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Why Don't MMOs Allow Easier Transportation?
Rock, Paper, Shotgun is running an opinion piece which asks why the majority of MMOs force users to spend a fair portion of their time traveling around a virtual world. At what point does moving from one location to another become a chore? From the article:
"I love big, explorable worlds. They're by far one of my most favourite things about games. Running off in a direction without any idea what I might encounter is a rare pleasure, and one far more likely to result in an exciting discovery in a game's world than the real one. ... Not knowing what's coming up is huge and exciting, and I'd not want to take it away from gaming, not ever. But you know what? Once I've been there, that moment's gone. I've discovered it already. I did the exploring. I don't need to spend half an hour of my time that I've allocated for playing games trudging at whatever stupidly slow speed a game's decided to impose upon me. There is no good reason, whatsoever, to not just let me be there."
If you allow teleporting from anywhere to anywhere it doesn't matter how big you make your world, because to everyone it will feel small.
In regards to why World of Warcraft uses the "flying on a griffin" form of "slow portals", that's cause they've read Bartle.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Keeping it real... as real as a game like that could really be anyway...
sudo mount --milk --sugar
The Sony game "Free Realms" allows you to transport from anywhere to a certain number of pre-defined portals. I'm sure the world would feel bigger if you had to walk everywhere, but it still feels big because you have to walk to a portal before you can use it, and explore all areas yourself to get quests and solve things. I did get bored with the game, as I do with any mmorpg, but that aspect I liked.
'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
Of course, you could go the other way and make location actually matter - like, for example, EVE Online.
More time travelling = more time playing
More time playing = more money earned
A better alternative would be automated transportation.
You tell the game you want to go to X, and your character starts moving to X on its own and is there 30 minutes later (or whatever time it takes to get there), without requiring your input.
However, since games like world of warcraft are strongly against bots of any kind, it's not likely to come.
I say allowing players to run arbitrary bots to automate what can be automated would make MMORPGs much better.
..than to arrive. The game is a simulation of "real" life, and in real life much of your time is spent stuck on the highway. I wonder why MMOs don't have traffic jams and why WoW doesn't have a shortage of rental animals for transporation, just like the real world
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Everquest one was mostly ruined when they included instant portal stones in the Plane of Knowledge.
WoW lost most of its charm when flying mounts were introduced. Imagine how epic Northrend could have been if there was actually some danger involved traversing the Lich King's lair, rather than flying over it all unmolested.
He pointed out that the fun does NOT come from seeing the murder/special effect/what have you.
It comes from the anticipation. That's why all his films are so great - he elevated this into a rule and applied it everywhere.
The games designers are just doing the same.....
One Word:
Moongates
All MMOs have some kind of timesinks. It may be grinding, traveling and so on. If there was no timesinks, the game would run out of content pretty fast.
When asked why, the answer is almost always: "It's 2014".
After playing a little bit of WoW again after Lich King came out, yeah, it was amazingly tedious after having played AoC and WAR. EVE is the only game with more tedious travel, but the concept of trading off cargo space over time is one of the primary mechanics that drives the economy. Different regions produce different things (like Electrical Engineering datacores) which someone needs to ship to the final destination, unless buyers want to fly over to the place themselves. But they're usually willing to pay a markup on them to avoid having to spend half an hour of real life time flying out and back.
WoW didn't have linked flight paths when it came out, which meant that if you were flying a long distance, not only was it incredibly tedious, but you also couldn't get up to go grab a sandwich or something. It was actually the main reason I played a mage in the game - they could teleport to different cities, which did a lot to eliminate the hated tedium of travel in the game.
I don't need to spend half an hour of my time that I've allocated for playing games trudging at whatever stupidly slow speed a game's decided to impose upon me. There is no good reason, whatsoever, to not just let me be there.
You are paying, let's say, $15 per month for the privilege of playing a game?
Gee, I wonder why the game designers would want to make you spend more time playing their game...
a WoW Undeground?
If you don't know what you're doing, you can't make mistakes.
It really depends a lot on the game. In Ultima Online you had a system where you could take a bunch of runes and mark them at a location and then teleport to that location later on. To do this you needed to have some magic skill which meant less points you could spend on other things. For the non mages other ingame crafters could make Rune Books and sell them and also scrolls of teleportation and Portal. Its not a technical problem and more developer laziness. SWG even has a reward that is an instant transport ship that people could obtain.
