Portals begone

I play Warcraft to escape, to go to some other world. Like Shade so wonderfully wrote, I want to kill Internet dragons! As such, I'm with Qieth: I'm glad they removed the Dalaran and Shattrath portals. As he says:

Come here, son. Have a hard candy. I’ll tell you a story from my youth.

An excess of portals means that when you play Warcraft, you aren't so much logging into an alternate world. It's more like you are logging into a staging area, and then you select a portal to go to one little part of that world that is interesting. Dalaran becomes more like a filing cabinet or a bookmark list.

I certainly don't want to return to the days of classic WoW where they made you travel just to waste time. Duskwood questing was particularly horrible, because the quest givers and the quest goals were at opposite ends of the zone, and couldn't yet get a mount yet.

However, what's a few minutes of sitting on a wyvern or a zeppelin? It's pure goodness. It puts a pause between moving across massive distances, and it lets you gawk at some cool Azeroth scenery. You feel like you are going somewhere, rather than selecting a bookmark from your bookmark list. It puts the world back in the World.