I’m the same way with the new zone design being heavily detailed with solid roots and bushes.
Like, some people gushed over how much work was involved. They loved the attention to detail, how filled out stuff was in places, and even how little nooks had things hidden that you had to hunt for sometimes.
I’d have contributed my opinion to that discussion, of course, but I got stuck on a few tree roots along the way to a hidden chest marked on my map and ended up late to the party.
They are vocal about what they don’t want to do, obviously. That makes sense. As nice as it might be, it simply is rarer for people to make tons of posts about what they LIKE doing when it’s working fine. Why? Because they’re actually DOING it, in the game. That’s how they’re spending that time.
And this entire thread isn’t about that either, actually. It’s about them taking away the ones that we already have. So that complaint is completely missing the point.
False. I have seen many people say that they complained about this during PTR feedback. Since I tend to stay away from the PTR because I enjoy playing the final polished game, there would be no way for me specifically to know that this change was coming, until…
Wowhead released an article outlining the changes, which is why I and a lot of other people are “suddenly” here. Because it does indeed seem like the people who gave feedback during older PTR releases were ignored.
And for the record, you yourself acknowledged earlier in the thread that you purposefully stir the pot with your comments and enjoy people getting upset over it, so… It seems hypocritical at best to point the finger at someone else doing that, if they even did, which I wouldn’t know because again, I’m here from the Wowhead article and nothing else.
I like feeling like each class has a use and is unique. In the old days, players would pay good coin for a port. It helped build relationships. It adds a layer to the game that is sorely missing these days.
Like rogues lockpicking. I miss things like that, but that’s just me 
And that’s fine, but don’t make me play the way you play. You can still do that while leaving my portals alone. (No YOU, BORNAKK!, but “you” as a collective term for the game devs.) This is what gets the flying crowd divided - when there’s no portals, I have no option but to play YOUR way. With portals, we can both play the ways we like. There shouldn’t be such an insane amount of removal here. If you want the world to feel alive, let me get there so I can pop some life into it.
Without portals, the world does feel larger. The only thing that adds is inconvenience. No gameplay, no engagement, no thought.
You get on a flying mount or visit a flight master and alt-tab or AFK.
Well, not everyone has time to check out the PTR. So, I can see some of them only finding this out now due to the wowhead article today or even on patch day.
Well, here’s my opinion from a collector’s perspective. I will probably sound frustrated, and I apologise for that; I know it’s not your fault, or really any individual developer, but this is how I feel with the game right now. I promise I’m working toward the portals, but I need to frame this.
As a collector, it feels like my play style is at best an afterthought and at worst forgotten. The game’s reward systems seem to be based around randomly giving cool rewards for just normally playing other bits of content. That’s fine, but as a collector, who likes to collect things, every one of those “if you get lucky you might get a bonus reward in this pet or mount” becomes a “you need to do X to get Y”. It’s less a bonus, because those bonus rewards become what we seek. They’re what we look for.
Islands are one example. Theoretically they’d be a collector’s dream; 360 unique mounts, pets, mogs and toys to collect, so much stuff to do! But the abysmal drop rate, and the lack of transparency on that drop rate, makes it feel like collectors aren’t really spared much thought. We don’t run the island for Azerite and get happy when we randomly get an additional reward; we run the islands for those rewards, and at present the drop rates on both unique items and doubloons are so low many of us are becoming jaded with the idea of collecting entirely, or at least giving up on Islands for the expansion in the desperate hope we’ll be able to solo them a lot faster in the next expansion.
So if we decide there’s a piece of new content in the new expansion that will be easier to collect from in another expansion or two, we fall back on collecting stuff from older content. That’s fine. We can be patient, as long as rewards don’t arbitrarily vanish if we don’t do them in time; if it’s more efficient to wait a few years to go after something and get it years after it was the Hot New Thing, that’s fine. We’re okay with that.
So we go back to older zones to farm rare drops or older raids and dungeons for mounts or pets or mogs. In Legion we even had an amazing new quality of life improvement in Bear Tartare, which gave us a 70% speed boost when we killed something - this made running Molten Core a lot more fun than it is at walking speed. But when BfA came out, Bear Tartare was nerfed to the point of uselessness. I still hold out hope one day it might regain is original effect as long as the Legacy Loot Mode buff is enabled, to bring that feeling of fun back to grinding, but I’m not sure.
But when it was removed, that was another blow to collectors. I know it was probably removed because of balance concerns with new BfA content or PvP or something, which is why I think it should only have its effect back in Legacy Loot content. But the point is, when it was removed it felt like collection-focused players were losing a fun toy that made our pursuit a bit more bearable.
Moving onto the portals now.
