I’m honestly waiting for them to remove hearthstones and the flight whistle lmao
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^blue sauce
“The plan”
Hahahahahahhahahahahahahhaha
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Thanks much. This layout’s kind of a nightmare to navigate for me, still.
Though I’m trying not to be totally pessimistic, I can absolutely see quest flags for these “temporary portals” going awry quick.
We’ve had to deal with very similar bugs with the Cataclysm portals since… Legion launch now, I think?
…just why even remove the flippin’ things to start with, seriously
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Now, I’m not trying to say that they’re making all the right choices, don’t get me wrong.
I’m simply saying that it’s a lot more complicated than “they just don’t get it”. I think they do get it, but they’re stuck between finance and players, and unfortunately finance has a lot more sway than we do.
If something isn’t profitable, finance will complain and eventually start to pull funding. Blizzard has no say in that, and ignoring their rhetoric will only hurt the product even more than tweaking the product in the first place.
Remember: Investors don’t necessarily care what product your peddling (WoW), as long as it makes money. If you need to make a new product and abandon the old one for the most part, so be it. To investors, as long as Blizzard can make more money by doing X, Y, or Z, they don’t care what happens to the individual player.
I suspect, whole heartedly, that if Blizzard had a new game that investors and finance were certain (dead certain) could not only outperform WoW by 200%, but also do so within a year, they’d probably tell Blizzard to “maintenance mode WoW, now”.
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Classic was two continents worth of content and while large is much smaller than the present game. There have been 7 expansions worth of content added since then.
I am looking forward to Classic and still think this is a poorly thought out change.
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if it wasn’t a problem on having portals where you can use them why remove them
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I will. People make this comment often but at least for me I see retail and classic as two different games that I have two different expectations for. I won’t be taking my retail expectations to classic nor would I have my classic expectations in retail.
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In general, the CoT portal is extremely handy as it is filled to bursting with raids and dungeons that have tmog, pets, and mounts players are actively still collecting. Having a bronze drake NPC in the portal rooms offering players a teleport outside seems like a good compromise.
The Dalaran Crater portal though, that is one of the only reliable ways an alliance character has to reach the upper half of Eastern Kingdoms. It’s like a 7 minute flight to reach that area. That is beyond unreasonable, and we can’t even claim sight seeing as it mostly travels over water. The only compromise I can even see in this instance would be for alliance to have a Wildhammer Dwarf mage npc available in portal rooms who offers a teleport to the Hinterlands?
As mentioned prior though, I think all faction cities (even the ‘destroyed’ ones) should be getting a portal room of their own. Let each city have a portal to each other faction city, and all the portals that are currently on display in SW/Orgs. Keep the zepplins and boats running as it will be our choice on how we get about.
I’m all for a method involved with unlocking new portals, like exalted with Keepers of Time to unlock (account wide!) the aforementioned bronze drake NPC to port you to CoT. But within reason, all the major expansion cities should be available within these portal rooms, no matter the rep, and just requires you to be a certain level to finally take them.
I have personally walked from Silvermoon to Booty Bay, it took a little over four hours. It was my choice to do so, just like how I walked from Orgrimmar to Silithus the night before BfA launched. Again, my choice, as it should be.
The portals are more for the sake of people with several toons trying to get that mount drop off an old dungeon/raid that’s 10+ minutes away by flight path, and those who only have very limited play time and just want to go jump through the blasted lands portal, fly to Molten Core and try to get that last piece of their transmog before they have to go make dinner for their kids or get to sleep so they can get up for work in the morning.
Adding 3 minutes here, 7 minutes there to player’s travel times does nobody any favors. Removing those portals benefited nobody. All this accomplishes is inconveniencing paying customers play time.
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When you intentionally inconvenience people and tell them its better… it isn’t!
