You should watch Bellulargaming’s video on cut WoD content. It’s pretty interesting.
Shat wasn’t going to be a town, it was going to be a raid. The Temple of Karebor (aka pre-Black Temple) was going to be the Alliance town, Bladespire Citadel was going to the Horde.
Bladespire was further along in development when they changed plans up, that’s why it has an interior and Karebor doesn’t.
I highly recommend it, it’s super interesting.
There doesn’t need to be a mass exodus because of one specific thing. However, if that one specific thing is symptomatic of a larger development philosophy, then the longer that philosophy goes unchallenged, the greater the erosion of game aspects players enjoy. Do you really want to just go along and make excuses until the erosion reaches a point where WoW can’t recover from the loss of players and, more importantly, player trust? Because I don’t.
Do you mean the Temple of Karabor? I’m still salty about that. We could have had a really gorgeous alliance hub and we got some huts in the sand instead.
I don’t think anyone here would object to a new hub. I think it’s a great idea. But don’t remove portals to add it. That’s just stupid.
Oops, yes. Thanks for the correction. I was so excited for it until they completely dropped the ball.
That assumes that people will not use older content with slower access. I’m betting Blizzard doesn’t think this will happen.
Yep. I remember getting there after launch and saying to myself “are you kidding?? THIS is the city we could have had??”
wait we got azuna instead of new dalaran? what kind of idiocy is this? your freaking character STARTS in dal in legion, not azuna.
i was kind of eyeballing this as a sky is falling thread but some of these reek of stupidity. no CoT? guess i better get my fill of xmog runs before the patch cause i sure won’t be going there after.
May I?
Mages have the ability to teleport to certain major hubs to make up for the fact that they have paper bag-strength armor and no self-healing ability (unlike every other class in the game). It’s our thing.
Some of the portals that are being removed are not portals that mages learn (CoT, Kara, and the Legion Dalaran portals), so even we as mages utilize these to get where we’re going.
You (Blizzard) are dealing with an aging game who’s population is aging with it. People have jobs, families, homes, and responsibilities, and can’t always afford an extra 10-20 minutes of precious game time to get from Orgrimmar to Tanaris to farm mounts in Dragon Soul, or whatever.
Flight paths, particularly in main land Azeroth, are slow, meandering, and poorly designed. They are not as fast as flight paths in later expansions, and do not benefit from tweaks to improve pathing. Doing three loops around Thunder bluff before you land is an absurd waste of time, and adds zero value to the game.
Flight paths are still not automatically learned upon out-leveling content.
If you’d like to make the world feel bigger and more alive, it would be wise to give us more reason to visit other areas, rather than restricting our ability to do so. Redo the BC cities so we can fly, add new content in older areas, make flight paths automatically learned once we’ve outleveled that block of content, speed up and streamline existing flightpaths. Unfortunately, the argument you’re making in favor of this change is myopic at best, and misses the bigger picture of why the community is so upset. I agree with many others that this is an unnecessary and poor design decision.
Yeah, I meant Karabor, but had a brain fart. I will watch the vid when I get home. Thanks for the link!
But why come up with the idea of removing portals at all? There has to be a motive; they have to think they’re accomplishing something. Because even if the removal is easy, that’s still time and manpower expended on disabling the code and testing that it didn’t break anything; more time and manpower to phase the portals so they’re available to players on quests. You don’t expand time and manpower for no reason.
If we knew what they thought they were accomplishing, it might give us some insight into who they think they’re designing this game for.
I still blame their apparent ill-advised thoughts of having “smaller, yearly expansions”. WoD seemed to be the first of those, but they changed their mind almost immediately and went with the 2-year Legion.
Hence why we got an expansion with tons of content cut to be just a year, yet ended up lasting a couple years anyways.
I know! I flew around it once, pretty darn depressed. It’s really amazing.
I was just thinking about this. It sure does seem like since WoD the developers are determined to make the game play more of the game for us than we the players do. I mean, when I’m on a long FP, I do exactly like you do, I alt+tab out to do other stuff. Why am I paying $15/month to not play the game?
I seriously thought about adding up all the minutes that I spend on FPs in a month just to see what that = in time that I am tabbed out and not actually playing the game. But then I realized, why bother doing that when I can just go play another game and not even have to worry about it?
It’s definitely a goblin-hatched idea, though: get players to pay you to play the game without them actually playing the game! It’s bloody brilliant.
My guess.
This is for Classic and how they plan to release each expansion from Vanilla on, with the new version of how the world is without flight.
They think they can get another $1 billion a year by remaking this game.
If they’re resolved to do this, can we get the minor compromise of enabling the Flight Whistle in all WoW zones?
This makes so much sense. And they had to spread the little they had over a long time… Hence the selfie and Twitter patch.
I’m betting they’re wrong. If nothing else, it will decrease impulsive “hey, I can just take a portal to X and do a quick mog run.” The players who do older content as part of their routine might not change their ways, but I suspect many will. I know I’m less likely to do multiple runs of Mogu’shan Vaults per week if I have to fly from Paw’don Village instead of the Shrine, and if I’m not at the Shrine, I’m not going to go “hey, SoO is right here, I might as well kill the first few bosses before I go kill the Sha of Anger.”
While I agree that very few if any people will leave because of this change. It’s just one more thing to upset a group of your players. I’m not going quit by any means over this. But it just make me trust their judgement even less. There is really no good reason for this change imo. It just reinforces my belief that it is just a big echo chamber at Blizzard and just how out of touch they are with their players. I can’t imagine how anybody would think this wold go over well.
I understand that changes can throw people off a bit at first, but I also think they help keep the world of Azeroth feeling alive.
I know the phrase “throw off”. I don’t think it means what you think it means. People are not complaining because they misunderstand what’s happening. People are complaining because they understand what’s happening all too well.
For me, it is more rewarding when I complete the task that way and I wouldn’t want to be able to get everywhere instantly but there is a good medium to find (but continuing to pile up various teleporting items feels strange). Traveling over large areas reminds me of how vast the world is and I often reminisce while flying on a flight path or a mount. Sometimes I have even just used the port to Timeless Isle and taken the flight path to Shrine (instead of going straight there) as I can enjoy the view and relax.
That’s an argument for not removing flight paths. And no one suggested removing flight paths. So the argument is moot. The fact, that you enjoy travelling in some way, is not an argument for destroying the other (fast) way other people enjoy travelling.
That being said, I know I can be a bit strange and I’m often not bothered by things that bother others - that’s why I ask a lot of questions.
Well, it’s good to know that you are here to listen to our gripes about how you plan to burden us with boring content before burdening us with boring content. We are just here to provide you with some entertaining commentary. Because this process is here to entertain you, the GM.
People are not “thrown off” by this change. They are put off by it.