I see this from a current content point. I understand having a time sink or time gate or grind or TRAVEL TIME to whatever content is “current” i.e. BFA. From what I can tell, the portal systems that you all keep taking out is just making it harder to do older content for “fun” or for older achievement farming.
This content isn’t that hard for the most part. Its just something fun to do to pass the time, so any convenience added to doing that activity is going to feel better. Not to mention its a convenience we have had for the past few years. Taking it away isn’t going to turn mage portals back into a vanilla booming business anymore. It’s only adding a negative context to doing what was a fun non-serious pass time.
Either way I don’t see it as a huge deal. I would prefer to keep the portals but soon people will figure out the new fastest way to get to X raid and continue to mog farm or whatever. I would like to see a speed bump in the flight paths of the older content if that is possible.
Heh. I got them on that one.
I wont level another character past 60. Ive got dozens either locked there or working towards 60 to lock them.
The other dozen are 111-120, with a couple locked in MoP.
but I can just keep the ones at 90 in Pandaria there and never leave.
Any way this goes Blizzard isnt twisting my arm into doing crap.
I’ll use what I can to my advantage and quit when the game gets more annoying than I want to deal with
Mages have teleport spells because the lore says that they do… thats like asking why Death Knights have a Death Gate ability, or why druids can shapeshift… Each class has an undeniable benefit over other classes. Mages can quickly traverse not just Azeroth but Dreanor and Outlands as well…
I love going back and doing the Culling of stratholme dungeon, the mount hyjal raid, and all the other raids and dungeons located there, and considering the shear number of times I have seen the world on the way to CoT I can say with absolute certainty that this will be yet another added frustration to playing the game, yet another straw added to the camels back
i’ll be honest, i don’t really pay attention to how much time the portals save me. mostly because i have toons ranging in level from 20-ish to 115-ish that i bounce back and forth between.
so the portals aren’t always available and even when they are, i sometimes prefer to use flight points as they give me a safe time to take a break for snacks, drinks, toilet use, etc.
i’m also notorious for running from one end of town to the other because i forgot i have mounts (rofl) so travel time is kind of moot for me.
that being said, i do get annoyed when portals move or disappear, when a new expansion gives me YET ANOTHER hearthstone to take up bag space (seriously, Garrison AND Naval Yard from WoD?!?!), or when entire regions become accessible only by talking to an NPC (I’m looking at you Blasted Lands).
While I don’t exactly like all the changes to the world zones that each ExPac brings, i get why they happen. What i don’t get is why the older version is still accessible for zones like Pre-WoD Blasted Lands and Pre-Legion Silithis, but not for the Pre-Cata versions of Westfall and Dark Shore.
as for suggestions/possible solutions, i’d like to suggest Ye Olde Teleport Book. the classic, and oft-implemented list of travel points one can quickly and easily teleport to provided A) that character has been there before; B) the location actually serves as a questing hub (I.E. at least 3-5 quests begin there); and C) the character has enough [teleportation magic fuel item] to get there (in one game, it costs 1 such item to travel within the continent, but 3 to port to some place on a different continent)
and the brilliant part is that Mage ports can remain relevant/useful by making them use no teleport stones to use (or cost fewer in the event of inter-continental travel) and by letting Mages craft Location Scrolls that other players can buy/trade for and then use to add the location to their own Teleport Book without needing to go there in person.
TL;DR: The changes will annoy me, even if they don’t actually inconvenience me any. We should instead have Teleport Books, Teleporting should require materials (for non-Mages) and Mages should be able to make Scrolls so we can add locations to our Books easier.
Not too hard to figure out the real motivation in that.
Heres where they blew their cover about any ‘convenience’ crap on our part.
They removed the existing portals BEFORE…well before…putting in the hub.
IF this were about our convenience…even as a passing thought in the back of their mind…that hub would have been put in BEFORE the old portals were removed.
That they didnt do it first is absolute conclusive proof that they dont give two squats enough about our convenience OR our game to even ponder upon whether this inconvenienced players or not.
Its worse than spite which can at least be attributed to some emotion. Its utter indifference. totally and utterly apathetic.
If youre a questing sort and thats why you spend most of your time doing, this probably wont affect you much, if at all.
The ones it affects mostly are the farmers who like to port all over, run for mats, mogs or whatever, then off to the next.
I farm all day. I DONT quest. So for me this may well be a game ender.
edit…I think I quoted the wrong thing when I commented, somehow here.
