Stop removing portals

Community General Discussion
1207

What does this even mean? ‘What content’ - well, they’re doing CoT content, obviously… Farming mounts or transmog, you know, in all the instances that you get to from CoT…

No offense Bornakk, and maybe it’s just because it’s in text, but your replies come across as really passive aggressive - full of questions, many of which the answer to is really obvious. It feels like you think you’re talking to children, the way you write. And then when people answer, you ask more questions in a manner that feels like you are being deliberately obtuse and missing the point.

As many people have said, these decisions will just make older areas/cities more dead, because people will not have a reason to go there. What’s the response to this criticism? Oh, there’s no response, because you can’t possibly argue that it will make those areas more alive.

The decision goes against what you guys are claiming you want for the game, and yet you don’t engage with that point at all (despite it being brought up numerous times), just ask bizarre and frankly irrelevant questions about what content ppl would be doing in these areas. Why does it matter what content they’re doing there?

9 Likes
1208

You know what made the world feel more alive? The Legion pre-patch event. That felt glorious. The way you had twenty, thirty total strangers mount up at the same time. Flying around in a pack like you were part of something big. Joking about the zone announcers. Ressing strangers who had pulled too much.

I felt like I was part of a massive, multi-player game. I felt like the world was enormous and I was part of it.

You know what doesn’t feel like a living world? Waiting on the docks for a boat or a zeppelin. Putting my flying mount on auto-run and pointing it in the direction of something half a continent away. Hopping on a flight path for ten minutes. I’m not looking in game. I’ve seen most of these places before. I’m not really enthralled by the idea of watching General chat argue politics while I wait.

Most of the time when that happens, I tab out. I read articles, watch some youtube videos, mess around on my cellphone. A lot of the time, I don’t come back. Or I tab back and I’ve died to fatigue over the water. Or just tab back and the game’s logged me out.

I don’t feel immersed in a massive world. I take a second and think about if it’s worth logging back in and most of the time, I decide it really isn’t and close the game.

Beyond that, though, what I liked about travel in WoW was the shortcuts. When I was looking at a giant questline that asked me to go to a ton of different places, I loved being able to look at all my teleport options and toys and figure out what the best way to get around was. Being able to have major portals in a lot of places made that more engaging and more of a puzzle.

Like “Okay, I can use my hearthstone to get to this city and take this portal. Then, after I complete this quest, I can use my Timeless Isle trinket to get to Pandaria, buy that item from an NPC and end up in Shrine to take the portal to Silvermoon to do that. Then, I can use my garrison hearthstone, flight path to Nagrand, and use the Mirror toy to get to Outland to kill that mob. By then, my hearthstone should be back up and I can go from there to Uldum and then use my guild cape to get back to Orgrimmar…”

That was fun. I feel more engaged in travel when planning my routes is an actual activity.

15 Likes
1209

I was excited about the new portal room until they started removing portals and now I’m just seriously annoyed.

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1210

That was indeed awesome. You had huge large groups contributing. Yes, there were bad eggs, but there will always be bad eggs. But overall, it was a blast.

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1211

The blue post here is the perfect example of why this game is in the toilet. Blue speaking for everyone, telling us what we like and want. The stupidity of Blizz is just too much. Especially when this thought process is applied across the board, pruning, GCD, removal of PvP gear, the stupid list never stops with Bkizz these days. I’ve never in my life seen a developing staff completely gut fun at ever opportunity they have.

9 Likes
1212

All this is doing is punishing people who DO actively travel somewhere.

You know what’s convenient? Raid finder/dungeon finder and sitting wherever in the world, porting into the content, and then right back out.

But I spend 0 time doing that and all my time traveling to old content I loved and farming it for mogs/pets/mounts and now it feels like you want to punish me more for choosing to travel in the world you want to feel big!

How about this, take away every gottamn kittening portal you like, put a portal hub in the capital faction cities…do whatever you want to make my old rep portal items and the like useless…

And give me the ability to solo queue into old content dungeons/raids to farm from a drop down menu. You guys seem to love those, should be much easier than trying to shuffle portals and decide what to keep and what to give the axe!

Right click to go to level 70 Kara? Thanks! Right click to go to Heart of Fear? Tempest Keep? Awesome! Emerald Nightmare? Sure! Want to portal into an instance to kill the world bosses in MoP? Here’s a quick link right click to every one of them!