In WOW the mages can do the same things but just to specified town locations. Still in WoW Engineers can make transporters to a couple of other locations. Yes not everything in WoW is as good as it could be but its the unfortunate yard stick that others try to measure up to.
The MyTh - I am a figment of the Imagination - [Im Probably even not here]
I think Guild Wars method was one the best method. Once you discovered a given post (Like "towns", "villages", ...), you could just open the map, click on the post and warp to it instantly. You still had some walking to do if you wanted to go to some dangerous place far away, but this was a good idea, IMHO. Death penalty was high enough to make traveling to those dangerous places a real adventure, even with simple bots with you.
I quite frankly hated the transportation method of World of Warcraft. Unless you were a Mage, traveling was so boring, time-consuming and awful that the "business strategy" behind those limitations was crystal clar.
I never found a clever transporation as Guild Wars did it. This game had also an automatic path finder if you were on a field and you clicked on some reachable place, that worked more or less. Sometimes you'll be just stuck on a wall but, generally, the AI would find the path alone very easily, even if the path were quite long.
I rarely found so clever transporation methods, even in Free MMORPG. I know, Free MMORPG aren't free. They place transportation limitations so you would give them money to get past those limitations.
But, quite frankly, I don't see that as a clever business method. If you piss the player too much, he will just get away. Blizzard thought about this in giving mount access to level 30 (level 20 in future, I heard) but that wasn't good enough. Gryphon transportation is totally retarded (Let's just make the path 3 times longer that it needs to be !) and flying mounts needs to be controlled, as there are no automatic path finder for human players IIRC, so that's also boring and time-consuming.
I find this very stupid that in a lot of games, mages aren't able to use transportation magic at a high level to teleport at any location.
"But you know what? Once I've been there, that moment's gone. I've discovered it already. I did the exploring."
That my friend is why you are a couch potato playing MMO games rather than hiking in the Rockies or scuba diving in the Maldives out there in the real world.
Small is not a bad thing.
With Guild Wars, you have to run/walk/fight to new cities/towns first (or get someone to "run" you there - e.g. do all the hardwork while you just tag along). After that, you can teleport to that town or any other town you have been before.
It's a _chore_ having to keep running to places you've been before.
Like "same old" cutscenes you can't skip, but must keep pressing "Next" (to kill anything that gets in your way) till you finally reach the real destination (the actual battle).
Being able to teleport straight to places you've been before is a good thing. I don't care if the world feels small in that way - as long as it's diverse enough.
It's like being in a small shop with a huge variety of products, and a different product on every inch of the shelves that you can choose if you like. Compared to being in a huge hypermarket with shelves and shelves of the _same_ items, so you need to walk about a lot more to get to the stuff you want.
Guild Wars is a bit like WoW Lite in some ways. So a lot of ppl won't like it.
It's a great way to stay in shape.
I think the answer is that some games don't provide instant transportation because some people like it that way and others don't. As long as the trip provides some reward, such as experience points or items, I don't mind it. Obviously from the earlier comments, some people do.
It's called competition and is how a free market works. If a product is truly the best, everyone will flock to it. But if product A and B provide the same basic product but work a little different, they will attract different consumers. If a product can remain in business, they have succeeded in their enterprise.
Being number one in a market isn't necessarily the best place to be. Having the best return on your money is the best place to be, and a product doesn't have to be number one to do that.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
A lot of people don't necessarily like traveling. World of Warcraft, to me, is a perfect balance of required travel versus ease to get to locations. You can teleport to any major city, and from there... head to your destination. Typically your travel time won't exceed 15 minutes. Look at any movie, or story... and most of the content comes from the journey there... not just once you get there. "I've been there a lot!" ... grats. They have summoning stones in World of Warcraft by the instances so your lazy butt doesn't have to run/fly/swim/whatever.
Fact is... your post seems more out of lazy ADD'ness than anything. You want to complain? Go play Everquest 1.
Transportation? Sending criminals to penal colonies? Do they really do that in games? That would be a serious waste of time in games. All I did was nicked a sheep and then I had to spend the next 20 years of my game playing time in a prison camp in Australia.
Stickiness
If I have visited New York, I should be able to teleport there or get their quicker than a 8 hour flight with out a stop in Atlanta first.
Of course it's slow and sort-of sucks. That's it's purpose.
The only real point of online "games" is suck up as much of your money as possible for as many months as possible. Actual content is expensive and as long as your credit card payment doesn't bounce, there's absolutely no reason in the world why any company would make any game any better than the minimum to keep you from canceling.