Blizzard devs are living in a cognitive dissonance bubble where they are pretty much guaranteed to get blindsided by strong reactions from their player base. I anticipate posts over how they couldn’t possibly have known the players would react so strongly. Flying… portals… what’s next? Our ground mounts get us around too fast?
I’ve seen the deterioration in Blizzard for a while, but now apparently they’ve lost their collective presence of mind too. It’s no wonder the storytelling has taken such a dive if this is what their best minds are coming up with.
Go home Blizzard, you’re drunk. Sleep it off, and do better. Be better.
Blockquote 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). Traveling over large areas reminds me of how vast the world is and I often reminisce while flying on a flight path or a mount. Sometimes I have even just used the port to Timeless Isle and taken the flight path to Shrine (instead of going straight there) as I can enjoy the view and relax.
Thats great… For you… please dont force me to play the game in a way that YOU prefer… I have been playing since '07 I KNOW how big Azeroth, Outland, Dreanor and Argus are, I have seen every inch of the worlds in World of Warcraft… I do not need reminding of how vast it is, or how beautiful it is, nor do I need to be forced to play the game the way a specific developer enjoys playing it… and thats all this feels like, you forcing your idea of what is fun onto us. IMO there already is a happy medium in the game… you can take your length walk/run/ ground mount/ flying mount through the world to get where you want to be, and for me I can take a portal to get near where I want/need to be, THAT is the happy medium, you removing portals is taking that medium away and again forcing us to play the way you do, instead of letting us play the way we enjoy playing.
One of the big deals about mage class identity is their ability to teleport around the world and open portals to other locations around the world. It’s one of the many reasons why people pick the mage class.
So sure, saying other classes shouldn’t get mage teleports because it would weaken mage class identity is good. You don’t want to weak class identity. Blizzard did that in MoP with their ‘bring the player, not the class’ experiment, which didn’t work.
But then literally not a few lines later, you claim that all characters should have access to all portals in every hub, instantly degrading mage class identity because now they don’t need mages to go anywhere. They can just go to their favourite faction hub, set their hearth and never need mages ever again.
Make up your mind. Either you want to preserve mage class identity or you don’t.
It’s like Irvine is upside-down, bizarro world. Some one there should clue in that if they think its a great idea, then the players will think it’s a horrible idea.
This is absurd. So the portals are still there but are hidden to most players, and only become usable if you’re doing a quest? That’s ridiculous. Why bother hiding them in the first place? Why can’t you leave existing systems and elements of the world alone if they worked and no one asked for their removal. You have pretty unanimous feedback that players want the portals to stay. You’re incentivising players to not complete any quest that enables use of a portal! How convoluted and unintuitive is that? And to ask why players want to go to the Caverns of Time? How out of touch are you? Do you now have mounts? Do you not have raids? Do you not have dungeons? Stop inconveniencing players for such contrived, illogical reasons and let us play the game the way we want to and have been for years without issue.
Feeling alive? It feels pretty dead right now and that is not because of a perceived overabundance of portals but instead a completely lackluster expansion with more issues than I care to go into.
Fewer portals make the world feel bigger? I personally couldn’t care less about the word “feeling bigger.” I’d suggest that “feeling bigger” is totally subjective - some would agree - but, judging by the responses in this thread, most would not.
They don’t want to deal with players who are upset because a few who are really upset have gotten rude, and yet they went out of their way on so many occasions to force through changes they knew we would hate and they knew people would quit over.
If everyone is polite and quietly goes away and stops logging in, will you think your politeness campaign has been a success?
Can’t admit fault here… cling blindly to what you’ve built and not hear the feedback. Right?
When there are fewer portals, does the world feel a bit bigger to you?
No. Old content feels harder to get to. This in no way makes the world “feel” larger. You’re asking to arbitrarily measure something person-by-person. I can quantitatively say it does take me longer to get places now, hence I’ll have to stay logged on even longer to achieve what I set out to do when playing.
Do you like that?
No. I hated it the last time you removed them from Old Dalaran. It feels like you’re punishing new players and veterans that are leveling alts? Why do this?
How difficult is it to get to the locations you mentioned without a direct portal…?
See above, it takes longer. Difficult is not a word I’d use for travel. Inconvenient is the word. This is yet another nerf-quality-of-life change that I abhor.
Now, how do you measure success? Is it by how long people are logged in? With these changes, how much more successful are you?
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