How to make no portals acceptable.

[LQDMTL]

... DOH!

You are absolutely right, and I am a gorram moron. I totally forgot about the Kirin Tor rings (I never got one for my tankadin because I don't think they had one for tanks, and... well, in hindsight I should have gotten one for my hunter, but for some reason I continually blank on those rings). Course, it means I have to carry it around with me in my bag and I now have to spend tons of my hard earned cash, but it certainly is an option. Thanks for reminding me!

There's also the Crusader's tabard, which puts you about 1 minute from Dal via bird (omg timesink /snicker).

---------- Post added 2010-09-27 at 02:04 PM ----------

I enjoy hanging out in Theramore on my alliance character. Does that mean that they should put portals there for my benefit? Sacrifices are part of the game.

Why? Do you RP being Jaina's mister or something? lol

[Jadugarr]

And how did you mysteriously, and evidentally spontaneously, realize you needed to go to Hinterlands? If you logged out the night before with the quest in your log you could've planned head some, maybe... ya think, and logged off in Ironforge (if not in Hinterlands).

No matter how you dice your example the only thing this doesn't allow you to do is be somewhere, realize your on the wrong continent or on the far end of the one you're on, hearth to Dal and click down to another city to correct your mistake. The vast majority of your play time questing / leveling, if you follow the quests as they're laid out, don't cause you to NEED to do that. And even in your example the added flight time is what.. 1:30? OH MY GOD... end of the world. Let's all go huddle and cry...

It's irrelevant why I need to go to Hinterlands, it doesn't even have to be Hinterlands, just anything north of Dun Morogh and the example works. When did I ever say I was doing any logging off or on? You're just attempting to twist the example to fit your worldview, which it won't because you can't get around the fact that this change is a fucking timesink.

What this disallows is convenience, and it forces a bigger timesink into travel. Continuing to deny this is the height of thickheadedness.

p.s. - implying that I don't plan ahead re: travel is pretty ridiculous. I carry scrolls of recall, the BT neck, and Jaina's locket all the time.

[sicness]

You are only looking at it from a players point of view. If you look at it from Blizzards point of view, it is beneficial to the point that they want everyone to congregate in SW and org.

As I stated that someone else mentioned that before, I agree with that. My argument isn't against this change, or even for this change, my argument is against people claiming this is better for the game, which it isn't in any way.

As I said, I could care less either way 'cause I have a mage, even if I didn't I wouldn't care so much, but to honestly try and claim that this is beneficial for the game in any way (not saying that you are, but others are) is asinine because it isn't in any possible way. It's not so bad that it shouldn't be changed, but there's no compelling arguments from people for this change that make it acceptable.

[Its Electric]

I really cannot understand why people are for this change.

Immersion? Really? You call staring at a monitor waiting for a flight path to finish immersion? I call horseshit. This is on the same level as the force hearthing removal. How can you not see this is just another time sink, only this time it's completely unnecessary? You accomplish NOTHING by sitting on a flight path. NOTHING.

[LQDMTL]

It's irrelevant why I need to go to Hinterlands, it doesn't even have to be Hinterlands, just anything north of Dun Morogh and the example works. When did I ever say I was doing any logging off or on? You're just attempting to twist the example to fit your worldview, which it won't because you can't get around the fact that this change is a fucking timesink.

What this disallows is convenience, and it forces a bigger timesink into travel. Continuing to deny this is the height of thickheadedness.

p.s. - implying that I don't plan ahead re: travel is pretty ridiculous. I carry scrolls of recall, the BT neck, and Jaina's locket all the time.

OH MY GOD... end of the world. Let's all go huddle and cry...

The time-sink you chose for your example isn't even enough time to reliably go take a piss if you wash your hands. So I fail to see how it's worth bothering to complain about at all.

[Grithmir]

... DOH!

You are absolutely right, and I am a gorram moron. I totally forgot about the Kirin Tor rings (I never got one for my tankadin because I don't think they had one for tanks, and... well, in hindsight I should have gotten one for my hunter, but for some reason I continually blank on those rings). Course, it means I have to carry it around with me in my bag and I now have to spend tons of my hard earned cash, but it certainly is an option. Thanks for reminding me!

