I’ve had the sobering realization that a new portal hub in Stormwind should make me feel excited. Instead, due to this entire debacle, I find myself dreading 8.1.5, a patch that on the whole I was looking forward to.
Gee. What a fantastic feeling.
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Better to make the transparently worthless gesture a week beforehand then be called out for never doing it at all. You have it exactly right. Like making major negative announcements late friday arvo or stealth changes.
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I’ll just be playing FF14, where I can teleport anywhere in the world for a small fee. I’m sorry but sitting on a flight point sucks. Travel is barely tolerable on my mage, alts are just a nightmare.
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All you portal happy people would hate classic wow.
Great change. Too many portals as it is. It’s better to simplify and allow for some fun navigation around Azeroth.
FF is looking much more interesting. I have not played it in years but I think its time for a change.
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No, I’m very aware of how big the world is, which is what makes it feel more inconvenient than anything else. Today I had to get to old Dalaran and I honestly couldn’t remember how to get there. Then I had to wait for a boat at stormwind and then I had to sit on a boat and wait through a loading screen. It’s not fun. If you want people to be bustling through the wide World of Warcraft then give us genuinely fun things to do out there. Experiencing it in transit is only fun so many times before it becomes an obvious time sink and a chore, just to do some trivial thing because it’s N expansions old. Blizzard should want us to participate in the long tail of old content but if that long tail is so inconvenient that it’s not fun, I expect a lot of people won’t bother.
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I mean… yes? I played Classic wow.
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There are less artificial ways to make the world “feel bigger.” The removal of convenience is always going to feel terrible by the playerbase and only reinforces spite and resentment.
If I want to explore a vast, vibrant world, I should feel encouraged, not forced.
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One of us… One of us… ![:eyes:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/eyes.png?v=6" ":eyes:")
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Classic had 2 continents, we are up to eight (9 if you split the BFA ones). And Classic and Modern are barely even the same genre.
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You nerf old world content as well as old raids for convenience of the players but, remove portals to areas that players used for convenience to do old content. In famous words of Charlie Sheen, WINNING! …jk. Sure, those areas can be gotten to by other means aka like going to do any dungeon/raid in CoT you would have to now use the Uldum portal and travel all the way there but, it’s an unnecessary inconvenience.
Does this change make the world feel bigger? No. If you want the world to feel bigger you have to have the players actually traverse throughout the world which means remove flying and having players rely on flight paths like the old days before Azeroth was redone to support flying.
You all forced pvp onto people by changing all servers to pve and then incentivized war mode. How did that turn out? Exactly, it was a failed system. Now you’re forcing people to go to SW/Org to use this new fancy portal room you all designed and inconveniencing players that want to do old content. GJ!
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Classic WoW only had two continents. Current Wow has 7 (on Azeroth) + 3 more planets.
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woah woah careful… you’re going to end up on a barbeque with an attitude like that.
Eh, not really. I rather spend more time traveling than pay a mage for a portal.
I can also quit, it is not like I will be playing this game forever.
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Dragon Soul has a grand total of three mounts that I still don’t have, along with a slew of transmog pieces, not even counting the Battle for Mount Hyjal and all the dungeons. Speaking of teleportation to CoT specifically here, we also really need a way to leave instances like Hour of Twilight without being forced to portal out far away from the Caverns of Time.
And don’t touch the Wyrmrest portals, please. I like having a way to get into central Northrend so I don’t have to fly across the entire continent from the Argent Tournament, which is about as far away from anything I want to do as it can be.
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Here’s the thing:
We have never had a focus on old content being replayable as a metric for anything other than collections. Aside from RP reasons, and loremaster, people generally don’t think much about old content, why it’s there, or what it was originally for.
It would be one thing to say that we’re not going to have portals to all sorts of areas in the new expansion (such as in Suramar). It’s another to say that the portals you’ve added in over the years to ease travel to extraneous content is going to be removed.
Removing my ability to go to the capitals, or a few extra locations (Dalaran portals), won’t make the world feel more engaging.
Why not? The world that I’m traveling to isn’t engaging anyway. It’s not, by design, meant to be challenging or draw me in in any way. It did that while I was there the first time, for sure, but this is not that time.
Yes. No.
The world “feels” bigger, of course. In the sense that it takes longer to get places.
However, none of those places are relevant to my sense of progression or immersion in the current game environment. They exist solely to level alts or farm transmogs from old content (which I usually want to get done as quickly as possible, without regard for where or what the content is).
Making it harder to get to those places feels like an arbitrary design decision meant only to make it take longer for me to do things for nefarious reasons. It certainly isn’t for my own benefit, as you say, because if it were it would belie a marked lack of understanding on the part of the developers as to what we actually like and desire in a game.
“We’ve decided to remove flying, because it removes you from content and this isn’t engaging or immersive. We also understand that the amount of time it takes to get somewhere should be relative to how long you’re going to be there.”
vs
“We’re removing portals, we’d prefer you have to fly over the world again. We think that was more engaging.”
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Blizzard, while you’re in the mood for fixing things, why don’t you fix quest bugs that have existed since Legion (i.e. the quest in WoD Shadowmoon Valley) or addressing the leveling experience slog?
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Why not remove flight paths while we’re at it? I don’t feel very connected to the world when I alt-tab and wait for the landing sound either. ![:wink:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/wink.png?v=6" ":wink:")
Okay, in all seriousness, while you want to incentivize a feeling of connectedness to the world, I think in actuality all you’re doing is disincentivizing content people go out of their way for; e.g. ICC or CoT mount runs. Holiday events in the old world.
A fundamental issue I have with the design philosophy of Battle for Azeroth is the assumption that player time investment equals player enjoyment. Stronger mob scaling and removal of world quest group finder functionality didn’t encourage players to do more quests together, for longer, it encouraged players to wait for low-effort kill-one-mob quests and alt-tab in between flight points.
In the same way, taking away the niche portals isn’t going to increase “connectedness”, because the player is simply not going to bother and log off.
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If you’re talking about the one in Dalaran, it’s going bye bye with the rest of them.