This change is deeply inconvenient for someone like me who quite regularly goes to run old dungeons looking for xmogs and mounts. There was quite a bit of things I missed during the years I was not playing the game, and I am still most interested in getting them. Losing portals, and the ones in Legion Dalaran in particular, hurts and greatly increases my travel time if I want to go to certain dungeons.
Take Horde for example and lets say I want to go to Blackrock Mountain or the southern half of the Eastern Kingdoms in general. The ways to go there now are the Blasted Lands portal in Org, the Karazhan portal in Dalaran, the much longer flight from Twilight Highlands, and the tedious waiting for a zeppelin to Grom’gol. This change removes the two best options.
This portal room change adds a little more centralization to the portal areas in Stormwind and Orgrimmar (which wasn’t really a problem except that the Dalaran portal in Stormwind was inexplicably in Stormwind Keep separate from the rest). And we get some new art, I guess. In exchange, we lose a number of quite useful portals that make travel times, particularly in old parts of the world, take longer and be more inconvenient.
This is not a good trade-off. Players are losing more than they are gaining here. I don’t need this game to eat even more time just on travelling. Travelling isn’t fun, and I don’t care about “seeing the world” more because I have already seen it enough to the point of memorization.
I don’t want to have an artificial increase to my travel times. I want to use my time to, you know, actually play the game.
Yes and no… Sure that’s where they are now, but for me personally, In Dal, in Shatt, in Org/SW, a port a mage can make, or changed every xpack to be in the current hub… i don’t care where it is, but as long as there is one would make it 100x better than having to fly there from Uldum or whatever.
They don’t. Mage portals are already more convenient, as they can be placed anywhere to avoid having to go to a portal hub at all. They have also had access to at least one portal (Theramore) that everyone else doesn’t.
If you want to protect mage’s niche of portals, then expand that system to give them more and better teleportation spots; don’t nerf convenience for the rest of us.
I feel as it this is “player housing” all over again. Setting the stage for failure so they can nix something. Can’t wait till the new announcement:
"We’re basing the next expac around the sinking of Pandaria (hey, there’s still the Wandering Isle) so that new continents can rise from the ocean floor.
I mean, Pandaria is hardly visited now, so we knew it wouldn’t be missed by the majority… "
Perhaps more constructively: I noticed when you removed a number of portals from the Shrine. I was sad, after being vexed, but shrugged and moved a few characters. I don’t like it, but I get pruning hubs from an older place.
Pruning singular access to a past central location - that I will never get.
I think they need to swing the pendulum even harder. They need to remove a lot of that convenience. But they don’t have the balls to do that. So meanwhile they’ll remove a few portals instead… lol.
Is it in the CM handbook to be this daft on easily predictable kickback on changes? I know you guys don’t like “insults” as useful feedback, but seriously there is literally zero need to make this change. Work on new content. Work on the AH interface. Work on the guild finder interface. Hell work on the bugged quest in ashenvale where the Kodo doesn’t appear. Do literally anything else useful with this game.
I like portals. Walking around is not very cutting edge. Most modern MMOs have direct teleport systems (GW2, FFXIV, etc). WoW Already takes a while to travel, the portals just helped make it not so tedious. Removing them is a bad idea.
Removing the portals doesn’t necessarily make anything more difficult to get to. It simply makes it more inconvenient. Making the game world more inconvenient does not make it feel more “alive,” it just reduces my desire to play.
I am not a raider, I am not a competitive PvPer. One of my favorite things to do in the game once I have run through the available new content is to go back in to old content and collect mounts, pets, transmog, and other collectibles that I don’t have.
Removing old portals and teleports makes this process more tedious, especially if I am doing so on several alts.
Adding a new, centralized portal room in each of the faction capitals is a great thing, and I’m all for that. The problem lies in when you arbitrarily remove quality of life features that have been in the game for years. These changes will not help make the world feel more alive, they will simply increase frustration among all but the most hardcore players, and could even contribute to several players leaving the game, which will do the exact opposite of making the game feel more alive.
No worries and no hard feelings. I just find it hard to trust anything Blizzard says anymore. They’ve burned that bridge too many times, and their insistence in going out of their way to make life harder for the player and then act like Bornakk is here infuriates me.
No. No, it doesn’t feel bigger, because no matter what you do, it’s still only six miles from Hrothgar’s Landing to Nayeli Lagoon. It’s the same thing with personal flight. Tearing up the highway and routing a serpentine detour through the residential district doesn’t make the town larger, it just annoys the Hell out of everyone and buries the mayor and the DoT in hate mail.
Is it just me, by the way, who’s strongly reminded of former CM Bashiok’s infamous “suddenly, I realised I’d forgotten I could fly, and realised that I didn’t mind” post from just before the infamous “no flying ever” disaster by this?
I mean, it’s likely just Bornakk being flavourful or playing “devil’s advocate” but to me it sounds just a little bit like that Bashiok moment, which sounded more like a press release from management than his own words.
For Caverns of Time, considerably. And no, the lack of portals doesn’t make the world feel one whit bigger, and I’m not just saying that because I like the portals.
Pandaria feels immense to me because it is. A lot of time was spent on the terrain, the places (there are a lot of them) and the scenery. I don’t go there often but when I do, I feel impressed - yes, that’s flying over it.
Making the world smaller and just making it inconvenient to get around doesn’t trick me into thinking the world is bigger. It just frustrates me.
You want the world to feel big? Make it big. Pandaria takes a while to traverse because it is big, not because of any tricks like a bunch of complicated terrain obstacles where you don’t have flying. I have a limited amount of time to play. If that’s going to be mountain humping, because you decided frustration > fun, I’ll just go find something fun.
You probably spend more money on tricking people into thinking the world is bigger than it is than you would spend on just making it a little bigger.
EDIT (5:35AM PST): Blizzard has added a second blue response, commenting that removed portals for specific questlines, like the Legion Order Halls, should appear while you’re on the quest, as well as commenting that the removal of portals to places like Ironforge and Thunder Bluff are an oversight that will get fixed.
Can some of the teeth-grinding and hair-pulling subside, now?
![:frowning:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/frowning.png?v=6" ":frowning:")