Originally Posted by Bashiok (Source)
Portals are removed as we don’t want you to have your hearth in an old city from an expansion you’ve outgrown just so you can have quick and instant travel anywhere you like. Those expansions had content that was far removed from things like auction houses and class trainers, and thus, contained portals. They were removed from those things because we didn’t want the expansion content (which would hold the bulk of the playerbase) to in turn also remove them from the classic Azeroth world. That’s no longer the case. Cataclysm has content near your faction capitals, which have auction houses and class trainers.
And for new characters leveling, who will eventually hit Shattrath and Dalaran, they now have auction houses and class trainers in place of portals.
As soon as you can fly in Azeroth this really does cease to be an issue. It will not be much different than flying from Borean Tundra to Ulduar.
I can see that since the OP is buried that enough people disagree with this being an issue, and for that I’m at least thankful that I’m not fighting a complete uphill battle in explaining it.
[...] It’s the first day, the first few HOURS, of course something new is going to be jarring.
But worse yet is that the entire plan isn’t unveiled, there’s no flying in the old world, there’s none of the new content. The one thing I do agree with is that ideally portals shouldn’t have been removed until the 7th, but that would have meant a ton of additional development time just to give an extra two weeks of insta-porting goodness.
One benefit is you don’t encourage all of the current re-rollers to hearth in the Shattrath or Dalaran, and then pull it away on Cataclysm launch. That seems like a worse scenario, actually.
I don’t doubt that this, like so many other topics that spring up day 1 of a patch, will die a quiet death once people actually play and see how it affects them instead of simply estimating. That’s not going to happen until Cataclysm in this case, though. Such are the growing pains of expansion life.
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I think the portals should have been moved to capital cities. Preferably all of the capital cities.
For those of us who still enjoy older content at level 80-85 for the purpose of completing achievements, it’s become more of a chore to do so. Being able to complete old reputation dailies in both Northrend as well as Outlands was made easy through the use of portals.
At the very least, one way portals to Shat/Dalaran from 1 or more capital cities is in order.