Due to the aforementioned way the game’s rewards aren’t really designed for “collect all the things” as a viable end game, when we have less to do in a new expansion and thus want to go do old content instead, it tends to be a lot more effective and efficient to have multiple alts. A helm with a 5% drop rate once a week sucks, but if we have four characters a week who could learn the appearance it’s a little better. Collectors, I assume, would thus tend to have more alts than most other kinds of players - at least, more alts they tend to move around the world more frequently.
So, if a collector has more motivation to do old content than old content, chances are they wanna do it on a number of characters. Think about Icecrown Citadel. You want chances at Invincible, or Arthas’ swords, you have to make your way through the entire raid. Now imagine doing that every week, aiming for those drops, and then imagine doing it on five characters, or ten. The travel time increases horrendously, and that’s with a portal to a relatively close location. Imagine if, instead of Icecrown you wanted to farm Throne of Thunder. Then imagine if the Shrine of Two Moons in Pandaria, that portal was replaced with one to the Jade Forest - clear on the other side of the continent. Every time you wanted to run Throne of Thunder, you either set your hearstone on the Isle of Thunder, which is bad if you still want to do world quests or warfronts since we don’t have a hearthstone to Dazar’alor, or you make the agonising trip across all of Pandaria several times a week.
Yes, the world feels bigger, but it’s not a sense of wonder. It’s a sense of time being wasted. After five characters make the trip to ToT you’ve spent enough time auto-flying to have done much of another run of the instance.
The CoT portal lets us get to Hyjal or Dragon Soul or the dungeons nice and quick, but if we had to fly 10 characters a week over Uldum and Tanaris to get there… it’s a lot of time spent for no extra benefit. The world feels bigger, but it doesn’t feel more fun.
So that just adds to the feeling of collectors being forgotten again. It feels like every time a QoL change happens that makes our insane goal of collecting fun things in old content more tolerable or, dare I say it, fun, something else happens that removes that benefit or even makes it worse. There are enough out-of-the-way locations in the world we want to get to, and will want to get to frequently until we’ve finished 100% with it, that we don’t need more, currently convenient locations made more of a slog to get to.
TLDR
The impact on me of removing portals is in the order of potentially an hour or two a week I could be spending running old content being wasted just getting to that content, and the worse impact on me is a feeling that my play style just isn’t supported or even desired by Blizzard at this point - between the nerfing of Bear Tartare, the lack of conciliations on Island Expedition rewards and the apparent removal of some of collector’s most favoured portals, I feel like Blizzard would prefer I just focus on playing new story content as it comes out and then not playing until the next patch. If it’s too much effort and not enough reward to accomplish my chose end game goals, why should I continue? I chose to be a collector, and that’s given Blizzard a lot of extra mileage out of me for no extra effort - I’ve chosen to run old content a lot, especially in Legion - but I’m starting to feel like I should cut my losses and give up on that.
Thought the idea is to want people to play more… not log off.
I very much appreciate the tone and content of this post. Thank you.
I can also appreciate the desire to take slower travel routes. I have been known to fly on my own flying mounts to get somewhere even when I know a flight path will be faster simply because I find flying fun. That said, there are times when I have limited time and then I appreciate having faster methods of travel.
Having multiple choices is good simply because not everyone plays the game the same way or values the same features. Keeping the portals as is and putting the ones back in Pandaria in no way limits your travel options if you choose to take other slower routes. It does, however, remove options from those players who prefer a different play style and other means of navigating the world.
There’s also the fact that rarely does a portal take you to the exact place you need to be. There’s often also some additional flight required during which there are plenty of options for sight seeing.
Me, I play on a potato of a computer with freakishly slow loading screens. Like walk to the kitchen and get a soda and am still on the loading screen when I get back. The fewer loading screens I need to sit through to get to where I want to be, the better.
Sometimes you do this, but not always. Isn’t it nice to have both options? Options are good.
Edited to add: Sorry I keep messing up your blue text.
I’m actually really liking the humility I’m reading with Bornakk. I hope it continues.
I do agree with folks like Sorelai:
for reasons like this above. Individuals can still achieve the same kind of gameplay without having to resort to making that the only style of gameplay.
My two rogues can do without it too… Nothing worse than be in Dungeon and some random person PM’s you for a port.
But I do free lockpicks for friends and guildies as well as free ports.
Bornakk, you seem to be making matters worse with every post. I know this is a completely foolish hope, but this is getting out of hand.
This has gone on long enough. Is there any possible way we can get a developer to speak on this matter? This is beyond ridiculous at this point. Who is supposed to benefit from this? People who can already fly at flight paths if they don’t want to use portals? Low level players who can’t even use the portals in the first place? Max level players who are just trying to access content that, in some places, is almost a hundred levels beneath them?