Since we’re just going by time played as the only worthwhile metric, how about we give mages cooldowns on their ports! Don’t want people skipping content and all that beautiful scenery and easily getting themselves or friends somewhere, now do we! That would affect ~mY mEtRiCz~!

1 Like
1213

I appreciate the intent but I actually feel the opposite. It suddenly feels like I’m being smothered, like my desire to keep living in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms is somehow actively pinching my ability to play. With all due respect too the time and care that went into this decision, there’s no reason for Pandaria’s Vale locations to suddenly not have links to their allies.

5 Likes
1214

I don’t mind the in-town consolidation of “everything from Org/SW is in one spot now” - that’s great!

The world “seeming big” as the blue post says is NOT what I need for this game to feel fun and worth playing. I don’t like the manipulation of trying to make cities seem more populated by forcing people into them. I don’t care if Shrine is empty when I pop through to run ToT.

What I like about this game is playing alts. Making it harder for me to get them around and take longer for them to get to places to do things is not fun. It is not immersive. It is annoying.

When I have a set amount of time in a day, I want to maximize my “doing things” and not my “trying to get to the place to do things”. Adding weights to my ankles and making it a slog doesn’t make it fun, it makes me not want to bother logging in because I won’t have enough time to do anything.

5 Likes
1215

I don’t know where this game is heading but with every change it is getting worst , trying to shove down our throat all their crap supposedly great for us and the game makes me sick .After the mess they made with professions anything is possible , doesn’t take a brainer making $15 millions to see how the game is in an awful state

3 Likes
1216

I openly admit on my Horde characters, sometimes I deliberately catch the zep from Org to Thunderbluff. This is because it feels more real than transport that leads to a loading screen, see if I were to get on an airplane in real life, I wouldn’t get a loading screen and appear in another city in 5 seconds I would have to endure the flight.

1217

I don’t mind changes, providing they’re for a good reason and don’t disadvantage players for the sake of it.

Removing portals to make the world seem bigger? No, it doesn’t. As many before me have said; it just makes it take longer to get anywhere which puts people off, greatly. It’s not like time-sinks don’t already exist in game.

I just levelled a Nightborne for the heritage gear. Not having portals to Northrend Dalaran once I was of a level to quest there just made me avoid doing any of that content altogether. I just levelled in dungeons until I was ready for Pandaria. I didn’t realise it was a permanent thing, I thought the portal was just missing because the move hadn’t been finalised. I have two more races to level for the heritage gear, I’ll be avoiding any content where I don’t have portal access.

Don’t like the idea that everyone has mage-style access? Not fair to mages? I have mages, I don’t care that other classes can use portals, it doesn’t bother me and never has. I still see people asking for portals and I’m happy to oblige, but taking away a mode of movement on this scale will makes mages a taxi service who will be pestered forever more for ports while trying to play. That may be a worst case scenario, but you can’t rule it out as a great possibility.

2 Likes
1218

Blizzard’s definition of fun isn’t the same as the rest of the universe. Remember, Ion is a lawyer, words don’t mean what we think they mean.

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1219

I am all for consolidating the portals into one-two places, but removing so many useful ones is not necessary, useful or appreciated. It does not make the world look bigger; it just means I waste more time on Reddit (or doing something else not World of Warcraft) while I wait on flight paths. I don’t play this game to sit in traffic.

5 Likes
1220

One of the ways to make Azeroth feel alive is by actually still having content added to places outside of the current expansion. That or by actually updating the old world content via leveling scaling and events to reflect that of the current state after lower level questing and by also including events that took place in the literature and by current expansion. Voicing ambient npc dialogue would help as well by nobody V.actors or by the community.

4 Likes
1221

I would tend to agree with everyone else, that having portals in multiple locations actually makes the world feel more alive, and having the world feel bigger isn’t really something that needs forced perspective to accomplish (nor is the difference in size really that noticeable, so I’d call it a null point). Also having portals to unique places in different cities is a clear bonus, as it makes all cities viable.

Generally speaking, portals only go to cities, and few capital cities are in an especially convenient location, so it’s not overly convenient to have them.

Because they’re the ones who make them, and they’re unique in that they can make them anywhere, instead of being bound to the will of the developers.

