan or CoT, I want to portal there from dalaran.
The fun is from getting the transmog and mounts. Not from traveling there. If I had it my way, I could portal every character to the dungeon to get the old loot, instead of having to portal to dalaran, portal to caverns of time, portal to the dungeon or raid, then start my day xmog farming on each character. It feels like winning a lottery when I get the transmog item I been farming for or the first time I run it. That is why I stay subscribed, because I don’t want to raid the same bosses for tens of hours each week on slightly increasing difficulty for the same ish looking armor with a slight tint added.
Increasing the travel time does not increase my fun in the game, it would have a negative impact. I may consider at some point that the travel time to get to the obscure points I previously could portal to as too much of a negative and stop. Removing the travel points with no replacements in the game is not the correct move and I hope other collectors will help raise concerns that the complete removal of these portals with no substitute is not the correct path to take.
Like the circular portals, they connect two and only two points. Their cutscene is longer, their cooldown is fixed in the world rather than to a character (as some other portal devices have cooldowns based on when the character used them). The only outlier is the ThunderBluff zeppelin because it does not lock the character into its cutscene and you can enter it at any point (if you can catch the sucker). I suppose the trams between Ironforge and Stormwind could also fit this category.
I’m playing Anthem, currently. You can’t fly 24/7 - you overheat. As a result, you need to be aware of where you are so you can land w/out placing yourself in danger.
I spent 30 min last night just flying around in Freeplay enjoying the world - not a single load screen in sight. Not everyone takes the games objective and runs off to finish it asap. I spent another block of time just noodling around the base and catching up on stories. Tonight I plan on reading the items I stored in the Cortex that fill out the game world and help set the stage.
But, Anthem is new. They are having a ton of technical problems. So comparing Anthem to a game with a rich history and a lot of added land mass is not really relevant. It’s also a shooter, and that is a different crowd.
Those portals were put in place primarily to facilitate travel for several artifact quest lines.
If you dislike having all these portals, you currently have the option of not using them, so no harm, no foul.
A fallacy, as I noted in another response. I can just as easily say “now you have a few extra minutes to travel. No harm no foul.”
When time is limited, adding extra travel time cannot do anything but harm. Where is the emotion in that?
I dont understand the reason behind this change at all. Is it Blizzards attempt to hide older content or what? Why remove easy access to the older areas? I dont get it…
Whats funny is, if this is indeed a ploy to increase time played (which I believe it is), the Dev team doesnt seem to understand that game time is a finite number for the majority of players. This isnt going to magically increase time played because the majority of players probably allocate a certain time frame to playing and will continue to allocate that same time to being in game. If someone is only willing to play an hour a day and their travel time increases by 10%, they arent going to play 10% more.
They will either play the same amount of time or get pissed off and play less.
yep time is a factor that blizz seems to forget about. I may want to play for a bit but I can very quickly say its going to take 10 mins just to get there. Why do this 10 mins of travel when I can just quickly do this. It’s kind of like fishing I don’t do it cause its time consuming and I do not find it fun so I do other things instead. Yes some people do find it fun and do it. Why stand in one place clicking your mouse when you can do something more entertaining and actually gain something. Yes I know gold and guild feasts yes my fishing is leveled but only cause your forced to do it for food in game since fishing is the only way to get the cooking herbing should be able to make food to.
Better than you and your apathetic turning over to accept whatever Blizzard decides is good for you.
We DO NOT like that. Not at all. The game is almost fifteen years old. I just want to optimize my time on it. I’ve been everywhere in the world, so travelling is an annoyance at this point.
Any content that has me traveling to caverns of time again for example won’t be worth doing it. I’ll just drop that quest. As simple as that. The same for ironforge. The subway would never top a portal.