Blizzard added lots of items like this, if you know where to look for them. There's the Argent Crusade tabard too for those who prefer to stay in Northrend.

[LQDMTL]

You accomplish NOTHING by sitting on a flight path. NOTHING.

Travel. You accomplish travel.

/smartass

[Oneleg]

never had those fancy portals in Vanilla, did just fine without them then, will do just fine without them now.

PvP servers will be fun again : )


the days of heading to menethil to hop on the boat and having to be looking for the rogue was a blast.

[Gigawolf1]

You know what they should really do? They should give a class the ability to make portals to all the major cities. Preferably Warriors.

[Usagi Vindaloo]

I enjoy hanging out in Theramore on my alliance character. Does that mean that they should put portals there for my benefit? Sacrifices are part of the game.

Frankly, Theramore would make much more sense as a neutral city with portals anyway (since Jaina is actually friendly with the Horde and willing to work with them) so that's not the best example. ;-)

There's also the Crusader's tabard, which puts you about 1 minute from Dal via bird (omg timesink /snicker).

That tabard (and the engineering equivalent) I had remembered, as I intend to spend at least a bit of time doing Argent Tournament dailies after Cata hits in order to get mounts and pets (I got burned out on them during WOTLK but think I'll be eager to do them again by Cata). Of course, if my hearth is set in Azeroth there isn't too much reason for me to head back to Dalaran vs. hearthing back directly from the tournament.

On the other hand, now that I think about it... the CoT portal will still potentially be useful for getting to Tanaris et al vs. going to TB or Org. And thanks to my tankadin being an engineer, he'll actually be able to do all his AH stuff etc while in Dalaran, meaning he doesn't need to go back to a major city as often; I could set my hearth in Vash'jir or something and do my bank stuff in Dal. Hmm, maybe this won't be so bad.

[snowblind]

They don't have to do anything to make them acceptable. It's fine. The only reason you needed the portals to begin with was to get to class trainers, which they've added.

Problem solved.

[Oneleg]

They removed the portals so that people would not just hang out in dalaran. The reason that FP take the strangest routes is because a lot of vanilla WoW is unfinished and not meant to be seen from the air. There are a lot of unfinished textures and zones in the games that are only meant to be seen from the ground.
That being said, an increase in FP speed would be awesome. I myself rarely use the FP from IF to SW because the deeprun tram is much faster.

The IF / SW route is about the same if you go by tram or bird, we timed it many times to see which worked better. If you hit the tram just as it pulled it that would be quicker, but I always had the luck of watching it pull out as I zoned in....

[Jadugarr]

The time-sink you chose for your example isn't even enough time to reliably go take a piss if you wash your hands. So I fail to see how it's worth bothering to complain about at all.

It's time I'd be spending playing rather than traveling on a flying anything, and that time adds up. You're quite obviously a short term thinker.

[Its Electric]

Let me paint a picture for you guys:
I have 9 horde and 1 lowbie alliance on one server. I'm not going to delete a horde toon to make space for a bank alt for the alliance character. I plan on leveling the alliance toon when cataclysm comes around. Now, if I want to get to the auction house whilst leveling said toon I will be forced to sit on boats and gryphons for a good chunk of time.
Sounds unnecessary, you think?

[Florena]

In my opinion, the only way to make portals being removed from Dalaran/Shattrath even remotely acceptable, is to fix the taxi system in general.
Mounts are going to be 310% speed in general, so why are the in game taxis this slow when they fly a path 150 times more convaluted than the worst tour guide ever.
Make flight paths move around 500% - 750% speed, and stop circling around the departure and arrival points(and any points in between).

In one of the earlier beta builds when paladins were REALLY bugged, you moved at what I would assume to be around 500%. I thought to myself, this is what all flying should be. It was awesome. But, it still got old pretty fast, having to fly from one end of the continent to the other... SUCKS. Which makes the other half of my prerequisites to make removing portals acceptable, is to have at least 1 portal hub per continent near the middle of the continent. (ex. Portals in SW / Theramore / Dalaran / Shattrath that only go to the other hubs, so you still have to fly from one point to another on the continent you're on, but not have to wait for some stupid boat to get to the other continents.)

