Stop removing portals

Community General Discussion
1782

Hi Bornakk. I think that getting rid of portals is completely spiteful. You know what’s in Caverns of Time? Lots of dungeons and several old raids that are now a pain in the backside to get to.

I main a DK and its already a pain to get to places like Strat when I was still going for rivendares thanks to having the old death knight hub portal removed for some dumb completely arbitrary reason.

You know what I’m doing right now? Nothing but my but character is in the other room on a long flight path. Thats immersion or whatever the buzz word is the dev team is using now.

That’s what lots of us do when we ‘travel.’ We go poop or watching something on our other monitor or alt tab.

There is nothing wrong with leaving legion portals where they are. There was nothing wrong with leaving the portals in old dal and the golden pagoda.

There is something wrong with these backwards decisions. I can’t imagine the player base wants this. The portal room sounded cool when it was announced at blizz con. Now it just sounds stupid and misguided by out of touch devs. If they actually played the game decisions like this wouldn’t even get out of initial discussions.

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1783

In all honesty, I do not see why the portals in Dalaran cannot remain in tandem with the ones being put in Stormwind/Org. I understand the IDEA of why they would be removed, but I believe giving players a choice on where they want to go in all aspects is a good one. What if someone would prefer to stay in Dalaran because its nostalgic to them? What if they just like it better than one of the capital cities?

I know personally, if Darnassus had a portal room and hadn’t been burnt down I would have made that my permanent home when playing alliance without a second thought as I had much preferred that city to the human capital entirely. Like wise I would prefer to use Dalaran over Stormwind as well. I have nothing AGAINST the human city, its just those two (SW/Org) are used for LITERALLY everything, and we have no reason to ever even LOOK at the other capitals which is a shame.

I also believe that is the reason that Darn/UC were destroyed as a “story element” was to reduce the amount of unused cities. I would much rather have them used for other things than have them destroyed because everything new/useful/convenient/important is stuffed instantly into the same two cities repeatedly.

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1784

It doesn’t matter how you guys word it at Blizz… it’s stupid. Plain stupid. It’s not a ‘new feature,’ when stuff gets ripped out for no reason. It’s plain dumb. You guys can keep making this game more ridiculous. I’m bringing my money elsewhere. I’m done - tell your blizz HQ people that.

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1786

I thought this was a farce. Imagine creating a vast world, over a decade in the making, and removing easy access to the old world. I need Caverns of Time for old raids; Dragon Soul & Hyjal. I need Caverns of Time to start collecting Candy Buckets and Coins easier to collect new toys and transmog. Why remove the portals? Does it hurt the game in such a significant way for its removal? Why remove so many quality of life items every expansion? Legion is over but so is Cataclysm and those portals in Stormwind still remain even years later. Why cut a convenience for the players? The players that still are subbed, paying 15 dollars a month, for you to treat our complaints with sarcasm and contempt. I never post on the forums, even though I have played since the end of Burning Crusade but the Blue Post reply made me shocked. As someone who works in a large business with a large PR firm, if someone made the comments the Blue Poster made, they would be fired.

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1788

I don’t know how centralizing all the major fast travel options in two cities (one for each faction) while getting rid of previous portals makes the word “feel bigger.” If anything, putting everything in one location at the expense of others makes it feel smaller to me.

Also, the whole “people need time to get used to change” thing is quite frankly insulting. This isn’t change for the better, and as it turns out, people don’t like it when you take away options they previously had for completely arbitrary reasons. If anything this comes off like the attempted justification for not having flying whatsoever in WoD and we know how well that went over with the playerbase.

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1789

Bornakk confirmed as a Yesmen.

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1790

Maybe just maybe don’t reply dumb stuff? I mean he/she couldn’t have soundedmore corporate activion than that. There is no logic to the portal changes apart from making/forcing players to take a longer time to get to places. period.

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1791

These changes are bad! Fewer portals make the world seem SMALLER because I would have to see the same city over and over again, rather than using portals in many different expansions and places.

I don’t like this at all. All of my characters had their hearths set at the Shrines of both factions in MoP. It is difficult to find mages to port me everywhere during holiday events, so what makes you think that mages will be lining up to port people to various places now?

This was done to increase time played yet again. Making it take longer to get to places - especially the Caverns of Time - just pads that metric that many think is all y’all care about now. To heck with the non-mage players, right?

At least I can teleport any time and anywhere I want in FFXIV, as long as I have the gil for it. Oh right, I got 99 tickets for using their Recruit a Friend program, so I’m still traveling for free and loving it.

Stop removing and destroying the old WoW content. It’s beyond obvious now that y’all hate everything that came before Ion H. took over, so MoP and older. That old content was what made WoW so successful, and you should be building on it - not constantly removing it. This is the third expansion in a row now where you’re removing things or changing/nerfing things from the previous expansions to WoD. Destroying the replayability of the old content was one of the major reasons I unsubbed, after the removal of Ranged Survival, removal of pvp vendors, gutting of my hunter otherwise, making everything forced personal loot or Legacy Loot Mode, changing my hunter pets’ roles, abilities, and appearances, time-gating flight with two Pathfinders, and removing the ability of high level players to help low level players without decimating their xp.

Every time I come back to these forums, the devs have done even more to destroy the game. I just can’t understand why.

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1792

Wrong, it is just one of the thousand cuts that makes you want to quit playing the game.

