I mean at the end of the day, every change Blizzard makes should be around Blizzard making money. If it isn’t then would they really implement the change and spend dev and coding time on it at all?
If the game is more fun, more people play and they get more money.
If the game gets more content, more people play and they get more money.
In this context, mounts, races, toys are all content and/or fun.
Is the new portal room content and/or fun? Is removing the old portal rooms fun and/or content? How does this change generate them more money?
Even then… the first time I’m trying to go somewhere and an ogre pops out at me, sure, it’s new and interesting. By the hundredth time, I couldn’t possibly care less. I just want to get to where I’m going so I can do the thing I actually want to do. All it is is another chore to slog through.
Exactly. Eventually the road becomes trite and boring.
Random events do help spice things up. The days when travelling between locations in mmorpgs was “awesome” are long gone. Especially in a world like WoW where the only surprises are stuff they ADD into old content.
If they’re using time played metrics as an indicator of “game health”, I can see it being less a means of directly making money from players, and more a means of keeping the investors feeling happy and secure (and less likely to sell their stocks, which as we’ve seen can lead to devaluation of the stock price).
Um, no… that was NOT what happened “every expansion.”
In BC, portals to the racial capitals were introduced in Shattrath.
In Wrath, more portals were introduced in Dalaran, but the portals in Shattrath were still there.
In Cataclysm, the portals to capital cities were removed from both Shattrath and Dalaran. Initially, they even removed the portals to Org/SW, but later, those were returned. To “make up” for the removal of portals, they added class trainers to both cities, added auctioneers to Shattrath and made the (previously engineer only) auctioneer usable by anyone. I remember when Cataclysm first went live, I had a friend who had parked his low level alt in Dalaran, not realizing that all of the portals were going to be removed. I had to go there on my mage and help him get out of there.
In Mists, they added portals to the shrines.
In Warlords, they added portals to trashcan. By the way, I went there during the free weekend, and even those had been removed. I also found that they also removed all of the portals to Hellfire Peninsula except the ones in Darnasus and Undercity.
In Legion, they added portals to the “new” Dalaran.
Now, with BfA, they have removed all portals except the ones to Org/SW from all the previous expansion capitals. This was the very first time since Cataclysm that portals had been removed and Cataclysm had been the first time that any portals had been removed. The claim that this was some kind of “tradition” is a bold faced lie.
I think the reason people did not like the changes sailed over your head.
Hardly anyone complained about the fact we had a new portal room.
Hardly anyone complained about the fact the old portal places were gone.
What they complained about was generally 3 different things:
That the portal to Pandaria stopped being a portal to the Shrines, and started being a portal to the Jade Forest, putting you on the east side of the continent instead of the middle making travel to the west end far more of a PITA.
That the portal to Dalaran crater went away with no replacement in the portal room, making travel to the North East of the Eastern Kingdoms far more of a PITA.
That the portal to the Caverns of Time went away with no replacement in the portal room, making travel to it, far more of a PITA.
It made it feel like they were just trying to arbitrarily stretch out content by making it take longer to get some of those places without reason, increasing MAU for no real in game benefit to the players.
If they’d not done those three things, the complaints would have been minimal and forgotten by most.
They at least seemed to listen a little. Caverns of Time portal will be coming back.
This solution assumes that people have access to Boralus etc. Not everyone who would use those portals does.
Over the free weekend, I made a new goblin. I wanted to go to Thunder Bluff. I did not have the flight path. I had no access to a portal there. My only options were to either corpse hop or use the zeppelin. As I was heading to the zeppelin tower, I saw the zeppelin leaving. it took 20 minutes before it got back.
Prior to the portals being removed, I would have simply logged on my mage on my other account and given my goblin a port to the shrine. Since not even my mages have access to BfA zones, porting my goblin there was not an option. I also don’t think that I should have to keep moving my low level alts every time a new expansion drops. I had, after all, been able to keep them in Shattrath when Wrath dropped, and at the shrine until they removed the racial capital portals from there.
We were all new players at some point, didn’t we learn where were the portal? New players can too.
Also, the reason why this game feels so freaking watered down is because they have been removing things to make it “easier”. Reforging, tier sets, glyph system, lots of skills that added flavor to the classes, are all gone for the sake of simplifying the game to its minimum expression.
What kind of ridiculous nostalgic justification is that? Most zones do not change because something happened, Dalaran is still at NR, Siege of Orgrimmar is still a thing, Westfall is still full of homeless people.
They announced they are going to add one of the portals they removed, but its too late, they just did another “because we know best” move.
In the Q&A, didn’t Ion say straight up that MAU is a metric that they report to investors? And doesn’t investing usually involve money? Increased MAU keeps investors invested in continuing to, well, invest in the game. That’s money in Blizzard’s pocket.
The Northrend Dalaran portal to Caverns of Time survived the Cataclysm only to be yanked out nearly a decade afterwards. So one portal, that managed to survive Deathwing, gets yanked without even a lame attempt at an explanation.
Maybe you shouldn’t make so many declarations about how the game used to be, especially if you can use google to jog your memory.
Let me just say, I would…maybe not agree, but be able to tolerate the portal removal a lot more if it didn’t break all of the quests pointing you to portals that no longer exist in the process.
I know the devs said they would make those portals appear for those quests, but my experience so far just doesn’t reflect that at all.
I won’t forget. There’s never any “last xpacs news” for me. Eventually, the camel’s back will break.
I like the portal rooms. That has absolutely nothing to do with Blizzard removing portals that didn’t need removing without even a shred of lore to explain it.
I absolutely hate that some cities are now isolated and everyone is being encouraged to hang out in just two cities (Stormwind or Orgrimmar). That doesn’t in any way make the “world seem bigger”. It makes me feel cramped and crowded and stuck in a tiny little world of a tiny little game.
And the only logical reason for this change anyone has been able to come up with is “time-played metrics”, which, if true, means Blizzard doesn’t give a damn about the game or the players anymore, only about their stock values. And that, my friend, is why so many folks are pissed. Because they do still care about WoW and want it to be a fun, engaging game, not a boring waste of time.
That’s money in Blizzard’s pocket.