And we’re saying we’d like the option to get things like that back. We don’t want to be forced to go to one city for all of the essentials. It wouldn’t be difficult to add some NPCs to the forgotten cities, and possibly a few portals.
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Both of these statements are correct and Blizzard knows it. The real motive is to slow content consumption and create less content.
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Only because they’ve made them more useful.
I empathize, don’t get me wrong - but it doesn’t feel very alive at all most of the time. It certainly can during certain moments, like during BfA invasions, but outside of those things it doesn’t very often. Org feels alive only because they’ve gone out of their way to encourage us to be there. This is just more of that.
It’s just the reality that people get bored and stop doing stuff, and you end up seeing less and less people.
I understand that feeling, on some level I agree with that. But there aren’t enough people to split up.
I should clarify that content-reliant portals like the Kara portals in Legion should remain (at least while it’s relevant content), or people would avoid doing those keys.
But if that’s the motive, then removing the portals from older content makes even less sense. Players who are using those portals are in already-created content; we’re padding our play time for them, without them having to do a bloody thing except leave our existing content alone.
On the other hand, what pushing players out of old hubs and into SW/Org and Boralus/Dazar’alor does do is make current content look more popular than, perhaps, it is. One thing I’ve noticed is how many other 120s I see when I’m in the Pandaria Shrines and Halfhill, or in Legion content. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the devs felt that time spent in older content was making them look bad, and rather than explain to their superiors why there’s more player engagement in old content than current content they’re just going to funnel us into our respective faction hubs and pretend they did it for our own good.
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That’s exactly why they’re funneling us into Org and SW, to give the appearance that there are more players than there really are. I don’t think that’s a good enough reason to not update the other cities up to like, 2012-level at least.
3 Likes
So make the others more useful.
As for the second part of your post, I disagree. I see enough people in the main cities and see people out doing other things in other zones.
People getting bored and leaving is only going to increase if you inhibit people actually playing the game — like removing these portals. And if people don’t play, the cities will feel empty no matter how much you force people to be there. They need to encourage people to play, not shove us into a box.
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They are trying to salvage BFA. But people rather do old content or wait for classic.
BFA is like taking a Tetanus shot to the shoulder every day. No thanks!
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I m ok with spending more time playing BUT NOT travelling
If i play an hour i don t want 10 mins of it being me waiting for a hs cooldown to be able to port to sw to get to caverns of time
If tou remove the cooldown on my hs to sw then great
If you don t then you are pissing me off by making me waste time travelling when i could be playing
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Burn the witch!
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Out of likes, but I agree.
Great point.
I actually don’t mind the inscription suggestion but i think engineers and jewellers would have to get similar items- so much easier to just give us our portals back though.
To (further) play Devil’s Advocate I doubt there’s much incentive to spend a lot of resources on things that are “niche”, especially now with the game market in an apparent nosedive. What I am hoping for is a future expansion to focus more on those old cities (much like Cata did with SW and Org) thus justifying attention.
I’m sure there will be a mass exodus because people can’t teleport to Silvermoon.
Patch 8.1.5 is going to go down like a lead balloon if this hits the live servers. This “experiment” was tried before as others have pointed out.
I guess the devs were not part of the wow team at the time this was tried once before.
Grabs popcorn.
3 Likes
Keep adding straws to the camels back, and eventually it will give. Eventually. Which one will be the last one?
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In the latest Acti-Bliz’s shareholder report WoW is actually one of their top moneymakers. It’ll work out, they won’t allow it not to.
That’d be from pre-purchases for the expansion, store mounts they’re pushing, all the bundles, etc. Thinking something is ‘too big to fail’ is a pretty big mistake.
There’s a pretty big disconnect between the players and the people making the game currently, the problem lies in the fact that they think this is what the players want or something they think the players ‘need’.
You ask most people about how it feels to play their spec or class, if they’ve been playing for a while they’ll probably tell you it used to be way better. I know I’m that way and really dislike the changes being made every expansion with taking away instead of giving really anything.
2 Likes
Would it really be that difficult to add a barber shop, a portal to SW/Org, tmog stuff? It sounds mighty similar to the bogus excuse they gave us for not giving us Karabor and the Bladespire cities in WOD. And then they added those things to Stormshield and Warspear… It would be pretty great if a future expac encouraged the devs to give the other cities more attention— definitely agree with you there.
I’m talking about mount farming and all of the other stuff people listed for why they use the current portals.
Edit: Corrections
1 Like
My belief is that there is nothing wrong with having a centralized location player hub like Orgrimmar/Stormwind. But when you remove portals that take players to other parts of the world so they can explore that seems odd.
Honestly I don’t think that’s really it. And I doubt there’s really any sinister ulterior motive to extend playtime or keep people from spending time in older content because it makes the current devs look bad, or whatever other conspiracy theory there is.
The simple explanation probably is that they didn’t really think through how a lack of portals to places like the CoT or other capital cities will actually affect how players engage with that content. Because again, on paper, simply adding 2-3 minutes of commute on top of an activity that will already take you roughly 10-20 minutes seems largely trivial.
Given the cacophony of people who have in the past whined about how easy everything is, or how convenience is ruining WoW, or how empty the world is, it’s not a stretch to believe that a good chunk of the population wants this. Hell, part of the cry FOR Classic servers is that someone people back in the day “earned” their stuff. (For whatever nonsense that is considering as a high school kid bumbling my way through on a crappy network, I earned exactly none of the gear I did end up getting.)
Just think of any rule or policy your school, local government or job instituted that literally had the exact opposite effect of what it’s supposed to do. This is pretty much it. Never suspect malice in actions that could more easily be explained by incompetence.
1 Like