No flying in 8.1.5, but some portal removal

Community General Discussion
81

I think this is ok honestly, don’t know why make a big deal over it

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82

So basically both portals from Dalaran (old and new) are removed towards ToC.

I feel they could have let the one in old Dalaran as it has always been there.

And then I don’t get the removal of the portals in the new Dalaran underbelly, since those were pretty useful to quest for your class mount and artifact. So basically players who are doing his retro will just have to walk (fly) ? I don’t get the point…

83

Walking and discovering zones in a MMO game? yeah I don’t get the point either

lul

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84

Indeed. They will have to actually go out in the open world in world of warcraft.

Dark times has fallen indeed…

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85

And then what will happen to the Chamber of the Guardian? will it be closed? will it still exist? what for?

86

Those Legion portals have made people lazy, it’s not like you can’t still get to any of the destinations without them.

I’m not sure how many people bother to do much of the artifact storylines in Legion either. You can level through it so fast you’re not there long enough. If you’re that interested in seeing the whole story through in old content, it’s hardly a bit thing to have a little extra journey time.

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87

Well you do have quest lines there, and the pillars are also stored down there.

88

Come on, those portals existed when you did (I mean if you did, you’re a void elf after all probably didn’t do much of that) Legion content, why would players doing it retro should have less convenience?

89

Eh. Because people will need to finally learn to adapt. Yes walking/riding/flying to your destination instead of 1 mouse click and thus take 2-3 mins more. Oh the tragedy…

But then again. As Punyelf mentioned earlier. Portals made people lazy as hell. Now that their 1 click-transportation has been removed. I guess the first days will be full of “I REFUSE TO PRESS forward move button and waste 1 min more! THIS NOT FAIR!” riots…

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90

But if there are no more portals this place is for nothing, The Chamber of the Guardian is only the last room with portals.

And then what if people are lazy? What if they enjoy clicking on a portal better than long traveling? what does it change to your game and your play style? go by ground mount where ever you want, we’re not keeping you from playing the way you want.

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91

great logic mate! If you’re that worried about traveling alone you an always ask a mage for portal. We’re not keeping you from playing the way you want.

BUT THEN YOU’D HAVE TO WHISPER ANOTHER HUMAN BEING. INTERACTION WITH OTHERS? GROSS

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92

It’s not about being lazy. It saves time. Do you have unlimited time to play each day? I don’t. Flypaths do not show anything interesting, do not contribute to the gameplay, give literally nothing.

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93

I was referring to one mention from the US forum above.

94

I have plenty of interaction in this game since most of things can’t be done alone, and surely better and more interesting things than asking for a portal or wasting time on a fly path, or then again, taking my own mount when nothing happens in the world. Because surely, on my route from Uldum to Cavern of Time nothing exiting is going to happen… no matter how often I will take that route as long as I will need stuff from Dragon Soul (or others).

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95

I’ve seen everything between A and Z when the respective zones were current content.

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96

I did that enough while leveling. There is nowhere left to discover in the oldworld.

The portals were there for convenience. Right now if I wanted to do Strath, I would go to Dalaran, take the portal to the crater and fly there within a minute or 2.

After the patch, I will have to fly to IF and AFK on a FP to get there instead.

None of these portals are life or death, what they are is convenience. It feels very counter productive for a game who is trying to stop haemorrhaging players, to keep removing QoL features which drives players away.

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97

What what what. You don’t call someone lazy if they take bus to work instead of walking there. What is this madness?! :exploding_head:

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98

Don’t forget having to pay the mage for the portal too :wink:
I see why you want this so bad :sweat_smile:

99

I know I might overreact and think about it the day after. But in seriousness what things like this lead to is that we stop farming or visit some places.

I have always had my HS in Shrine of Two Moons (Horde City Hub). It got nerfed ones and now this. The issue I have is to access old Shattra and Dalaran. The location is perfect sins there are three mounts that I farm weekly in Mist. An easy jump to Ogrimmar to reach new content by the cavern portal room.

Then I’m in two moons, it is an easy jump to Shattra and on to Sunwell Plateau. Some times I stay sporadic in Burning Crusade content and do a small mining run or visit the Black Temple or some other dungeons With these changes, this path will be removed and I will not sporadic end up there for an hour or so. So yes they will get fewer visits to old content.