On a less obvious note, the perceived value of a task is related to how much time and work you have invested it it, making the value of time spent in the game a self-fulfilling wish (I spent hundreds of hours doing this, therefor it must be a valuable task). Want something really interesting to do with your time? Find or make a job that doesn't suck. Learn to SCUBA dive. Meet new people. Find a girlfriend (or a wife). Go explore the real world.
Off topic, but where would you come from that NY is an 8 hour flight and stops in Altanta? South America or something? Just curious...
I played EQ for a while and I never acheived an uber level--traveling was still risky for me. I could buff up and avoid the worst of it, but yeah, getting from here to there was often a difficult choice. For the areas where I felt no risk traveling through, those were short.
I think what would make sense is to base a teleport on the players level, the area level, and distance. If you are at a high enough level that the area doesn't pose much risk, then let them transport over it, especially if you have to go from one place to another through easy levels. It makes the game play better for high level players and gives an extra benefit for long term play.
If you've been somewhere before and can 'teleport' back quicker, and someone who hasn't been there before must follow the path, it gives you a possibly unbeatable advantage.
Why don't you stop wining... if you are bored with travel, your MMOs world is too big.
What's you're looking for is called a "single player game". Try it sometime. They're all but dead but a far superior gaming experience.
Another implication of instantaneous travel would be much less complex markets. This would be a major change for a game like Eve (MMO internet spaceships) where the difficulty of getting somewhere with something is a key part of the game.
The issue isn't that transportation is slow, it's that it's boring.
This is where static content fails. There is hardly ever anything new going on in an area you've already visited. Maybe game developers should focus less on expanding worlds when they do expansion packs and such, and more on coming up with systems for dynamic content delivery that mimics a living world better.
I wouldn't mind a 10 min trek through a known area, if the monsters changed, little random quests popped up, or whatever else happened on the way.
The issue is plainly the static nature of the world, not a lack of teleportation (or whatever other system is suggested)
I've played only a couple MMORPGS, but FFXI was far, far worse in this regard than WoW. It took at least an hour just to walk to another area. And there are no flight paths. WoW isn't a perfect game, but I think this is one of the things I actually feel it does pretty well.
you could train your run skill up to silly numbers and just fly across its landscape. Throw in a dearth of portals from location to location and you could get anywhere you needed. When one aspect of unattended play shone in a game, AC had player run portal bots. With the ability of a character with the right skills to link and open to two portals it made for even better fun. Best yet, most portal bots operated as buff bots and would fully load your player with an hour or more of incredible (okay - near game breaking for lower level) abilities.
Throw in the fact it was the first really zone less game and it make running around AC fun.
Still, why not do it? For the simple reason, increasing play time and subscription time.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Ah, the RL argument. Excuse me while I resurrect for the 6th time today, and begin again with shooting fire from my hands.
We are all God's parents.
Running is gameplay.
If you could teleport anywhere within a game at any time instantly, the best places, best quests, and so forth would all be overcrowded. It's like if you could teleport anywhere instantly in real life. The California coast would be heaving every weekend and evening and numerous "hotspots" would be crowded with tens of thousands of people 24/7. Popular areas in existing games have demonstrated this, since they're usually the easiest places to get to. A key example is outside the bank in Ultima Online's Britain.
1) Economy - some games, like EVE, go out of their way to make travel difficult - there's even a cost to moving stuff around. This allows for very interesting realistic economies where some people can make their living by shuttling stuff from where it's cheap to where it's expensive. 2) Military - If everyone could instantly teleport anywhere, the weaker faction would never have a chance against a stronger one - everyone could instantly teleport in. With slow transport, hit-and-run tactics, ambushes, securing the city entrances first, and a whole host of other tactics could be introduced. 3) Realism - the feeling of having a large world. This one is mentioned a lot, but how can a remote area be remote if you can get there in 1 minute?
Do you have a fridge next to your computer?
Bad jobs motivate employees to do just enough work to not get fired. Bad subscription games will entertain you just enough to keep you from quitting.
As a recovered Everquest player, I've begun to follow what I call 'The 10 minute rule'. If I walk/run/do nothing for 10 minutes in a row in any game, I uninstall the game and throw it away. No second chances. I wait for reviews before I will invest in a game to avoid wasting my money.
