Stop removing portals

Community General Discussion
1126

Probably the same crew who has been defecating all over the idea of player controlled flying.

Sorry, but planes have not made Earth feel like a smaller place (as an example). I’ve gone on planes, and it has made me realize just how HUGE planet Earth really is. Same with flying in game, until Blizzard started actually creating SMALLER zones.

In short, by removing portals, restricting flying, and other QoL means of mobility, they’re trying to HIDE the fact the worlds they’re creating ARE indeed a smaller place.

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1127

With regard to Caverns of Time, I think there’s some underestimation on how much effort is too much here. It really is just a game. And in any single player game, I wouldn’t have to take literal years to earn a reward, but alas, there’s that Blazing Drake keeping me from an Emerald.

So I suffer through the spine fight as many times as I can stand. But that’s only when I’m feeling up to trying my luck in the first place.

Now, I’m told that I have to spend extra time just to arrive at the place where I’m already feeling disheartened and awful about the time I’ve spent farming? Now I have to spend MORE time on this one task that I don’t find rewarding to begin with?

That’s not super fun. It just makes me want to give up and play a single player game where I know exactly what I can do in a certain amount of time, and not waste part of my day on a glorified loading screen. At least getting to Dragon Soul was super quick, that’s literally the best part of that farm and now it’s being taken away.

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1128

Hey man calm down, our “Mission” table sends our “Followers” to do those quests for us, because by blizzard standards we’re too stupid to do it ourselves.

1129

No, the world is big with or without portals. GW2 lets your teleport almost anywhere on the map, yet the world still feels huge. Although I love flying, flying is more of a detriment towards making the world feel smaller. Also make bigger worlds if you want the world to feel bigger, Legion and BFA both gave us a pitiful amount of land mass to explore.

No.

See, the world didn’t need portals when there was only one expansion. Now that there’s over half a dozen, we need an ability to travel to places we want to quickly. It isn’t immersive or interesting as a max level, being forced to take a boat to get to Northrend for the 200th time.

Some of these spots are actually way out of the way, like old Dalaran or the Caverns of Time. Or getting back to Stormwind/Org from Outland as a low level (why is the Hellfire portal being removed, why?).

But a lot of these aren’t necessarily “difficult” just more so just far enough to not be bothered to run to. There is an illusion of saving tons of time when you can just blip somewhere. Sure, I can take the portal to Twilight Highlands, AFK fly to Kharazan, or I can just go to the Kharazan portal. It entices me to explore more because the feel of it being easier.

For example, the love is in the air event is going to be painful next year if these portals are actually removed. Enough so where I don’t think I’ll be participating. I had a good routine going down where I would use the HFP portal to get between cities much quicker. Going from Org -> Dal -> City -> HFP -> Org repeat. Made the dailies quick and easy, had me playing the game more than I usually would be.

Now if that option was removed, I wouldn’t feel enticed to do any of it.

Blizzard, I am pleading with you. Please stop taking away player options. I understand that your dev team thinks that they’re oh-so-above all of us plebian players, but trust us sometimes, we may suck at a lot of things, but we’re incredible at calling out things that aren’t fun. And one of the worst things you can do to a playerbase or just a person in general is take away their agency. Please stop this.

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1130

I genuinely can’t recall the last time I used a flight path and actually watched my screen. I always tab out or step up from my PC to do something in the meantime. It doesn’t fill me with nostalgia, I’ve already played enough of this game to be disenchanted with the zones I’ve seen hundreds of times before. Seems absolutely pointless beyond forcing us to clock more time into the game.

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1131

I used to meme about Blizzard actively making changes that would cause players to quit, but now it seems like Blizzard is actively making changes that will cause players to quit.

If you wanted to make the world ‘feel bigger’, make a bigger world. All this is doing is adding tedium for collectors.

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1132

No, YOU are stirring up drama. Don’t accuse the PAYING CUSTOMER of causing a problem.
Not everyone who posts in a thread like this to express sympathy for the various complaints voiced in it NEEDS to type exactly the same points they agree with completely.

It’s a ‘here here’ kind of post, obviously. YOU need to stop stirring up drama and trying to provoke or belittle any of us.

It’s really annoying how "MVP"s seem to earn their status by attacking legitimate customer concerns as “unreasonable” or “inflammatory.”

You want to be helpful? How do we report MVPs and/or Blues for misconduct against the customer base?

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1133

If the old world had real and engaging content that even higher level characters could engage in you could honestly ask that question and I’d be willing to discuss it. However, the old world does NOT have such content. As a result, the removal of portals is simply punishing the folks who enjoy collecting.

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1134

Being able to reach content in a timely manner is core to being able to engage with that content. It currently takes around 20 minutes to get to Molten Core from Great Seal. Ulduar can be 10-15 minutes. It can easily take around 30 minutes to run an old raid.

If someone has an hour spare, they can login, and run an old raid. By disrupting the travel patterns with the removal of portals, that content is no longer an option for the use of that time. You are removing the engagement capability of old content by making it take too long to get there.

There is also the context of the current expansion. Loss of direct portals to Undercity and Darnassus have extended travel time in the old world. The continued delay of flight has extended travel time in current content. We’re spending less and less time in game engaging with content, and more and more time, just sitting, on flight paths. There is a severe problem with engagement this expansion, and this will only make it even worse.

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1135

Oh and I’m not a big time collector. So don’t think its a matter of bias. I mean, I’ve been meaning to go back and do some old raids for the past month. I just haven’t had the energy. I do it sporadically. I know some folks who do these runs every week. I just don’t have the energy.

However, Collectors are a type of player in WoW and they’re not a small group of players either. You shouldn’t be actively trying to punish them and make what they enjoy harder than it already is.