The question I ask myself is: Why was this done? Have they lost so many players that they need to put us in the same spot in the would or it would feel empty. I wonder how the meeting did sounds like then this desition was made, what is the real backstory of this.

I feel like the speech about mages need to get their job back is a construction after they got a backlash from the community. Other things they make changes to is called evolution. there is so much they changed that is really bad.

  • Removed the need to use old material to level crafting.
  • Removed old content so we can’t play it anymore even they got leveling scaling.
  • Removed the need for leveling gears with looms. (the bonuses could be added to a real gear with an account bound token so people still need to collect gear.)
  • … The list goes on.

I get the feeling that they are trying to streamline the game to a single path. Before changes were made there was a need for players that didn’t raid or PVP that lived on collecting gold and play pokemon in the game.

In my opinion, If they remove something they should replace it with something, not just rip it out. Offtopic as I was writing about in a previous post on the old forum. They should add the legendary questlines back and give grey reward items from it, but they have just removed the game’s history from us.

100

Unpopular opinion time!

I think removing the portals was the right thing to do, and while I recognise that there are some downsides and some differences of opinion, I think most of those opinions are borne out of people who simply don’t want to play an MMORPG. There are a couple of concerns which are completely real and legitimate, so let’s start with those:

Legitimate points:

  1. Portals are sometimes referenced in quest text. Obviously if a quest tells you to take a portal that doesn’t exist, that’s pretty bloody stupid and needs to be fixed.
  2. The game provides no real alternative to portals, with most alternatives boiling down to a less conveniently placed portal.

These two things are 100% legitimate grievances, and I buy them wholesale. I’d have loved to have a discussion about where all the boats and zeppelins and trams and things like that went, and how all this unexplained teleportation can give you a lot of unnecessary loading screens and disrupt your sense of place, and that therefore travel needs to become much more convenient.

Add a ton of zeppelins to Orgrimmar and boats to Stormwind to take you all over the world? I’m all for it. Put portals in Dalaran? Sure - it’s a mage city after all. Tremendously speed up flight paths and reduce complexity and cooldowns of hearthstones and flight master’s whisles, and even extend the whistle to work in older content? I’m on it! Wonderful ideas.

But most of the complaining is not about that; and I’m actually really disappointed in this community. The complaints are generally down to these things:

  1. How much you really, really want to have your sense of place disrupted in favour of making things instant. Having to wait just 1 minute for a boat to arrive is just too much to bear; you’d rather spend time getting teleported into cities you don’t even want to visit so you can get teleported to other cities you do and have a bunch of loading screens in between.

Why? I don’t know. I guess you must feel the same wanderlust when playing WoW as you do when taking the bus around downtown. That’s a tragedy in and of itself, and just having Blizzard sidestep this massive problem with portals is doing yourselves a disservice.

  1. How much you really hate looking at the world if it means you earn gold like 10% slower

If everyone earns gold 10% slower, the economy will have 10% less gold in it before long, and all the prices will just drop. This is not a problem. Get over it.

  1. Some areas the horde and alliance aren’t fighting for anymore doesn’t have players in them.

Well, duh! The horde and alliance aren’t in Pandaria or Northrend or even Outland right now to any significant degree. How dare the gameplay try to line your experience up with the lore of the game?! Look, I understand if you want to visit those places for nostalgia, but that should not mean the game should try to encourage everyone to be there unless they simultaneously update those locations to fit into the current story arc and justify us being there.

Ultimately, this whole debacle reveals to me that almost nobody cares about playing World of Warcraft as an individual character living in a massive world and taking in the sights as things just happen all around them, and then participating. The whole mindset of the entire playerbase is all about how efficiently you can farm. Even the casuals are like this. What the hell for?!

Why aren’t anybody up in arms about how the world got this boring in the first place? This whole debate is being framed wrong by the community who’s just having their usual knee-jerk reaction at Blizzard removing something, even when that something is, at best, a thin bandaid over a colossal, gaping wound.

EDIT: As I was posting this, someone added a post saying basically the same thing in a different way right above me. Woe be me. Derp. :stuck_out_tongue: He’s in favour of the bandaid and I’m against it, but regardless: Can we discuss whether or not this was just removing the bandaid from a gaping wound in World of Warcraft, and can we discuss how to fix it?

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