Bornakk, with all respect, asking us how difficult it is to get to locations without being a mage makes us think that perhaps you’ve never tried to travel the long way.
Of all the portals I’m going to miss the most, it will be CoT I miss the most. Right now, I can use my Dalaran hearthstone, and a short flight later I can be in the basement portal room to get to CoT. If I’m feeling lazy at that point, I can catch a dragon down the spiral and from there, it’s a shorthop to several instances where I can do mount and transmog farming. I have multiple alts I do that activity on, so this is a regular run for me.
Without that portal, my shortest runs will involve either Boralus>Silithus, then manually flying to a flightmaster (probably over in Ungoro, unless I’m heading south into Uldum) before dropping into southeast Tanaris and flying the rest of the way manually. Or, hearth to SW, take the portal to Uldum, then hit the flightmaster to southeast Tanaris, as above.
By the way, for the record, your question about whether the world “feels bigger” with fewer portals, no, it does not. It feels a whole lot less fun, because you’re increasing the amount of time it takes me to get anywhere for no reason other than an opinion being held by some designer(s) at Blizzard that isn’t shared by many players.
It’s also dead, most of it can’t even be reconciled within current events.
For instance, Deathwing’s dead, but if I go back to Badlands, that whacked out dwarf is still telling me stories about how Deathwing is coming.
Why can’t I just tell him he’s dead so that guy can go back to eating bugs or whatever he does?
If I ever made a MMO, I’d actually resolve the zones around the actual storyline. Which, even though I loved Legion, how are there 9,000,000 Scepters of Sargeras? There was only 1. Because reasons. Because gameplay reasons. Why not make something that makes some sense? Why not expect us all to be treated like the mercs we are instead of “hero.”
We aren’t all prophesied heroes.
It’s a bit ridiculous honestly. And there’s no fixing it at this point. Apparently now immersion is synonymous with Gameplayed time (which, I add, is a joke because the game has a monthly sub anyway) and the fact that it’s never reconciled to make any sense at all. Suspension of disbelief goes so far and I’m willing to do so. But the issue is that we know sharding tech exists now, so why not Bandersnatch Wow?
Keep in mind that you literally get paid to play this game. Your opinion on what’s fun and not fun in WOW is completely skewed by the fact that your vocation interfaces with Azeroth whereas 99% of the players do not. A dev that gets paid to play and then says that in their opinion flying is unecessary is completely disconnected from the greater share of people playing this game.
This is how you end up with customers that do not feel they are being heard, as well as a laundry list of changes that don’t match up with what makes the game “fun” for most people.
If you were a Comcast employee with free service, and you were paid to be a CM on the Comcast site, you’d probably also need to expect your view of their service to be a bit different than people who pay boat loads of cash.
An attitude like, “I personally don’t see a problem with outages, I just go read a book!” probably wouldn’t fly and would come across as completely tonedeaf.
Yep, graphics. Even though the game’s graphics are constantly updated, WoW has never quite been up to par consistently. The other cities could use those essentials you mentioned, but they won’t put them there for my previous post’s reason. People have been asking for literal years. I unsubbed since WoD and came back in BFA, still not there. To my knowledge, I haven’t even seen a blue talk about it, either that or I don’t remember.
So, I can only deduce from this that it’s on the blizzard’s blacklist of “this will hurt the game’s image because we don’t want to update the old content til we’re ready to have a proud result of it, that way we don’t have to work on it for straight up years”
This is a garbage answer because Every non-mage has to eat a cooldown on a hearthstone then run to the portals. Mages can create portals from anywhere to anywhere as often as then want without worrying about cooldowns. THIS IS THEIR ADVANTAGE.
Seriously stop with this messing with the game in such annoying and non-beneficial ways. You make it harder and harder to stay a customer.
Edit: PS: it also really screws up my leveling experience when playing alts.
World feels bigger is a euphemism for seeing more players in a centralized location. This is the same reason the devs used to gate flying to “make the world bigger” aka see more players on the ground.
Current WoW devs logic regarding their game world is quite sad! They shrink it and force more players into a smaller world to make it seem bigger. Quite sad to see MMORPG devs promoting such toxic ideas.
A nice sentiment, but what would you do there? It’s largely empty of players, and there’s no content to really do as you’re not level 40 anymore.
The portal removal won’t hurt as badly as you think, and it’ll add value to the engineering profession and mages.
It’s obvious to me they want to herd the playerbase into Org and Stormwind to make the game feel populated. First Legion and BfA not offering an Auction House (for non-engineers), War Mode requiring returns to the main capitals, and now the portal rooms.
Probably the same things we used to do years ago, when we weren’t funneled into one city. We used to go there just to use the AH, bank and other NPCs, and then go afk, just like people do now… in Stormwind.
Ironforge used to be packed. And then they moved all of the essentials to Stormwind and Dalaran, Shrine, etc. and IF was forgotten.
The portal room was seen as a positive. Key word WAS. You soured the taste of it in the players mouth and now it’ll be seen as a negative no matter how you spin it , leading to YET ANOTHER thing being added to the game that the players have disdain for and dislike rather than something positive. This next patch sure isn’t helping with the negativity in BFA.
Ironforge was also at the heart of the original endgame, all contained within Blackrock Mountain. That’s why all the raiders hung out there in their tier flashy sets and on then-expensive mounts. Stormwind was mainly a hub of early questing.
Playing WoW is your job. For most of us, that’s not the case. Playing WoW is a diversion that I engage in when I’ve finished my job for the day.
Travelling over a large area for the first time while leveling feels like a rewarding journey. I may find loot upgrades, new quests, and/or XP boosts along the way. That’s engaging. Once I’ve hit max level, then travelling over that same area day in and day out is no longer a journey; it’s a commute. I commute over an hour a day to and from work in real life. The last thing I want at the end of the day when I’m trying to unwind is another freaking commute inside of the game. This is also the reason that I’m frustrated by the lack of max level flying in the game. Why do you want to tack hours of dead time onto my gaming experience? There’s nothing more frustrating than making the choice between joining your wife in bed and completing the faction assault that expires in the next hour. Ideally you could just hearth back to town, or take a portal to the quest giver. Instead we have to use a flight whistle and take another minute to fly back to the quest giver. Why is the quest completion a now-or-never proposition anyway? We’ve done the work. Can’t we just collect our reward later? The current setup is not fun, and it doesn’t make the world feel “alive.” it’s just frustrating.
One minute doesn’t sound like much, but BFA nickle-and-dimes you with this time gated garbage. Even getting onto the war campaign boat from the inn is a pain in the butt. You have a tiny plank that you make a running jump onto. If you miss, then you have to spend another 10 seconds running down the walkway, making a u-turn onto the ramp, and making another right turn from there. Even if you make the jump, there’s a good chance that you snag on the ropes to the side and/or fall off the tiny plank. Why??? Is Civil Engineering banned in Kul Tiras? Just give us direct access to the plank and widen it so that you don’t have to be a tightrope walking acrobat just to get to your mission map! It really feels like you guys are going out of your way to make this game as inconvenient as possible.
I’d do the same thing I do in Org/SW. You think SW or Org are near more content?
No offense, but why should I care about them feeling needed? Blizzard is removing things that have been in the game for years. Things that improve the QOL of travel for players. Removing that is not a good thing.
Making it more difficult or frustrating to do/get to something is only going to anger or upset players (look at this thread). If you were forced to take the scenic route to work every day, if it added 10-15 minutes to your commute, would you be happy?
And funneling us into two cities just feels like Blizzard forcing their way to play on us. The world feels alive enough as it is. I will take travel convenience over sitting in SW with a bunch of people AFK.