Good game design keeps players playing with engaging content that is enjoyable to play through again and again. Bad game design creates some form of incentive to entice players to slog through boring content. Massively multiplayer game design doesn't *have* to waste our time, but it will continue to do so if you let it.
oxonobiously is my new favourite word :)
Jumping 20 systems to get somewhere in EVE really can be a bitch, especially if you rely on the autopilot. There's many things that effect the overall rate of travel like how fast your ship can align, how fast it accelerates, how man AU/s it gets, how many AU it is between gates, if you fall short of jump range making you travel 10-1000 meters...
I know EVE is a largely PVP based game, so it's designed largely around it. This travel time plays an incredible role, and putting your resources where you need them to fight.
In EVE, the game (for PVP'ers) would be radically perverted if travel was eliminated. Many parts of EVE can be shot to pieces if Newtonian physics are applied, but they do focus on realism as long as it's convenient to the objective.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
... the way it's done in WoW is as close to perfection as it can get. There has to be a trade-off between reducing the boring travel times and making the world feel big enough and the guys at Blizzard have really got it right.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
AO has the grid/woompas/fixergrid/gridwarping/warp time and space/beacon warping/yalms but dosen't 100% rely on it so you'll end up walking some time or other.
It may be an 8 year old game but it doesn't suffer from the silly issue of endless grind-like travel.
Why would you pay to wait???
As the Lead Designer of the PC game Majesty explained to me the technical term is called "Dead Time." If the player is _bored_, you hav _failed_ as a game designer.
Anyone who thinks waiting 20 mins in a MMO getting one from one destination, has never played D&D. D&D has almost _zero_ dead time. Want to travel north? Ok, GM rolls a die, and usually 1 or 2 things happen.
1. Ok, you're there. Now what?
2. Half way there you get attacked. Now what?
In CRPGs, there needs to be a balance. Ultima Online showed that if any one can recall, then yes, the world does seem small. WoW has shown us that suckers, er gamers, will put up with paying to wait. In Diablo 2, there are check-points (waypoints) that once you reach them, you can instantly travel back to any of the ones you have reached. Guid Wars does this exact same thing. Want to travel back to any city you have previously reached. Bam, there. I would limit the distance warped, or allow mages to _sell_ tiered portal scrolls that allow for greater distances.
Playing the SWG beta, one aspect of the experience stood out. When attempting to travel from planet to planet, you had to sit at the shuttle station for up to 5 minutes.
I did a lot of resource gathering, so I spent most of my game time out in the wilderness. The shuttle stop ended up being the place where I was most likely to interact with other players. I later learned that this was by design.
http://www.raphkoster.com/gaming/socialization.shtml
http://www.raphkoster.com/2005/12/09/forcing-interaction/
In City of Heroes, it's very quick to get from zone to zone and many characters can summon individuals or the whole team to them from anyhwhere in the zone. The PVP is only in certain PVP zones. And movement speeds are enhanced as early as level 6, with the full travel powers available at level 14.
On the other hand, in World of Warcrack, where many servers are all-PVP all the time, it's vitally important to not have everyone who cares able to show up within seconds. That totally removes the element of maneuver from the PVP game, and it's down to how many Horde are logged in vs. how many Alliance.
Something sucks in real life, therefore it should also suck in role playing games? Even though there's no technical reason why it must be so?
Ah, my Everquest memories of 'making the run' to ToV north and Vex Thal. Sure it was a pain in the ass, to me it only made victory sweeter - granted once you'd figured out how to pharm the good zones, it was never terribly difficult. Trying to rez your way up to Air island 7...now that *was* a memory I'd rather forget :P
Project Entropia, now Entropia Universe, allowed warping. The work was in finding the warp points. Sometimes if you died close enough to one, it gave you the warp point. After that you could warp to and from that point.
Im a troll because I disagree with you.
Our minds seem to handle this for us in daily life. While enduring repetitive travel (commuting, for instance), we tune out a little, our minds wander, and the more often we travel the route, the less 'immersive' the experience becomes.
Computer games could mimick this to some degree, perhaps by increasing your maximum allowable speed each time you travel a given route. This should probably be a gradual increase of some kind, perhaps asymptotic towards an eventual uber-max, would be a good place to start.
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
In WoW you need the 5-10 minute flights or you'd just never pee and die. Blizzard recognizes that their game is more addictive than crack and players dying from not peeing would cut into the bottom line. That's why there's no instant travel in WoW even though they continue to dumb-down every other aspect of the game.
