Blizzard's excessive use of Portals

[Alopex]

OP is going to hate the 10 or so portals available to a player in Broken Isles Dalaran (Capital Cities, and 5 more related to artifacts)

[Goldielocks]

well shes not a soilder, shes just 1 of 6 of the leaders, so if she leaves the rest can do their jobs, shes still defending azeroth from the demons, just not leading kirin tor, so its like a war general quitting their job as general, to charge in as a soldier

Any future content aside, as of now it looks like she's leaving Dalaran before the demons attack it. That means she's not fighting the good fight anymore. Leaving and allowing someone else to do the job is deplorable.

[Damax]

They should just leave you the choice, like the griffon on the alliance side after the broken shore. You can take it, but you can also fly there yourself.

They could do the same with portals you could click it or fly there yourself, lets see who doesn't want to break immersion, I'd love to see those stats. Even Roleplayers on moonguard will use portals without second thought because its part of the culture in wow. no lore is broken when the alliance or horde sets up mage bitches to maintain portals because going places can be the difference between winning and losing a war.

Sometimes portal makes more sense and flying there makes it sounds like the task is not urgent (specially if you are around Kadghar who can teleport and portal easily I always find it funny when he's like : We have to hurry we have no time to waste meet me there! (flies off) and I'm like why don't you port me if its urgent? KADGHAR COME BACK!!! then I end up doing other stuff and breaking the immersion of the urgency.

[ComputerNerd]

What RPG element is there to discovering a location simply to allow faster on-rails travel there.
That has no character building element.
Discovering a flight path doesn't inherently unlock anything special, nor is there any variety in the selection you can unlock compared to someone else based on some decision you make, other than faction.

People need to stop using the RPG argument to complain about things when they don't know what it means.
Even using the term MMORPG to describe wow is very wrong.
The real decisions are removed from the player as to not segregate players into smaller groups detrimental to providing sufficient numbers for the group experience.
That is what a real RPG does, actually give you meaningful choices which will change what is available to you.
WoW does not do that.

[FelPlague]

Any future content aside, as of now it looks like she's leaving Dalaran before the demons attack it. That means she's not fighting the good fight anymore. Leaving and allowing someone else to do the job is deplorable.

yes because the demons are only attacking dalaran >_> all of azeroth is under attack, anywere she goes shes going to be fighting demons, even pandaria gets wrecked

[Goldielocks]

yes because the demons are only attacking dalaran >_> all of azeroth is under attack, anywere she goes shes going to be fighting demons, even pandaria gets wrecked

We don't know what she's doing though, and besides, the strongest sorceress on Azeroth leaving her fellow kin during this important time is not the right decision.

[FelPlague]

We don't know what she's doing though, and besides, the strongest sorceress on Azeroth leaving her fellow kin during this important time is not the right decision.

khagar is more powerful then her, and aegwyns spirit could still be around and well.... alos the other kirintor are fine, also looking at dalaran its not in any trouble till much later, and we tp outta there

[Goldielocks]

khagar is more powerful then her, and aegwyns spirit could still be around and well.... alos the other kirintor are fine, also looking at dalaran its not in any trouble till much later, and we tp outta there

True, but she's likely in second, being the strongest female spellcaster. Saying "they're fine" is a bit much, isn't it? We need all the help we can get against an army demons that is thousands of times larger than the total population of Azeroth, maybe millions.

[morislayer]

OP has a point. If I remember correctly, we had to hoof it to attempt to save Crusader Bridenbrad. Although there was a bit of analogous complaining in the two, the quest chain is quite memorable.

[Lord Havik]

Because: "*.*.*MAGIC!*.*.*"

It's an ingrained staple of the fantasy genre and helps rationalize travel over vast distances or across intangible planes of existence without boring the crap out of the player with extensive explanations.

[Dugna]

We kinda tried doing the old boat way.....didn't exactly work out (broken shore) so Khadgar and more being able to teleport us all around broken isles isn't really that bad...

If you want more people to experience more zones like storm peaks leading into ulduar, you need to incentivize the questing zones, but when blizz did do that aka (Cata) people bitched we didn't get enough end game stuff.

[The Stormbringer]

"Betrayal" is a strong word. All she does is throw a hissy fit and quit.

[jettzypher]

I'm perplexed by the notion of "atleast it requires you to go discover the location first," despite the example you (the OP) gives is to an area where it's safe to assume the player has already taken part in that content. It's an old location you're revisiting, as opposed to going to a new location. *shrug*

[Deleted]

Well see, Blizzard was supposed to be working on making leveling more meaningful, but really all they have done is made it even easier to level with pre-patch. Maybe if 90% of their questing experience wasn't player x going to do some bullshit y, then people wouldn't just dungeon spam. Dungeon's should be a complement to leveling, not the main source of exp for vets to exploit. Also heirlooms are a shit design as well, because they take most leveling gear choices which makes the leveling experience even more bland.

