The Burning of Dalaran portals is the best thing I've seen these days. Heck, it could be very well it own patch theme.
Ugh, they need to stop immediately.
I did miss this, did blizz comment why are they doing this? Why are they keep removing some stuff from the game? Details make game fun to explore, some little facts and tricks in the game worth a lot of fun, and they keep and keep removing everything from older expansions
Removed
He comes across as boorish even though my guess is he was trying to be funny.Removed
The intro was the best thing xDbut yeah taliessen flying to farm something for the xth time on the xth toon makes it so mcuh worse.it just adds up and is not adding to the fun. the farming is bad enough, no reason to add insult to injury.
Now is your time NA, I believe in you! :'DI think some quality of life is ok, but I think some things are a bit exaggerated. Sometimes to a point where it's almost more confusing, demanding or exhausting, than simple, fun and convinient.An additional mage, as mentioned in the video, who can teleport you to different places depending on e.g. achievements or rep could indeed be one idea? Well not EVERY zone, raid and dungeon, but places like Caverns of Time etc. Also I wouldn't mind a teleport to The Steam Pools, depending on what it has to offer. It could be a good place for a permanent home to the Black Market AH among other rich man spoils, depending on what happens to azeroth next of course? I'm semi-joking about this next part, but that gets me thinking... The Steam Pools is run by gadgetzan... :3I'd watch and/or bet my gold on high risk high reward live War Games/rated arena and duels in a small colosseum, maybe even participate. Kinda like a mix of the Brawlers Guild and PvP'ing in front of Org/SW or in gurubashi arena?Goblin: *Come on, come on, come on! Plaaaaaace ya' bets before the gates open, who'll win this round?*
You can slow travel as much as you want.Nobody ever forced you to use the fast portals.
its true they only removed portals to increase player play times.
OK, I might be a bit naive about this, but this has confused me for a while now. Why is "increase player play times" supposed to be a good thing for Blizzard? They get a set monthly subscription fee from the players regardless of play time that month. It is the same revenue for them if the play time is 1 hour or 300 hours. So, increasing the play time metric doesn't give them any more revenue. And there are no in-game advertisements either, so it doesn't increase ad revenue either. Under this basis, shouldn't Blizzard prefer to REDUCE play time, to decrease their costs (server load, tech support required, etc.)? It's like saying that the All-You-Can-Eat Buffet restaurant is making decisions that don't increase the number of customers in the restaurant, but rather encourages the customers they do have to make extra trips back to the food to refill their plate more often... why would a business want to run that way? I always wondered why people focus so much on the "play time" metric as if Blizzard wants this to be as high as possible... if I were in charge, I'd want that metric low. I've already got the money, after all, in the form of the monthly subscription. After that, "play time" is more a measure of my cost rather than revenue. Would be different if the monthly fee scales with play time or if there are in-game ads, but as it is, play time has to work against Blizzard, not in their favor.
Finally some sanity.
Yep, Bartrex is right on ^ Inflating the time it takes to travel from point A to point B means you'll be able to accomplish less per session, which means more play time (and in the long run more sub time, which of course is the goal) is required if you're set on accomplishing w/e task(s). I think Blizz/Activision is looking at it as, once people have gotten what they want out of the game, they're more likely to stop playing for a while, so let's make it take longer to get things done and give a phony excuse about why this is a good change. Pretty diabolical way to generate some extra money.
OK, I guess I understand better now. I did say that I was probably naive about this. I supposed that proved to be true, based on what Bartrex and Necropos both said. So, slowing down play (resulting in more /timeplayed ) ultimately leads to more subscription revenue by catching players who just try to get stuff done and then suspend their accounts for a few months until more content is out. This is probably offset by adding server load in for players who were never going to suspend their accounts, but now are just adding to /timeplayed when they would have kept their subscription up anyway. But the most recent change with portals was mainly going to hit people farming old content for transmog and mount drops... those players don't generally suspend their accounts for a few months at a time, do they? It seems to me that the sort of player who cares to farm old content as a preferred mode is not likely to ever suspend their subscription, because they can probably always find something else worth farming when they finally get the drops they need. So, again, Blizzard's change is designed to increase the /timeplayed metric on a group of players who wouldn't naturally be the ones to suspend their subscription anyway... I'm still not convinced that this is a good business decision on Blizzard's part! I'm still seeing this as a move that increased their costs (which are rather directly correlated with /timeplayed) while not increasing revenue (because old-content-farmers are not the demographic that suspends their subscriptions for a few months anyway).