In EvE online, near as I can tell, they want to replicate the tedium of space travel. They've done a very good job of simulating what flying around in outer space would be like -- mostly just flying from one place to another with a few minutes of action every so often.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
In my day all we had were Scrolls of Town Portal, and we liked it, damnit.
Transportation in City of Heroes is so much faster than other MMO's I've played. Train stations or boats allow you to quickly move from one to zone to almost others in the same level range. There's a multitude of shortcuts (Pocket D teleporter, day job teleporters). There are Supergorup base teleporters that take you to almost every zone. Once you get to level 25, you can get the Ouroboros portal, which you can summon wherever you want and allows you to instantly teleport to the key high-level zones that you visit a lot.
That's just between zones. In the world itself, or even in instanced missions, you can move extremely fast if you pick up a travel power (first available at level 14). Flight is the slowest, but most versatile. "Slowest" is relative, it's still faster than epic flying mounts in WoW. There's also Super Jumping, Super Speed, and Teleportation, in increasing order of speed and difficulty to use.
After hitting boost range and teleporting across a huge zone in a half dozen hops, when I go play WoW with friends it just takes so damn long to get anywhere. :( Especially in the old world where the ground mounts feel so slooooow.
A lot of this discussion is rather binary, with talk of walking versus instant teleportation. I think the real answer is somewhere in the middle. I don't think instant teleportation is the answer. I think faster moving speeds are the key. I don't have a problem "walking" from point A to point B, but the base travel speed in most games is painfully slow. Hell, even normal mount speeds in WoW are too slow (epic land speed feels about right to me).
It's also interesting to note how games like WoW and City of Heroes periodically add new features that help players get around faster. Ground mounts in WoW used to be level 40. Now they are 30. In the next patch they will be 20. Many classes now have talents that boost their running and/or mount speed. So developers obviously know this is a big issue amongst players. I think as a game's life goes on year after year it becomes a bigger and bigger issue for many players, which is probably why the speedups have been slowly added over time.
It also seems very obvious to me why the slow speeds are there to begin with. As others have stated it's simply to ensure it takes players longer to get thru game content. Plain and simple, it's a timesink. But as I said, over time this quickly becomes an annoyance to most, which is why many games keep trying to shoehorn in various kinds of speedups.
Phantasy Star Universe (through some miracle is still running) allows you to pretty much get anywhere from your room (essentially a store house for your things). Any field base that you've been to can be accessed by going to a NPC who transports you there. However, you have to have visited all these places in order to get transported there. I've always thought this ruined the open feeling of the game and made it feel closed. That being said, I guess I haven't had to spend countless hours traversing pointless terrain just to actually play the game. If you played Phantasy Star Online and like the casual hack 'n slash feel then you should definitely try out the game. The player population is dwindling and just a sliver of the WoW pop. would make the game much funner. Please play with me ;_;
Oblivion is not an MMO but it implements a fairly elegant solution to this problem.
You're allowed to fast travel between all the major cities right off the bat and other explored locations once they have been discovered.
You can also acquire a horse and ride around.
Seriously, why they didn't just put the One Ring into a wicker basket, give it to the King of the Eagles, and have him fly directly to Mount Doom and drop the basket into the pit of lava, thereby saving me some 1500 pages of dreary reading about overland travel, I don't understand. There is absolutely no reason why anyone should have to spend time traveling through Middle Earth in order to get anywhere. In conclusion, Lord of the Rings sucked, and was a massive waste of time.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Server load is the primary reason you can't travel instantaneously everywhere. It prevents flashmobs from forming and driving performance through the ground. Walking/riding/flying is the in-world application of this concept. If it takes 10 minutes to get there, not everyone will come (because of course it's 10 minutes back.) Also as players approach a crowded area they ease into the lag and can decide to get away before they get into the middle of it. If humans could freely teleport around the planet, they would have crushed the UCLA Medical Center last Thursday.
From a design point of view it encourages social behavior to get people to travel in packs. The more social people are the more they play the game. In addition it becomes another improvement point for the player--faster travel, along with better armor/attack rating/spells, etc, etc. This gives players more options about what to pursue for their character which is good.
Besides time spent on a mount isn't wasted. There are tons of stuff you can do while on a mount, just not killing.
A less practical reason is to cut down twinking and PLing.
All WoW and any MMO(or any other activity here on this earth for that matter) amount to are time sinks because without time all games and beings here on this planet would cease to exist.