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Blizzard is Dr Emmett Brown:
”Portals? Where we’re going we don’t need portals…”
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But the money is tied to subs or game time purchased, not in time spent logged in. Whether I log in once a month or 2 hours every day for a month, they get the same amount of money. I liked the game better when the focus seemed to be on getting and maintaining subs rather than increasing time played metrics.
It wouldn’t necessarily require two years or reinventing the game. Based on replies in this thread, a simple way to start would be to put back the Pandaria portals, leave the other portals alone and add the portal hubs in SW and Org that also have a complete set of portals. Changes don’t need to be major for folks to start seeing a bit of hope at the end of the tunnel. Little things add up to big things.
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Which will work great as soon as the person on the quest asks their friend: “Hey, can you give me a hand with…” and the friend isn’t interested in traveling forever to get there.
This non-solution reeks of the same problems people had with quests (most of them vanilla, but at least one in Wrath) that would only teleport the people on the quest to locations otherwise inaccessible. No one could get help for those quests because they could never find someone else both willing to help and also on the same quest.
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Once again Blizzard comes up with a solution in search of a problem.
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Now we need a Dalorian (sp?) time machine mount.
Blizz is all about finding new and more annoying time sinks.
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Or a game worth playing. I log in to raid… and that’s it.
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Time played shows “investment”. There’s a huge discrepancy between a player who logs in daily for 2 hours and a player who logs in sporadically for short periods of time.
One is likely to keep playing, even if they’re not having as much fun as they could, but the other appears to already be dwindling out. Investors see the first as guaranteed money, and the second as “don’t count that beyond this month”.
It’s the whole concept between time-played. It’s about trying to dig deeper and see the future of money by assessing the actual engagement levels with content now.
I get it, too. If I have two cats, and one is eating regularly, doing the things it normally does (like playing with stuff, etc), I tend to think the cat is OK. If the other cat isn’t eating much, stopped playing with it’s toys, and otherwise seems to sit in one spot not doing much, I take it to the vet.
Except, in this case, the cat spits out money, too. So… I’d consider the healthy cat to be a safe source of money, but the sick cat might be on it’s last legs.
(Of course, in practice, you should take the cat to the vet anyway, because it’s a living animal. Just pretend these are simulacrum of cats, without real ethics for their lives.)
To be fair, I meant more like… overall. Improving class design, reworking end game world content, innovating M+, raids, and the gear cycle, etc.
Yes, this particular issue in this thread is readily resolved fairly easily. There are also lots of small things that could be resolved fairly easily. There are also many fundamental things that would take a great deal of time to pull together.
So when I said “two years” I was thinking the development cycle of completely reworking the end game experience, classes, and how they define monetary value of player engagement. I was trying to speak broadly, beyond just this one issue.
In what world does bottlenecking players ever do anything to open up the world. Did you guys learn nothing from the launch of WoD? More portals equal more people using other cities.
Why aren’t there portal rooms with voidstorage, auction houses and barbershops and the like in each capital city?
You want us to be out in the world then make it possible.
One more bad change that just proves how out of touch Blizzard is with the player base.
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Less portals means less zones that I am willing to travel to and do whatever outdated content is there. The love is in the air dailies for example. I would not have done them a single time without the dalaran crater portal. Old raids in caverns of time, probably not gonna bother going to do those any time soon. So many areas that I will just no longer think about going to.
Sure, some people want less portals, and thats fine. Tie the portals to a specific quest for each one. People who don’t want them don’t have to do those quests. I personally want more portals, not less. Make a separate alcove for each expansion in the portal room, with a specific portal to each zone of that expansion. On top of that, make the zone quest and exploration achievements required to get each portal quest. I have played this game so much (300+ days on this toon alone, not to mention my dozen or so alts) that I have explored every nook and cranny of every single zone. I do not need the world to feel bigger by increasing travel time.
The world does not feel bigger when it is less convenient to get around, it feels smaller because I am not going to bother going out to half of it because getting to it will be a massive waste of my time.
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