Wednesday, October 6, 2010

No Not The Portals

For those who haven't heard, come Cataclysm the portals to the major cities throughout Azeroth and Outland are being removed from Dalaran and Shattrath and are being replaced by Class Trainers. Blizzard's reason for this is they don't want people to have easy routes in order to get around between Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms. If you think about it you wouldn't have to change your Hearthstone from Dalaran come Cataclysm because you could get everywhere you need to go from there. Now this actually puzzles me and I will tell you why.

First off the reason Class Trainers where not put in Shattrath and Dalaran in the first place was because Blizzard still wanted us to have a connection to the "old world". We had to go back to use the trainers and the auction house. I accepted it even if it was a pain in the ass and the portals made it easy to get to the old cities anyway. Removing the portals in my opinion now makes traveling to these places except to level pointless. They would have had a great opportunity to still have these cities active during a new expansion. Hell I was planning on making Shattrath my new home because of lack of people in the area.

Secondly, LFG ports you to the dungeon. You don't have to travel there. I would guess that half the people doing instances with this tool have no idea what zone the instance is in they are doing. With Brewfest if you didn't have the remote in past years you had to head to BRD. Blizzard has removed the traveling aspect so why did removing the portals even matter? If you are going to argue removing the portals stops people from traveling then force people to queue for specific instances at the meeting stone. For the random I have no logical way of "making people go", but at least stand behind your point of removing the portals.

Lastly this means hell for those who are leveling to use the auction house. You will be stuck in Outland or Northrend without a viable way besides a mage to get you to the Azeroth.

I understand the decision and I am actually for it, but just make it consistent and not bad for leveling. Make people travel some way to instances and make the auction house available in Shattrath and Dalaran. Simple and easy make it happen.

3 comments:

  1. You make very good points you cant say one thing then go against it in another regard.

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  2. Just checked in beta:
    The engineer only actioneer in Dalaran accepted my character (not an engineer) for auctions. I could not find an auctioneer in Shattrah.
    And you have to discover the entrance to all Cataclysm instances before you can enter them through the LFG.

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  3. I have always had my hearth set to Shatt, all through Wrath. Until I upped the memory on my computer, Dalaran was "Lagaran" and I avoided it unless I had to go there. Shatt had everything I needed and portals to get back to old world cities.

    Then, I got the Argent tabard and the Kirin Tor ring. I can go anywhere. If the ring is on cooldown and I'm needed in Northrend, click on the tabard. I hearth to Shatt and take portals.

    I understand the desire to keep people gaming in the old world but, to me, it smacks of insecurity. It seems Blizzard is not completely sure that people will move their hearths back to the old world, so they remove the portals to force people to choose. By doing this, Dalaran is probably going to look like Shatt does now. For some of us, it's going to be a lot of fun. "Oh, I didn't know that was here!" Will we be back to "Lagforge"?

    --Gimmlette

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