This doesn’t make their removal any better. Seems like pointless development for an issue that wasn’t an issue.
Removing the portals makes your game worse and less fun to play. That should be a cue to revert the changes and leave them. It shouldn’t have been an issue to begin with.
It makes the world feel less alive if you take away portals! A altruistic organization like the Kirin Tor likes to portray itself as wouldnt take away such a convenient and easy way for heroes to travel around azeroth and beyond!
It helps them get around easier so that they may do what they do best! BE HEROES! Which is what we are in this game according to the Blizzard Narrative!
You taking away the portals takes away from that narrative! What if , say for instance, there was someone who needed saving in some obscure palce that could be easily gotten to from the portals? By taking that away you take away from the immersion! That someone could have bad things happen to them because of the convenient way Heroes use to get around was taken away!
Or what if we have a timed quest one day involving a place that the portals can help us get to ? What if by taking away the portals, you arbitrarily make us have to move on a extremely tight timeline for the quest makign it almost impossible to do ?
Flying makes the world bigger. People actually said this in real life when flight became common.
The idea that it makes the world smaller in this game is just one of a long string of lies that they’re hoping we’ll believe if they get repeated often enough.
And then what? 5+ minutes flight time straight there if you’re on a 310% flying mount?
Oh! Or I could just go through two loading screens.
Ah yes, fly to a timewalking dragon at the top of the zone to then fly to the bottom of it… because that makes sense.
I literally have a friend who is brand new to the game. He’s taking his time, leveling slow, he’s excited to go to Outland for the first time (meanwhile his DK is going through Wrath for the first time.)
Should this new player be punished because the hellfire portal gets removed and now he has to either set his hearth in Shat or fly back every time?
They’re at least leaving the Shat city portals alone right? Please, for his sake I beg you Blizzard.
![:popcorn:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/popcorn.png?v=6" ":popcorn:")
POPCORN! GET YOUR POPCORN HERE!
All proceeds go to save our portals fund!
It is my opinion that your argument about larger vs smaller world falls flat on its face here. The portals in question have been in game for a long time - and to just remove them part way through the expansion in an effort to clean things up (probably because you didn’t want to make room for them) is just for your convienience … not ours and it’s unnecessary.
I feel you’re making an excuse “making the world larger / smaller / etc” because there’s no room for them in the new portal room. Add your new portal room - move the ones that make sense - please leave the rest where they are. We’re accustomed to them and they make our valuable / limited playing time more fun. Outright removing them will make things less fun for me. I already spend enough time traveling as it is.
I don’t see the big whoop. Everything that was removed seems to have a very close alternative. What’s with the freaking out?
“Times change” - Garrosh 2014.
No one who grew up with vanilla WoW through TBC, WotLK, et al. has the same amount of time to invest in the game, much less spend it on travel time, especially now that there’s a good amount of players who are managing a stable of alts they intend to grind content with. Keep in mind, too, that old Azeroth in classic had much less zones to travel to with only two continents to consider.
The reason there’s so much negative feed back is that because it’s a bad UX decision from the dev team. Consolidating is great, but the justification for taking away from old content doesn’t hold up.
It would not surprise me in the least if Blizzard put back the Caverns of Time portal but moves the dungeons and raids to another out of the area place just to spite the players for not going along with the original portal removal.
All this does is to increase travel time.
They were not a problem then, so why are they all of a sudden a problem now?
Why does this remind me of WOD and the fact that all of a sudden flight was a “bad thing”?.
Why do you feel players enjoy the feeling of the world being bigger or smaller?
Travel time isn’t game play and it isn’t immersive. When I spend 3.5 minutes on a flight path to a WQ that takes 30 seconds I don’t feel the world is a big bigger. I feel like my immersion (or mental investment, if you’d rather) is broken and I begin considering other activities because my ability to stay focused on the tasks I want to complete is compromised.
Nobody wants what you’re selling and whatever value you’ve convinced yourself these concepts have is severely over estimated.
If you want us to play the game for longer periods of time then give us more to do - don’t inflate our game time with immersion breaking no/low-input sessions being littered through out our day.
The rest of us hope you classic folks stay over there, too. I’d rather get to the content I want to do quicker, instead of spending 10-15 minutes of travel each time I want to go there.
The fun of adventure and travel in these games is only really there the first time or couple times you do it, for a lot of us. That’s why the systems other MMOs have in place are so much more convenient. You travel to one place, unlock the teleport there, and then I can get there quicker when I need to do dailies/gather/run old content. I don’t want to run back there every single time.
I’d also like to add that with your answer on the legion artifacts and portals, it seems clear you want to make things more complicated instead of, you know, just leaving things as is. Why does the world need to feel bigger? Is feeling bigger more important than player accessibility and confusability? If you have to start making exceptions to get your plan to work, your plan likely needs a do over.
I would also like to know how you would address the HFP portal removal for alts and new players.
Why have the last three expacs been a laundry list of what has been REMOVED, rather than what has been PUT INTO the game?
The “close” alternatives are, if we’re lucky, at least a zone away from where we want to get to.
Because there are, in my opinion at least, significant issues with BFA’s design that many players are expressing here on this thread and throughout other areas that are in dire need of attention and improvement by the Developers.
ActiBlizz has made corporate motions for focusing more and more on things that are important and tightening their budgets, and they choose to waste time on removing things that are not needed, and as demonstrated above by Bornakk, they are not even removing them.
They’re hiding them behind phasing, which for anyone who has had a quest broken by phasing, means that they’re adding a significant layer of complexity for something that never needed to be touched in the first place, and they’re doing this on the heels of several months of the worst PR since EA tried to Pay to Win Star Wars Battlefront 2.
Seriously who is making decisions on this Dev team?
No takers, anyone? Flightspeed to 490%.
By the sounds of things we will need a guide on WoWhead or some other 3rd party site in order to figure out how to navigate WoW with all the portal changes…Seriously, why go out of your way to make it more complicated for players?
I feel like I should not have to open up a web guide to figure out how to get from Point A -> Point B since we feel deleting/moving portals around is amusing.
I think you mean if there is one online - who just happens to be on the same realm as you.
When Stormwind and Orgrimmar were bustling with the recent holiday, folks milling around the holiday quest givers, I offered to provide free ports to any cities to help people hand in their necklaces to the various leaders.
Amongst the couple of dozen people milling around on both realms, neither my Venture Co nor my Aman’thul mages could find anyone from their own realm. It didn’t matter because the ports were free, but everyone seemed to want to tip me and no-one could.
So bad luck to any mages who hope to rake in the gold after this change.
If you’re going to be taking away the only portals to Karazhan, Caverns of Time, etc – at least give mages the ability to port there.
This just seems like a poorly thought out decision, imo. No idea who is supposed to be happy about this decision, cause now we have to spend more time just flying places && that time will add up. ![:roll_eyes:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/roll_eyes.png?v=6" ":roll_eyes:")