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1136

For how I personally play and enjoy games, I like when I feel like I need to travel for a few minutes to get somewhere. For me, it is more rewarding when I complete the task that way and I wouldn’t want to be able to get everywhere instantly but there is a good medium to find (but continuing to pile up various teleporting items feels strange).

Bornakk,

I feel like there’s a pattern with your replies about changes that the community is not happy with. These changes are decided internally at Blizzard and THEN you come out and ask us endless questions to understand “how you like to play the game”.

How about in the future you come out and say “we have this planned, what y’all think?” instead of trying to justify changes right before they go live? I know this is still on the PTR and CAN be changed, but question is will it?

This change, again, looks to be another measure of keeping us logged in longer for OLD CONTENT that we want to do with our alts that we’ve seen/done before many times over. It’s not the fact that we don’t appreciate “how big the world is”. That’s fine when you’re consuming new content on your first, second or third toon. But content that’s YEARS old we would like to get to it quickly.

If I want to enjoy The Barrens, or Thousand Needles and need to trek for 10 or 20 minutes to get there, trust me I will do that.

I find it especially interesting that you seem to agree with all the QoL changes (the negative ones) that the community doesn’t like and then we get grilled on why it should be different. Umm… like I said earlier why didn’t we get grilled before the changes were announced or implemented? Things that have been in place for YEARS that we’re used to… just to shake them up and make things worse? I honestly don’t get it. It seems like Blizzard is making the changes for the sake of making changes and pretend “we’re doing stuff, shuffling around for different content”.

Not trying to bash you, I think we’re just trying to understand things that no one can make sense of and then the CMs saying “go explore!.. the stuff you’ve already explored… but we’re gonna make it harder so you’re logged in longer and the investors are happy with /played hours”.

:thinking::thinking::thinking:

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1137

When I travel long distances on flight paths or by pointing my flying mount in a direction and hitting autorun, I don’t reminisce or enjoy the view. I tab out. I turn my attention to my laptop, or my phone, or my Switch, and often times my character winds up AFK for 30-40 minutes at the end of the flight path, because whatever it is that I was doing while on the flight path turned out to be more entertaining than World of Warcraft.

When I’m playing WoW, I don’t want to spend time traveling. I view traveling places as pointless busywork. The scenery is nice to look at the first few times, but when you’ve flown to Onyxia’s Lair or Firelands or ICC or any of the other places I farm semi-regularly as often as I have, the scenery stops being entertaining or enjoyable.

Now, when I’m actually in the instance and playing the content, I’m having a blast. I like having the ability to walk through the instance at my own pace and collect old appearances to expand my options for upcoming Trial of Style competitions (which we all know is the REAL endgame). I just don’t like how convoluted it sometimes is to get to those old instances, and I definitely don’t like how that process is going to become even more convoluted if the current portal “adjustment” goes through as is.

I would have a much easier time convincing myself to do transmog runs if it didn’t take so long to get to and from the instances. I would be playing the game more if traveling places took less time.

(I find it worth mentioning that I do have a mage at 120. That doesn’t change the part where there are three other armor types to farm and none of them are farmable on a class with teleports to everywhere.)

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1138

There are games I love to death but I could never complete them because the game makes me waste so much time doing certain things.

One of the things I’ve noticed players as a whole (regardless of the game) seem to be able to agree upon is the idea that wasting our time is a bad thing.

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1139

Pretty much this.

One might reason from this post, and all those who have said the same thing, that the best way to have people stay with the game is have them constantly engaged. Like perhaps letting them get to their destination much faster and not letting them get bored enough to tab out!

Blizz, are you thinking with portals?

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1140

This is part of a propaganda effort to convince us that what’s white is black, and that the world feels wondrously large if we’re trapped in our capital cities because the places we’d rather go to are so annoying to get to we’ve just decided to tab out and surf the internet.

And guess what? If we do that they won, because they report that as time played. It’s to their own advantage to annoy people so much they afk more and play less.

Have you never noticed that to justify some of these incredibly unpopular decisisions they’ve made in the past few years they’ve come up with a long list of justifications that, when examined, make no sense?

What, did you think they would go back to reporting subscriber numbers?

HAHAHAHAHAHA…

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1141

I do not understand the need for changes like this. Those portals were there for 2+ years and the game worked just fine. Why’s it suddenly an issue now? Why are you guys creating issues where there previously were none? Do you want the playerbase to be upset?

How does Blizzard honestly benefit from removing the portals? Is the couple extra minutes a week of flight time to boost play time really worth all the backlash? I can’t imagine it possibly could be.

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1142

Is this the same thought process behind the horid design of Dazar? Needing a flight path to check mission table, m+ cache, pvp cache, tmog… ect this is just another time gate. The world isnt just vanilla…

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1143

I want to upvote this comment but I’m all out of likes for the day. I’ll just do this instead: :+1:

People can, and do, enjoy different aspects of the game at different times. The devs need to stop trying to force players onto their little one-way track. The reason WoW became so popular was the flexibility it offered. There was something for everyone. Now it feels more and more like the game is being winnowed down to just one thing–and we’re being told, “You’re gonna like it even if we’ve got to cram it down your throat!”

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1144

Why not just have one big portal in each major city that, when clicking it, gives you a list of places that it can teleport you to. Like Caverns of Time, Northrend Dal, Legion Dal, etc. It’s a simplified, yet still convenient portal system.

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1145

I started playing my Hordie again and man … I feel bad for them. Boralus is lovely in comparison, all the amenities you need are easily reached and their locations make sense.

Dazar’alor feels like someone decided they hated the Horde and wanted them to suffer.

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