Who wins? Who is this for? Because it certainly isn’t for the players.
Welp, if there was any chance of me renewing my sub, it’s gone now. I’ve been playing FFXIV and it literally does every feature WoW does 10000% better. I was originally just going on hiatus, but the more I play FFXIV, the harder is it for me to come back to s**t like this. This was just the final nail in the coffin, and I think this is a sign that it’s time to move on.
Peace✌
I like porting to the Caverns of Time from Northrend-Dalaran due to how laggy Legion-Dalaran is in terms of loading screens.
Nah, if something is too inconvenient, I just don’t bother doing it anymore. This is a game, not a job.
A game about magic and fighting and exploring shouldn’t be so stubborn about easily getting around the world. If someone had a portal that went directly to their job and then the powers that be took it away and told them that they should enjoy their hour in commute, no one would be happy with that, right?
If you want players to go somewhere for some random metric that you’ve decided is important, give players a reason to want to go there instead of walling off every other direction. It just feels bad. Sorry I can’t be more concise.
The Caverns of time portal was very nice in Legion-Dalaran but it was also nice from Northrend-Dalaran (if we took the portal from shrine or was in pandaria and didn’t’ want to hearth to legion-dalaran). I personally used both about equally if i can recall right.
Putting at least this portal in the portal room or mix it with the cata portals i guess? Would save alot of time having to fly from Uldum, because its not exactly enjoyable to sit on a taxi or use auto fly for something like 10 minutes at least, to get to where you wanna go.
honestly don’t know why you think mages are useless when you give us a garrison hearthstone and legion dalaran hearthstone back to back expansions if you feel like this. Kinda did that to yourself.
Absolutely. You said exactly what I was thinking, only better.
I take the Timeless Isle trinket port because I forget that there’s even a direct portal to shrine from Legion-Dal. I loved taking joy rides in a flying mount across old zones too, heck, even RP walking through old zones, but there’s a time and a place for that, and time is a precious resource (as the goblin proverb goes, “Time is money, friend.”) that many in the playerbase see dwindling as a result of competing hobbies and real life responsibilities. As it is now, playing as a druid main, memorizing available portals between the dreamways and cities keeps me very cognizant of how big the world has become, especially when I’m trying to access a very specific location in the world to turn in an Island Expedition bonus quest, or during holiday events, or during Timewalking week.
I did the whole transcontinental flights thing, back before connected flight paths was patched in as a feature. Auberdine to Gadgetzan, point to point, manually. I’ve ran up the hill both ways in the snow in Winterspring in the oldest iteration of the Wintersaber reputation grind. It’s an experience I won’t forget. Heck, even now on my alt, I haven’t finished the Alliance war campaign, so my port of call for Zandalar is only in Voldun. Flying from the Alliance port in Voldun to Xibala, Zuldazar for a Motherlode run is a good exercise in getting ready for Classic WoW, lemme tell ya.
I have plenty of guildmates who enjoy plenty of in-game activities outside of raiding. Some are avid pet/mount/mog collectors, some are hardcore PvPers, and some are insane-in-the-membrane altoholics. A good number of them leverage the current portal network to facilitate their endgame goals. For some of them, and players like them, it’s not always just 1 task that requires travel. As referenced by other players in this thread, there are long checklists of content to grind across multiple continents of Azeroth, Outland, Draenor, and Argus, that’s made readily accessible by the portals. As many have stated already, without the infrastructure to facilitate the ease of access of old content, they would stop consuming that content. When they stop consuming that content, and enjoy the overall game less, they stop playing. and when they stop playing, then that is when the World of Warcraft feels smaller.
This is the best response I’ve seen to this topic to date. As far as making the game seem “bigger”, all it does in my mind is make it significantly more of an @$$pain to get places. When it is a serious @$$pain to get somewhere (like CoT or Kara), I often reconsider going there AT ALL. Which then means I’m not playing the game, I’m logging off to do something else.
I also already get on pay taxis and do something else. Like tab out or even walking away completely. I played vanilla. I’m done with it taking 15min just to GET somewhere. Once I’ve been there and back umpteen zillion times, I should have a portal available.
I play a mage. I have played said mage since almost the beginning of the game. The current portal rooms don’t break any class fantasy for me. I can still portal from anywhere at all. I’ll even add a so far unspoken (that I’ve seen) opinion which is: I really do NOT want people constantly begging me for ports again. It’s obnoxious and annoying. I have been very super happy for non-mages to have stationary portals available to them and thus they leave me alone.
I’m probably in a minority here, but I think there are far too many portals in the game. I liked it more back in the day when being a mage or engineer, or keeping some handy items around helped you travel quickly if you knew what you were doing.