It is already acceptable in its current form. Outland/Northrend are now irrelevant, the portals were in Shat/Dal to allow easy access back to the old world to visit the auction house and class trainers. They were not there to allow instant access between all old world cities. And we don't need them.

Alliance: Everything is linked to SW. IF and SW have the tram. Exo and Darn are easily accessed through SW harbor.

Horde: TB and UC accessed through zeppelins. I'll admit the TB/Org Zep could use a speed boost but that's it. UC and SM have an instant portaling orb between them as it is, the only instant inter city transportation in the old world.

Things are fine, especially when you consider that Blizz are emphasizing Org/SW as the 'main' cities in Cata, and those cities have quick access to all the others.

[Littleraven]

the fact that anyone sees it as unacceptable is a problem imo. i for one am glad they are removing them

[Oneleg]

This is understandable for the mid path flight, (flying through paths in mountains etc.) but not for the "let's fly in a huge circle around the place 3 times before we land".



Making a game less accessible, is not a good thing, therefore, unacceptable. Having played the game since the week of initial launch, I remember what it was like before portals in Dal/Shat, and it was utterly terrible. I know many people who stopped playing the game then only because when they wanted to play, they typically only had a hour or so a night to play. When 25-50% of your entire game time is spent in just GOING to an area that you can play in, you get pissed off pretty fast. I'd much rather see them take out the LFD and put portals to each zone. At least that would inspire actual existence outside of cities for people once they hit level cap.

The only reason that this change is being made, is it makes everything take longer. Therefore, Blizzard thinks that if you have to spend more time doing meaningless tasks, that it will make less content take longer to do, therfore you won't spend 10 months being dead bored because you already completed the end game content before they released the new expansion.

So your going to have to experience what people did 6 years ago? It was a great deal of fun on a PvP server to have to head out to say Ony, because it meant you might run into some actual world PvP. On PvE servers it will be a little more bland, but might add a little of the MMORPG aspect back into the game. Now its just the standing around BS that sucks the life out of the game.

[LQDMTL]

It's time I'd be spending playing rather than traveling on a flying anything, and that time adds up. You're quite obviously a short term thinker.

That time in a given game session is negligible at best. Quantify it over an extended period of time and sure, it might actually be significant enough to concern yourself with. However, if you're quantifying travel time in a video game far enough out to come up with a significant number then you should maybe question the fact that you're playing such a game in the first place. It's not about short term or long term thinking, it's about thinking about this rationally. If a few seconds of your game time here or there is so worth worrying about then it's high time you re-evaluate whether you should be playing at all. This change is nothing. It's a drop of water in an entire swimming pool. It's meaningless. Getting all bent out of shape over it is stupid.

[Mortis Darkskull]

In my opinion, the only way to make portals being removed from Dalaran/Shattrath even remotely acceptable, is to fix the taxi system in general.
Mounts are going to be 310% speed in general, so why are the in game taxis this slow when they fly a path 150 times more convaluted than the worst tour guide ever.
Make flight paths move around 500% - 750% speed, and stop circling around the departure and arrival points(and any points in between).

In one of the earlier beta builds when paladins were REALLY bugged, you moved at what I would assume to be around 500%. I thought to myself, this is what all flying should be. It was awesome. But, it still got old pretty fast, having to fly from one end of the continent to the other... SUCKS. Which makes the other half of my prerequisites to make removing portals acceptable, is to have at least 1 portal hub per continent near the middle of the continent. (ex. Portals in SW / Theramore / Dalaran / Shattrath that only go to the other hubs, so you still have to fly from one point to another on the continent you're on, but not have to wait for some stupid boat to get to the other continents.)

or maybe you should just look at the news... they said they'll remove the portals from dalaran and shattrah... because they want us to use the portals on deepholme... I remember they said that while deepholme isn't a city, it'll be the new portal hub...

[sicness]

So your going to have to experience what people did 6 years ago? It was a great deal of fun on a PvP server to have to head out to say Ony, because it meant you might run into some actual world PvP. On PvE servers it will be a little more bland, but might add a little of the MMORPG aspect back into the game. Now its just the standing around BS that sucks the life out of the game.

And additional flying makes the game so much better?