I don’t think anyone was arguing that, and feels a little bit strawman-y. Having multiple locations for fixed portals does not diminish the abilities of mages to teleport, nor does it detract from the ability of mages to make a portal in the middle of out-of-the-way endgame locations (like Argus and the upcoming 8.2 ones) to help out players.

Transmog runs. Dragon Soul’s entrance is in Caverns of Time. So is a large chunk of Cataclysm’s dungeons, as well as the Mount Hyjal raid.

Depends if you have access to Uldir or not. Even with Uldir, there’s still a decent bit of extra travel time added.

I think the latter is. I don’t think you need to keep the Dalaran Crater portal in the new portal room, but it would be nice if it spawned in Legion-Dalaran if you’re on that artifact quest; at least while leveling. It’s a lot of extra time added to an already arduously long level grind to have to travel to some of these spots the old-fashioned way.

You say this a lot, and it reflects the core problem of your argument; you’re leaning a bit on a straw man by taking ‘existing portals’ and making it ‘portals to everywhere’. Nobody is asking for instant transport ‘everywhere’. To get to Stormheim, for example, you need to still fly the old-fashioned way. To get to places in-between capital cities, you still need to spend some time using a mount or flight path.

The existing portal in Legion-Dalaran leading to Wyrmrest is a good example: it takes you to Northrend, but you still have to travel some distance to get to Ulduar, Icecrown, etc. I think there’s benefit in at least having a portal to each expansion, which seems to be the current approach, though I still argue the Caverns of Time are special.

Is the Dark Portal in past Blasted Lands going to still lead to Hellfire Peninsula? The quest flow in Outland is bad enough as is thanks to its age, having to go through Shattrath would be problematic.

12 Likes
1222

Well the thing about games like this is you should be giving players a choice. Good for you, you enjoy having your time wasted traveling the long way to complete a minor task. Don’t use the portals. Everyone else, aka the vast majority of us, would prefer to use them. So don’t deny us the choice. Forcing people to play the game YOUR way is the cause of every terrible change WoW has ever gotten.

As for making mages feel special I think it’s pretty shady to use them as a shield to justify making such a change. What makes a mage special is their mastery of ice, fire, and the arcane. If you really want them to feel special give them a unique spell to mark 3 locations anywhere in the world and then another spell to teleport them or their friends to one of those customized marked locations. Oh look… that would be actually letting players have a choice of how to play the game though. Something you guys really hate since you think giving one class a list of hand picked locations is “special”.

Like I dunno about you but when I play any RPG with a big world the exploration on foot is something I only do the first time around. Once I got these spots located on my map fast travel exists for a reason. There’s no point in retreading previously explored ground. It’s just a waste of time. The more time we’re spent wasting the less time we actually get to enjoy a game and are more likely to quit it for good.

6 Likes
1223

Why is Blizzard CONSTANTLY forcing the old content on us??? I want to be able to port AS I HAVE DONE UNTIL NOW. The game is getting worse and worse each day. No flying, no portal, no xp buff… MY GOD.

7 Likes
1224

Ahh, Blizzard!

You’ve perfected the process of taking a great, player-based idea, presenting it to the community as such, and then implementing it in such way that only serves to counteract it’s intended use.

Fun Detected
“Must limit player control. Must add RNG. Disregard Player Feedback.”

(“You think you want [portals], but you don’t.”)

14 Likes
1225

What drew people to WoW early on was the simple matter of Choice. They had lots of choices. And now Blizzard has gone full pants on head stupid and is trying to remove the very thing that MADE the game what it was.

They’re trying to remove Choice. They’ve been doing this for years, but its getting worse and worse and more and more visible.

Choice is a core aspect of any good RPG.

And you, dear blue, are supporting the REMOVAL of Choice. I at first was trying to be nice, as you’re just the messenger, but from the posts you’ve put up, its obvious you 100% support this. So I’m no longer going to be Nice to you. I’ll be Courteous, as is required, but Nice? Forget about it.

13 Likes
1226

There was nothing stopping you from slowly going place to place in the way you described. I don’t know why blizzard adds stuff, just to take it away later. You keep trying to reinvent the wheel and investing time and resources on things that no one brings up and ignore or dismiss the things that spam these forums time and time again. Just stop.

3 Likes