Please let me know when you find a way around having to use so called 'time' in order to have fun.
Guild Wars allows instantaneous travel to any location in the gameworld that you've already visited. EVE Online does not. This is fine because in Guild Wars, the game revolves around the adventure. It's okay for players to be hopping around quickly because the designers want the players collaborating on missions and quests, not walking. EVE Online, on the other hand, features an economy. With instantaneous travel, you lose arbitrage, piracy, shiping companies, etc. and key aspects of the economy cease to exist. I don't know about WoW, where it may be arbitrary, but in the two MMO's with which I have any experience, the decision to or to not allow instantaneous travel seems appropriate for the gameplay model.
Virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea
I'm going to chime in with everyone else and point out that while instantaneous teleportation to anywhere probably wouldn't work -- it would make the world feel smaller, and make it much more difficult to build any sort of a decent dungeon -- having some sort of teleportation is just useful.
Teleportation in Nexus TK works like so: At any given point, you're either in Vortex (high-level hunting area), or you're in one of three kingdoms. In each of these places, there are four gates -- north, south, east, and west. And you have a spell which takes you to these places, instantly.
There's also your home point -- could be an inn, your house, or a subpath area. Use a yellow scroll (costs one coin; absurdly cheap) and you teleport there instantly. That's not a homestone with a 60 second wait -- that's an instantaneous effect, zero cooldown spell.
Travel between kingdoms is usually a few steps (no more than a 10-20 second walk) from the North Gate of a given kingdom, and maybe another ten seconds to switch servers. That same system also provides shortcuts to specific places within kingdoms.
All of this is in the large, registered player, post-level-50 content. They recently added an area (Tangun) for level 50 and under, where players are essentially trapped in a single large map. Yet even here, teleportation to the "home point" within this map is possible, and you can pick up a horse at about level 2, and it'll take maybe five minutes to ride around that entire map, if that.
Hell, even clans have crafting areas, and often various instantaneous portals from the clan hall to various points of interest.
Now, it's not WoW, but I honestly don't see the point in it taking 20 minutes to get anywhere, unless the act of getting there is somehow part of a quest. Whether the world feels small depends mostly on what you do in it -- if you're always going to the same places, yes, it seems small, so stop doing that.
The way to make your world seem larger is content, not gimmicks like slow portals.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
put a handheld game for your character to play (which you play) while walking, running, flying, etc. i think playing some chess while traveling would be pretty nice at times.
I think the one thing I really missed in WoW was the Town Portal from Diablo. I understand having to explore to learn new paths (*) however, when you're out in the middle of nowhere (or a dungeon) it would be nice to be able to jump back to town for repairs/selling - which you can do with the Hearthstone - and then be able to go right back to where you were, the lacking feature.
(*) IIRC, when you get to Sentinal Hill in Westfall and are sent back to Stormwind, they Gryphon Master says he has plenty of Gryphons trained to fly that route. So if they Gryphons know how to get to the destination, why do I have to go there first to gain the flightpath? It's all based on where the Gryphons KNOW, not me. And they know destinations, not starting points.
Your post was *not* insightful. Everybody knows games aren't real life. It is useful for games to not model real life when doing so can make the game more fun. Walking through the same boring areas where you won't get any experience points and also won't experience anything you haven't 20 times before is *boring*. Games are supposed to be fun. Adding things like the ability to instantly teleport to anywhere you've already been means you can cut out the boring travel time. Whether or not it is realistic is beside the point.
Another example: hit points (or heath, if you prefer). They're a useful abstraction, but it doesn't really stand up to close examination. In real life, attack effectiveness varies according to what part of the body you're attacking, the weapon you're using, etc. In real life there are a lot more ways to "instakill" somebody than there are in most games. In real life, somebody isn't going to be able to fight back after you hit them over the head really hard with a giant hammer. Even so, hit points are a useful abstraction because it makes the game easier to understand - it also makes comparing the relative merits of various weapons, attacks, skills, etc possible - although at that point you're getting into the realm of attributes that determine a character's ability to withstand attacks of a certain type.
Anyway, my point is this: Allowing such things in a game is a good idea when doing so makes the game more fun and doesn't destroy any of the core mechanics of the game. If you were talking about a racing game, for instance, allowing instant teleportation from one part of the track to another whenever you want would be a bad idea, obviously. However, allowing you to select which track you want to race on next without having to experience the travel time between the two race tracks doesn't detract from the main point of the game - it just makes the game more playable and fun.