Dungeon spamming isn’t a thing because questing in the old world is boring, but because it’s way faster than questing, granting more exp/hour. I recently tried to compete with a guy from my guild. We were both 60 and I started questing in Outland and he went for TBC dungeons. Guess what: By the time I hit 61 he was 62 and by the time I hit 62 he was already 65.

Quests are fun, somewhat, even the old ones. But if you have quested through an area several times you sometimes just wanna get over with it the fastest way possible.

So even if they revamped the old zones again, people will still stick to dungeons, and it will just become a massive waste of resources, unless they somewhat triple the xp gained and use scaling technology.

Flight paths and flying mounts have (ok, had) to be unlocked.

While true, the whole initial topic was about portals placed in the world, these are only available beyond 60 (to Outland) and later on, so people already have access to their flying mounts. As for the flight paths, okay they have to be unlocked.
However talking about stuff like Ulduar teleporter: Once you had done that content you’d most likely have the fps, therefore it’s still afk fp. Even if you hadn’t, it’s just one time travel to unlock them and afk fp later on.

[Nilin]

from an mmorpg aspect it helps prevent immersion breaking. If I were to manually walk/fly to black temple I'd see a ton of shit that already happened 10 years ago in game time still occurring outside. This way instead, I'm being transported there by someone with the means to do so, (not my own power and not a magical plot force) and entering an instance completely tailored to fit the quest.

So I really don't mind, besides, if I had to manually go to black temple hardcore players would feel obligated to set their hearth to the nearest area to ensure minimal travel time, and players with slower PCs or who just hate loading screens would be looking at several loading screens to get to black temple, while the continent is otherwise seamless.

[Deleted]

Didn't you read my post?

I'm afraid I just skimmed it briefly. It didn't really warrant my full attention.
The diversity of issues we complain about in this game is simply amazing!

And to answer your question, since you only had three options: I must say the thought of portals in WoW somehow ruinng and spoiling the purity of rpg's (sorry, just can't make myself to use bold font) is so very far down my list of "stuff to complain about", the Bristol stool scale beats it by miles.

Ok so serious answer:
There's like four fucking versions of Dalaran's in the game right now. The portal is there to avoid pages and pages of forum posts and support tickets because people can't find the right one.

[Deleted]

let me turn this around for some of you. Magic and portals are an integral part of wow and always has been. Every time Igbo somewhere that takes more then 10 min to reach I ask myself why there is t a portal from Stormwind to here. It ruins my immersion that they haven't created a portal to this place

[ablib]

OP, are you complaining about portals opened by NPC's in quest lines? If so, I agree with you.

If you're talking about a major city having a portal to everywhere, then no I don't agree.

OP needs to clarify, because it looks like this thread has derailed.

[Jakisuaki]

fun > mechanics

discussion over. sorry. it's not a new game, there's tons of places, flight pathing to a capital to grab a zep to northrend to flight path somewhere else is not fun. no rpg lists a feature of "long travel times!"...also, unless it's a phasing mechanic, no one is really forcing you to take a portal...

Watch out we've got a badass who thinks his opinion is the only one that matters. Grabbing a zeppelin or taking a boat atleast feels somewhat immersive, you have to go the harbor/zeppelin tower, wait for them both respectively, have a short takeoff scene, a loading screen, an arrival scene, and even then you don't get ported to right infront of your bloody objective.

- - - Updated - - -

We took a boat to the broken shores!

Yup, would you prefer a portal directly to the broken shore instead?

- - - Updated - - -

I'm perplexed by the notion of "atleast it requires you to go discover the location first," despite the example you (the OP) gives is to an area where it's safe to assume the player has already taken part in that content. It's an old location you're revisiting, as opposed to going to a new location. *shrug*

The point is that any player, a new one especially, could theoretically teleport to a place he or she has never been to before and never experienced to the fullest. Atleast the fullest you can without having participated in the current content raiding.

[Deleted]

Well, it would makes sense to actually *travel* IF you were in new zones. But traveling to deadwind pass or to northrend don't offer any new stuff.
IF we had to travel to some new area, then yes, please let me use my ground mount.

Traveling through old zones without any new stuff going on is just a waste of game time.
Traveling in new zones are new impressions, and btw I'm all in on the WOD flying model.