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1793

Mornin’. Looks like we had a slight detour.
Here’s the thing gens: Retail is Retail, Classic is Classic. I don’t want Retail features to be stuffed into Classic, and likewise, I don’t want Classic to be forced onto Retail.
But that’s beside the point. We’re talking about unwarranted removals of conveniences we’ve had, in some cases, for over a decade.

“But it’s not current content” isn’t seeing the big picture. Would you believe there are actually people who play alts, let alone new players to the game?
We don’t fit into one shiny box on how we consume the game we’re paying to play.

As for immersion, Ctrl+F “Player Agency”. It’s an incredibly important aspect to any game, especially those with prominent online features.

Finally the point regarding “it’s just minutes though”. Well, yes. For one character. Considering altoholics and the general playerbase who do legacy content (despite what Ion might claim), think about it this way:
Cumulative time stacks up quick.

It’s why people complain about a 10c rise on the price of bread. Does it affect you, personally? It might if you make sandwiches every day for work.
Does it affect everyone else? Absolutely. The Bread Company™ will make millions more despite the upset.

But that’s a “living essential” versus entertainment. It’d be like adding minutes of advertisements on your stream, to a cumulative of hours of wasted time when you’re just trying to binge The Office for the third time. You’ve seen it before, but you want to get to the good parts again. Any extra roadblocks are unnecessary for a product you’ve paid for.

And that’s ultimately the point. While it’s only minutes for the shortterm, all my runs of BWL, of DS, of HoF, Kara, all those World Bosses?
I’m gonna wind up wasting hours upon hours through my alts alt-tabbing while I wait for auto-flight to catch up. At the very least I didn’t actually have to tab before, since the flights were about ~1 minute given the accessibility.

TL;DR:
Don’t remove what we’ve had since forever, it’s what we learned from WoD.
Yes, the time spent across the entire platform is going to be huge for end metrics. I’m not big on this whole idea that that’s somehow their endgame with this, but it’s true.

11 Likes
1794

Thank you. I was about to type something like this too. Glad to see someone else is on the same page.
This is a ridiculous change. We have all learned where the portals are and schedule our old content runs depending on our routes. Changing this is just dumb and useless, other than REALLY enjoying to piss off the player base that pays your salaries.

3 Likes
1795

Losing things like portals really doesn’t make the world feel “alive” in any way I can figure out.

The world does feel big as you explore it with limited options. That’s fine. But as you progress… you don’t need that feeling any more. You want to feel like you progress in other ways too, like shortcuts. Faster travel. Going the same old routes the same old way is not interesting or fun. When I use a taxi… well, I do it so I can alt-tab out.

I recently did the Lunar Festival on a bunch of characters. I knew each time I went in that it was going to be a long haul - and that’s with breaking it up into chunks followed by a hearth to Legion Dalaran and subsequent use of multiple portals to get where I needed to go.

I gave up on so many things in WoD because of being stuck on the ground for so much longer, as it was. I’d think about what I wanted to do, realize how much trouble it would be to get where I needed to go… and just give up and log out. Travel time just meant so much less I could get done in any given game session.

It is, at base, about feeling productive in your time, and it applies IRL as well as in-game. When I need to go somewhere nearby, I may rarely choose to walk, but most of the time I will drive because I’ve got other things to do with my time. Could I just teleport there and back, it would be even better for me. And IRL if I need to go a longer distance, I’ll take a plane… I’d rather go by train, or maybe by car, but I want the most time at the destination as I can get, and planes get you there fastest.

TL;DR: I want more gameplay time. Travel after exploration, or with limited time, is about as fun as waiting for the game to load.

4 Likes
1796

Adding travel time just makes you realize how much old content there is that is no longer used. It doesn’t add to current content.

I am confused on how taking a 10 minute fight path does anything to immerse you in the game when you are probably just going to get up and use the bathroom.

Bathroom breaks are good and all, but not for immersion.

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1797

While I think it’s fine to have portal hubs in faction capitals, I don’t like the removal from a sanctuary Dalaran, where one could interact with opposite faction players without having to get in a fight.

Specifically, Dal was always a great place to do some of the holiday achieves because you could usually find the race/class combos on which you needed to put pumpkins/flowers/snowflakes/etc. I almost feel like the pushing of players into faction cities was a deliberate move to make things like this harder (and a lame attempt to push the faction divide).

6 Likes
1798

Blizzard: “we want the players to immerse themselves in our content”

Player: “ok so I will go to Dragon Soul to try to get the mount from there, I’m happy there’s a portal to go there fast”

Blizzard: “NO THIS IS NOT HOW YOU IMMERSE. /removes portal”

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1799

Reminds me of the the people whining about No-Flying.

Hate to be the one to tell you this, but the flight fiasco is contributing to BFAs player exodus.

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1800

You can flip through the whole world portal-to-portal in under 3 minutes. That’s just silly in an MMO.

FF14 is managing fine, thank you…actually FF14 is GROWING. Their aethenet system is a godsend.

One click = there.

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1801

If that is the problem then add MORE portals and Portal Sickness.

1802

Downloading the game now. I’m so tired of blizzard deciding what my fun time is supposed to be. And this condescending blue guy here looking down on us is my last straw.

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1803

Guild Wars 2 and Elder Scrolls online are still kicking, I’d like to add, and they have frankly ridiculous levels of accessibility with portals even between minor questing hubs!

And I’ll tell you huwhat, that’s a boon for me as a roleplayer and as a new player to the former. Being able to go where I’d like and just look around in my own time, others doing the same, then simply coming back when you want to even after you’ve finished it for whatever extra it offers.

2 Likes