If I understand your argument:
The initial exploration is interesting and challenging but the second time through it boring so why can't I just skip it and get to where I will inevitably be, instantly.
The corallary to that is:
The initial killing of a monster is interesting and challenging but the second time is boring, so why don't we just skip it and say I killed all the orcs.
Perhaps you should seek treatment for for ADD instead of trying to get game designs to completely alter the game play and balance of power in the game.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
1. Overcrowding due to easy of access 2. Shrinking of the game world due to perceived lack of any distance 3. Content runs out quickly due to immediacy of transport 4. Travel is a general time sink slowing the progress of characters 5. Travel can also be a money sink to allow a bit of money back into the economy 6. Encourages grouping if used with things FORCING more than one person to summon (e.g. Warlock summon in WoW, Meeting Stones in WoW ) 7. Instant travel removes the sense of achievement at getting somewhere cool and difficult 8. Sometimes travel can further the story line by making it seems a great adventure 9. It causes the players to play longer allowing more revenue generation 10. Travel can also be used to force people to experience certain game content they would otherwise "fly over" (e.g. Northrend in WoW) There are many reasons why instant travel is a bad idea for an MMO. While it sure is convenient and I like it, the idea of having anyplace instantly accessible is just BAD in so many ways. I noticed here that many people are complaining about forming groups etc. Uh, not the games problem that people are slow and not on time. Many of these folks are blaming the "time to get somewhere" for people resource problems. Gamers are notoriously late to places and groups. There are exceptions but...far and few between. Most MMOs have some way to facilitate a groups meeting up. Portals, Summons, Meeting Stones can all be implemented allowing instant travel even from the darnedest places. There are exceptions to the time of travel theory BUT they are far and few between. Now, I do think that WoW especially is slow to add new flight points and the connection of major cities. But I am familiar with the reasoning they are using and while I don't agree with it...I will go with it and not buck to hard. Anyway, time to go. Just know the people designing these games including myself are not trying to drive you nuts, but do have pretty decent reasons to do what we do.
If memory serves, in COH/V, you can enhance movement abilities such as flight, running or teleportation. Given enough upgrades, eventually you can travel much faster. This would pertain to non-combat movement.
I personally love the travel methods of A Tale in the Desert (you walk everywhere, but you can spend offline/rest time to teleport whereever you want) and Ultima Online (where players could make runestones denoting a location and then could teleport to that location assuming you kept up with the stone).
These methods were glazed over.
This is why I liked Anarchy Online. Good selection of vehicles, the whompahs, and the grid/fixer grid... All great methods of transportation, and some are completely available to lower levels... Too bad much of the rest of the game sucked.
My number one answer is to keep the world big. But I think you nailed number two.
People can and do play themselves to death with big, immersive online games. Many more play themselves sick. Some forced downtime is a good thing for letting a few rational brain cells get a turn to take care of the body (food, exercise, rest, eliminate, clean) rather than suffer at the hands of all the twitch and reward cells.
I don't think this is the reason they made slow transportation, but I think Blizzard is wise enough to realize it's a good reason to keep it.
If I have visited New York, I should be able to teleport there or get their quicker than a 8 hour flight with out a stop in Atlanta first.
If we had the technology then yes......yes you should.
...for truth. In classic Everquest, before the '01 Luclin expansion, travel was phenomenally difficult and time-consuming.
1. Teleportation required the direct intervention of one of the two teleport-capable classes, and largely had to be done person-by-person. Furthermore, many of the teleport sites were a moderate distance from most of the higher-level content (North Karana as a druid/wizard transit hub? Imagine the Barrens, but without the NPCs, the hordes of newbies, the varied terrain(!), the easy access to major racial hubs, or the interesting monster spawns.)
2. Travel WITHOUT teleportation was unforgettably painful at low levels, and was tedious at any level. First off, THE BOATS. The boats were on ~20 minute timers IIRC, and took a long time themselves to pass through aqueous transit zones once one was actually aboard. Add sketchy collision detection, which regularly dropped characters' corpses (and all their equipment) to watery graves at the bottom of the ocean, and the fact that the people using the boats most probably had the worst "swimming" skill (read: newbies) and were likely to have trouble swimming down to their bodies without drowning.
