Why do low levels need fast access?
What if the portals were retained, but level restricted for use by people who are of an appropriate level to get to Dalaran of their own accord?
Scaling world means people don’t “need” to follow a specific path to quest.
Regardless, lowbies have managed just fine since forever.
are you sure?
are you really sure?
I guess that also explains why he doesn’t see why people would want flying in current content. If you only play one character, it’s probably not that awful.
But you know, I’d say probably the vast majority of people in this game enjoying playing alts. So you know Ion, you may want to re-think that stance because it’s pretty frustrating having to do the same content over and over again on the ground on different characters. And people won’t just stop playing alts and conform to your style of gameplay, they will just stop playing the game. Because playing alts is what makes this game fun for them.
Lowbies can already get a mage portal to dalaran crater, and could previously get a portal to legion dalaran and set their hearth there.
On top of that, they can already get the flight book heirloom and fly there.
I’m sorry. Sometimes it can be difficult to tell in a post without a voice, but … Is this sarcasm here or are you actually being serious?
Pretty sure. Here I am complaining about it and I haven’t complained about rep grinding for Allied races. I’ve managed to unlock at least two so far. I’ll get there when I get there.
I’ll also remind you, most portals are level locked. So no lowbies will be jumping through portals that aren’t within their level range.
And honestly, the New Dalaran portals are only available to people who’ve already hit Legion (at least, with the Dal Hearthstone, I’m sure a MAGE can port a lowbie there) . By the time your level 100, you’ve so far out leveled the content that those portals link to its absurd.
This. The portals are Level locked, but Mage ports are not.
Be in fact, still wonder which are still level locked and which aren’t. I’m sure somethings have changed through out the years.
This is an extremely weird oversimplification of the issues, but since you’ve decided to use my very first forum post to derail the topic, I’ll grant you a reply.
I have never once said that I don’t want to re-run old content. See: first forum post. So there exists at LEAST one person who does want to do old content, rendering your statement absurd.
And, in the even of “well, you are clearly just one person”: Are you seriously proposing that NO ONE else has EVER wanted to do any of the things I listed? Because that would be ridiculous, and yet it’s what your post seems to be hinting at.
There exists both people who complain about lack of content as well as people who enjoy doing it. News flash: you can have both types of players. There is no such “suddenly everyone has decided to care about the old content”. What you are seeing is a lot of the people who have ALWAYS cared about the old content. Erasing those players to force your narrative is such a lazy and dishonest argument for “lol no one knows what they want!” What are you even hoping to gain?
The issue is that there are many types of players, and they have different interests in the game. There is no ONE type of WoW player, and there wasn’t even back during Vanilla.
That said, this has nothing at all to do with people who want to keep the portals that have been introduced to us and those of us upset at the idea of them being done away with for seemingly no good reason.
Yes. Obviously. Because you are saying that the devs cannot acknowledge that more than one type of player exists, and if that’s the case, there’s more trouble for the dev team than this portal issue.
Can we get Ythisens back yet? At least he wasn’t condescending while telling the community the rough equivalent of “you think you do, but you don’t” or “don’t you all have phones”.
I would say it’s mind-blowing that people are still crapping on a CM that’s actually communicating with us for once, but it absolutely isn’t.
No, it doesn’t make the world feel bigger for me.
All fewer portals does is make me have to spend more time using my malnourished mounts.
Of course, more time spent “playing” is really the only thing the current dev team seems to care about so I’m not surprised by this decision in the slightest.
This shouldn’t even be a discussion. If Blizzard want to make a fancy portal room go for it but don’t delete any portals.
To the comment of making the world bigger:
Add portal junctions to all big cities. My favourite places in Classic were Undercity and Darnassus. I liked the architecture and the layout of Undercity especially (banks + auction house). Both were destroyed in BFA, sadly.
If I had a viable choice to hang out in either place I would happily do so. (They were also less laggy during Classic than Lagforge, Lagrimmar, and Lagwind)
I’m playing a video game to have fun and enjoy myself. Now I realize that not everything can be my definition of fun, but making traveling more tedious is definitely NOT on my big list of fun stuff to do. I want to do things and play the game, not stare blankly out the car window.
Flight points? They make me /afk every time I jump on one unless they’re really short. If Blizzard’s goal is to make travel more tedious, then keep it up. All that long flight points do is make me actually walk away from the game for periods of time to do more interesting things - and I would sincerely hope that isn’t Blizzard’s goal here. I’m already struggling to make myself log in on non-raid days.
