On the portals… We wanted to consolidate that into something that was more intuitive and made more sense and also showcased some more of our city art better. On the other hand wow classic gold we also didn't want to be in a long term world where three years from now, players picking up WoW were learning that the best place to set your hearthstone is Legion Dalaran because that's actually the place that has portals to all these different places in the world including these current capital cities. That's a very strange place for the game to be in in the long term, which is why we've been doing this progressively.

The overall intent wasn't to reduce inconvenience in some massive way, we added new portals in certain locations, consolidated them, removed the old portals, and then of course heard a round of feedback that led to us reintroducing a Caverns of Time portal because that seemed like the main outlier pain point in this new world we had set up.Poring over the feedback, I saw one comment that stuck out to me in particular. This person said that even though there was a precedent to removing portals, the reality is that taking stuff away from players never feels good. At this point, how do you add stuff without just pissing people off down the road when you need to scale it back or take it out entirely (like Artifact weapons)?

This touches on your earlier question about things we learned from BFA and the feedback to it. There's no question, we're in the almost unique position given the game's longevity and the longer-term aspirations of balancing long and short term.

A lot of the times, players react to a decision and they're bewildered by it and no one could understand why we would do something that makes the game clearly less fun today, but it's because we've been burned in the past and we're worried about some consequence three years down the line.

Taken to their ultimate conclusion, what do Artifact weapons mean [if we keep them forever?] Do they mean you literally never get a weapon upgrade again in World of Warcraft… that eight years from now you're still wielding your Ashbringer? And then, at the same time, if we signed up for those indefinite costs and we committed to never taking things out, we might have never made an Artifact system in the first place, and we were freer with it and did cooler things because we had a sense from the start that this was going to be an expansion-specific feature, so let's pull out all the stops and not worry about how do we leave room in this system for progression for the next three, five years down the road once this expansion is over.

At the same time, I think we've likely been leaning a bit too far in that direction cheap wow classic gold We've been burned, without question, by adding systems and feeling the burden of layered systems that need to be maintained going forward in terms of complexity and balance, and just in terms of what goes into making the game. But that doesn't mean that players don't still want cool new things as they increase their character's level, as they go into new worlds, as they enter new expansions. We need to be more willing than we have been in the last couple of years and expansions to make permanent additions to the game and accept that, yes, there will be some untidiness down the road but it'll be worth it because it's exciting for players. People want that out of an MMO, they want an RPG as you're adventuring and progressing and gaining new things.

Yeah, that makes sense. Well I appreciate you making time to chat!