I vaguely recall Blizz even touting the portal rooms as expandable for when more portals need to be added, so they cant even pretend like lack of space is the reason.
13 Likes
haha you dug your own grave with this reply.
Azeroth hasn’t felt alive since there was no flying mounts and no portals to anywhere. The portals in Dalaran were put there specifically to help with all the quests in the zones the portals led to–like artifact quests–the main point of the entire legion expansion. fkcu man I wonder if any of these Devs or CMs even play the game they’re working on.
19 Likes
I think the world feels bigger when you go to WORLD CAPITALS and they aren’t ghost towns. Remember in vanilla when you got around by traveling for hours. Not so fun. And to compare what existed to the versatility that mages have to transport is silly. But hey, more time traveling means more time in game on current content, and less time having to develop new content right? But hey, I get it, shareholders are key, but stop making it so dam inconvenient. (See also why the hell we wait for wait for flying threads)
6 Likes
I see where you’re coming from. Working hard to sell those boosts to levelers who can’t get from point A to point B, eh?
6 Likes
Go log onto PTR, they’re gone.
2 Likes
Actually, it makes the world feel closed off. I know I am not the only one who, depending on what it is, thinks, “You know, I would love to go do <insert something in a remote area, like a dungeon> for , but it would take me like 15 minutes of flying and boats to get there. Screw that.”
Plus, I LOVE the idea of trying to figure out the fastest route. As an Alliance Paladin, I like knowing that if I want to quickly get to Sethrakk to try for the Raven Mount and I was in, say, Stormsong Valley, I could Hearth to Boralis, take the portal to Stormwind, to go to Dalaran, to go to the MoP Shrine to port to Shattrath and fly down. Heck of a lot better than having to go to Stormwind, take a portal to Hellfire and then fly.
I feels like I know the world better by knowing the different paths to get through the world in the fastest route possible.
But even in general, fewer options is rarely better than more options.
16 Likes
I’m sure a bunch of people alt tabbed flying over empty zones will make the world feel sooooo alive.
11 Likes
There’s a fine line between “maybe I’ll go do this” and “why bother?” and removing portals moves a lot of that content into the “why bother?” category. If too much convenience is removed such as portals then I have no issue finding something else to do.
I don’t want the world to feel larger it just takes longer to get places which leads to me doing less to the point where I don’t feel like logging in. It’s death by 1000 cuts and this is one of those cuts.
24 Likes
IMO, each city should have portals to each other city. Having a major port hub to areas out side of each racial faction city would have made more sense.
For example, Stormwind/Orgrimar has the portal hub that takes you to major non-faction specific places like CoT, Karazan, Dalaran Crater, etc. in addition to a portal to each faction racial city and each major faction hub for the various expansions (Shatrath, Northrend Dalaran, Vale, Ashran, Broken Isles, Zandalar/Boralus)
Then, each faction racial city has a portal to each other racial faction city, but not the major faction hubs for the various expansions or non-faction specific places.
Finally mages get portals/teleports to each racail faction city and also to unique and obscure or out of the way locations that aren’t easily accessible by means other than standard travel (boats, flying, walking).
THAT would have made so much more sense and actually streamlined and provided a QoL update for the portal system… not this garbage of removing things to make it more difficult to get around.
Seriously, sometimes it seems like Blizzard really doesn’t think things through, or they make changes to show they are in “control”… either that or all the tinfoil hat theories on how all Blizzard cares about is “time played” are actually true…
13 Likes
My initial response is that this is absurd to remove all of these portals after all this time for what feels like nothing more than to make us slow down to spend even more time playing the game… but there are various items, toys, etc in the game that can get you pretty close to where most of the portals already take you.
I dislike the change, but I’m ready for the change I guess.
No, it feels smaller because I end up just not bothering with old raid mount/tmog runs. I don’t have as much time to play WoW as I used to, and lengthening travel time means I spend less time actually playing the fun part of the game.
At first I was surprised to see this because like most other people I had assumed the portal room was congregating the portals in a single location to make it more convenient, but I guess it’s pretty par for BFA’s course for it to actually be a watering down of a feature and a blue acting coy about it.
31 Likes
No flying, less portals - does NOT make the world feel alive or bigger, stop making this game less convenient. If you’re going to screw us over like this, at least give us a way back to the portal room from every destination. Add the teleport cloaks to the general spell list instead of having to carry them around in our bags.
10 Likes
So, is waiting for your hearth to come off cooldown considered “content” now?
They did this to force players to take much more time leveling their alts, but also to make travel to old zones so inconvenient that they would have no choice but to stop doing old content and become obedient little mythic raiders and key spammers.
And they did it knowing full well they were going to be driving a lot of people from the game.
But I’m sure it will all be okay when wow is ported to mobile and the current live version is removed without notice. You guys have phones, don’t you?
15 Likes
Hold up one minute- one of the only reasons to go to pandaria is to farm raids for mog or achievements. So you’re going to take out the central portal and leave the one on the other side of the continent from half the content? How is that anything less than annoying?
19 Likes
So many people are going to stop doing old mount runs. If such a time played metric even exists this is going to hurt it severely.
9 Likes
No? The world feels bigger when it’s actually bigger.
I main mage so this isn’t really a huge problem for me, but the rarer portals like CoT and Kara and Blasted Lands… that’s BS. No reason to remove those, especially when they’re still tied to Legion quests that we’re expected to do for allied races.
27 Likes
Flying around a world we’ve already flown around for years and years isn’t that fun anymore. Especially when we’ve been given the convenience to get some places immediately and then had it removed. I still farm Kara and CoT for mog/mounts, I’m sure I’m going to have so much fun spending a bunch of time flying all my alts around zones I’ve flown through hundreds of times, when I could just Dal Hearth>Portal and not waste a bunch of time in the past.
All this change does is lead to us spending more time alt-tabbed and not playing the game. This is a really dumb idea, and just slows the pace of the game even more by creating pointless boring downtime. Traveling isn’t fun in this game, it’s not something that should be leaned into. Mage portals have basically been useless for multiple expansions now by your own design, except to allow mages to set their hearthstone somewhere that isn’t the capital.
9 Likes
Gotta keep reinventing the wheel. Not even every new expansion now. They’re doing it between patches.
7 Likes
Look. We all knew Blizzard couldn’t be trusted with this and now we can see why.
7 Likes
Mythic SoO isn’t a long enough raid. Gotta add in that 3 minute flight time from Jade Forest!
By the way, new raid pets releasing in Pandaria in the same patch! That’s not annoying or anything!
14 Likes