Normally I would agree with you, but I think everyone is pretty justifiably frustrated by Blizzard taking away convenience choices to inflate their time played metric, and this is just the final straw. They’ve repeatedly made their intentions known with Pathfinder, time gated rep grinds to something like new races, etc, and people have repeatedly voiced their opposition to it, in which Blizzard just… doesn’t care. And now this, it’s just cemented the nail in the coffin for how little I care about this game anymore if this is 100% the direction they’re going it with it now. It feels like they think everyone plays like Ion Hazzikostas does, one character and no alts, so why would we need these pointless convenience options like flight and portals? What’s wrong with putting a time gated rep grind behind everything, don’t you guys have mains like me?
Let me just say Blizzard, you think everyone plays like that, but we don’t.
I agree with people that are upset about the portals. I don’t like that they’re being taken out either.
I do NOT agree with people treating a CM like trash because he’s here gathering information and doing his job.
I feel that, if I may say, that the remove of portals shows a marked lack of understanding in why they existed in the first place.
When WoW launched, only mages had portals, that’s true. Others having access to that was a special event without a mage. This was part of a mage’s class fantasy, and it was really a unique treasure they brought.
Moving forward, the world became more expansive. A whole new world to visit! Except, without a hearthstone set there (or a portal), you’d have to physically go to Stormwind somehow, then take a flight path down to the portal, then another flight path (unless you had purchased epic flying) to wherever you were going. This process could take as much as half an hour. I know, because I’ve done it.
Portals, however, in Shattrath, sought to mitigate this issue. There were portals to Quel’danas (which would have been a huge pain to get to for anyone on Alliance), and Orgrimmar/Stormwind. Setting your hearthstone in Shattrath made interworld travel accessible. It didn’t affect travel around Outland or Azeroth individually, just between them.
Again, moving forward. Northrend showed up with Dalaran. With Caverns of Time being a thing, and relevant, a portal was created to expedite getting to southern Kalimdor, which was a pain for everyone. This was mostly the first time travel around a single world became easier, but it was also intended to mitigate what was deemed unnecessarily long travel time.
Cataclysm brought portals to it’s specific zones (of which one couldn’t be traveled to at all otherwise). This made traveling the world much easier. We now had two portals in Eastern Kingdoms, and two in Kalimdor! This was, as you can imagine, widely beloved. The design intention, it seemed, was that flying was now possible everywhere, but it wasn’t pleasant to traverse the leveling content all the time just to get to the pockets of max level content.
Mists of Pandaria added all the city portals to the one shrine, which was probably the tightest aggregate of portals (as it included Shattrath and Dalaran plus the capitals).
So on, and so on, and so on.
The trend is clear, though. Portals were added every expansion for a reason. Players really enjoy doing old content, but it’s pretty much all instances for mogs, mounts, and pets. The travel time to get to these places, or to run a full gamut of them, increases every expansion.
If I want to, let’s say, run every dungeon that can drop a mount, how long should that take at max level?
The same was true in WoD, and in Legion, for the most part.
So you might be thinking… but Atalanta, your premise is that the world gets bigger every time, but your hours don’t change that much, so it can’t be that big of a deal.
Except! Each expansion added more portals to places I’d been. This meant that I could expediently get to where I need to go faster. Adding portals “shrank” the world, but it enabled me to keep up with my tasks in a reasonable fashion.
That, Bornakk, was the point of portals. To reduce unnecessary, extraneous travel through an ever growing world and backlog of content. Removing those portals means it takes longer than ever to get all of these things done. Given that the content that I’m going to do isn’t becoming more engaging or getting harder, it’s a shallow change at best, and will only increase the time it takes to get places. It won’t improve the experience of getting there because it’s effectively making it worse.
So what do I use all these portals for?
![:stuck_out_tongue:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/stuck_out_tongue.png?v=6" ":stuck_out_tongue:")
None. I won’t be going there any longer. Our guild opened our doors in MoP. I’m not going to land in the Jade Forest and work my way to the Shrine. As soon as I put that on the calendar, members will say they won’t be home in time, I’ll have cascading arrivals, and in Discord the person stuck in the air will be disrupting what is going on with the few individuals who parked their characters ahead of time. Which, incidentally, having to do so removes immersion; and not having a portal to the Shrine removes spontaneity.
I’ve also been giving the “world larger” question more thought. It’s still a no. If you want a larger world - start designing them once again. If you have to remove access in order to simulate a larger world… well. The “large world expacs” felt like large worlds because they were. Unlike, say, WoD, which was convoluted mess of switchbacks desperately trying to hide the lack of space.
I understand your line of thought, I just feel that it is fundamentally flawed in the approach.
I don’t agree with that either, but if there’s one thing he needs to take back to the devs from this thread, it’s that “people are frustrated by these decisions”. I don’t fault him at all for these decisions by the devs, but please let them know that we are sick of this crap.
Ythisens was the most condescending CS rep there ever was, ever.