Stormwind and Orgrimmar portals now exist in Shattrath and Dalaran
We had a number of instances where people were coming back to the game after not playing for a long period, in some cases years, and having a really difficult time finding their way to where they should be.
Stormwind and Orgrimmar portals now exist in Dalaran and Shattrath to help them get to the relevant cities in Cataclysm; one for each faction, and only those two portals exist to facilitate that intent.
[...] Well specifically for BC you could have played the entire expansion and still never purchased a flying mount, and if you timed it right you could have played all of Wrath and never purchased flying there either. That could be quite a bit of running, if you happened to even look up and know where you should be going to begin this whole Cata-whatever-it's-called.
We try to lessen or remove situations where someone logs in after a long time to maybe check out the game again, and sees there's some daunting task they need to begin before being able to really get back into playing.
One that still exists, at least for me, is bag clutter. I'll log into alts, look at my bags and bank, and be so overwhelmed I'll log out. Those types of situations are almost immediate stops to someone's desire to log back in or continue playing.
Anyway, to you or me, yeah it seems silly (how can they not know how to get back to Stormwind!?), to many past players though it's a legitimately helpful change to try to make it a smooth welcome-back experience.
And yeah, you guys can use them now too. Whatevs. (Source)
LoL a Blue post I would guess.
I never liked the decision to remove the portals. People already had to go to Ogramar and Stormwind to use the new Cata portals so Im pretty sure most people were going to be setting their home point in one of those two places.
So what if a number of people chose to keep their home point in Dal? It would have cut down on the lag in Stormwind and Ogramar.
Even after the portals were removed there were some clever ways to get around. Even if you dont have a mage handy to teleport you:
Use the portal in Dal to the Caverns of Time
Use your Tournament reward tabard to teleport to the tournament grounds.
Use the way gate in Sholazar to get to Ungoro and back. First time I found out this actually worked I was pretty shocked.
Use the TolBarad tabard to get to either Hellscreams Reach or the Baradin Warders camp, depending on faction.
Use one of the guild rewards that let you hearth without using your hearth stone.
Teleport to the dark gate entrance to Outland from any major city.
From Shat go to the Isle of Quel'Danas and take the flight point
Druids can teleport to moonglade
Engineers can use all their various teleport sites.
I wish Blizzard would make up its mind, they talk a lot about taking out the things in game that make it more of a grind and less fun then they turn around and remove portals making it harder to get places. Now they have relented
somewhat and returned two of the portals. Maybe they just got tired of the QQ.
They wanted to make use of the old Vanilla lands and they did a great job of it. But in so doing they made Northrend and Outlands as devoid of players as Vanilla area had been.
The only way they are going to change that in future expansions is to add content to all three areas. If they do that you better believe there will be QQ about not having the portals in place.