3. Say, why were the newbies on the boats in the first place, anyhow? Perhaps it could have something to do with the fact that many spells were sold at only one racial hometown. Consider that many races started on one of the useless islands to the east or west of the mainland, devoid of leveling opportunities beyond, say, level 20 (or, then, there was the Estate of Unrest...if Crushbone's Ambassador D'Vinn didn't teach folks the meaning of the word "train," then Garanel Rucksif was likely to do so, as that dratted ghost liked to take the LONG route back after being brought to the front door...)
4. Then again, the casters were lucky, since they could readily "bind" themselves in a variety of somewhat handy locations, which controlled where they respawned upon death and gave them a place to Recall to. Melee classes got no such handy contrivances. It was accepted practice, even with EQ's massive XP penalties, for a traveling melee classed character below about level 30 to enter a distant town's bank, deposit all their equipment, then attack the bank guards to get a "cheap" ride to their rather-inflexible bind point. "Cheap" meaning that even though experience was a pain in the butt to get and required a semi-competent group AT LEVEL FRICKIN' 30, traveling home took EVEN LONGER.
5. No mounts. Yup. Wanna go faster than a slow trot? Well, there's Spirit of Wolf, castable by Druids, Shamans, and Rangers. It's a 34% to 50% speed boost for about half an hour, which was unbelievably handy back in the day, since while it only shaved a few minutes off travel time directly, it was enough to let someone outrun the most common bats and bugs, which let you take a more direct path through many zones. Once one learned where the caster mobs were situated (caster mobs liked to charm, root, snare, and stun in those days), one could travel through much of the outer world with little fear (save running out of SoW midway and not being able to find a replacement). There were Journeyman Boots. About a 35% boost, if one could manage to spawn the Ancient Cyclops -- getting that spawn to occur has been a legendary challenge from the annals of MMO history. Then there was Selo's Accelerando. I am convinced that there were precisely two motives for having a high-level bard. One, filling out an account with one member of every class. Two, Selo's Accelerando. At level 6, bards were the first class to get a run-speed buff. It started at a piddly 21% bonus, but increased linearly from then on, and benefitted from equipment. Every other run-speed buff capped out at 75% or so at level 60 in optimum conditions. Selo's capped at 158%. So, yeah.
Maybe I'm getting to be a gaming curmudgeon. Maybe I'm out of touch. But, frankly, anyone griping about travel in WoW is a whiny little snot. Back in my day, it WAS uphill both ways, because you
The first MMO I played was Everquest (actually, Ultima Online, very briefly), where traveling from one side of the world to the other took maybe an hour, if you were very, very lucky.
Compared to that, WOW changed everything. I've never felt any reason to complain again. Just my two Abrahams.
Property is theft.
Actually the reason is quite simple: If it takes time to travel, then it takes time to explore everything and thus, the world can be significantly smaller. If you could instantly jump from place to place, then the time to explore the world would be greatly decreased and, to maintain your interest, a great deal more content would be required. Was this really worthy of Slashdot story?
I started playing EQ some years back. I've never been a hardcore gamer - never had time. But I liked the fact that it took a while to get places, especially at lower levels.
1. While the world was big, the community was small. You were likely to enounter the same people a few times as you both hung out in the same portion of the world.
2. It meant that there still a lot more to see. You couldn't go see it all at once.
3. It allowed you to spatially orient yourself and have the feeling that the world was real.
4. Travel wasn't just a trip, it was a challenge. A low level toon running through a high level zone had to dodge and duck and learn.
5. When you went out in the wilderness, you were really out there. There is challenge and excitement being far from civilization and support.
6. When in a certain region of the game, you were either getting help or offering help to people who were "from" other parts of the world.
What EQ had at the time was the prospect that you would eventually be able to travel faster. You might get a spell to make you go faster, either running fast or porting from specific druid portals to other druid portals. To me that seems like the right way to handle the boredom factor. Give the higher level toons, the one's that have already explored, the ability to travel faster.
The library really ruined things. When I finally left the game for good, one thing that really made it easy was the feeling that it was no longer a place I could explore and learn about. Instead of learning how to get from point a to point b by traveling through a world, I was just being portaled from one fairyland to another. I would go to the Plane of knowledge by clicking on a stone near point a, then click on another stone to go where I could travel to point b. There was no sense that point a and point b were real, they were just imaginary worlds one visited by clicking on stones.
Let the newbies explore. For players who have "been there", provide faster mounts or vehicles, or give them spells to let them travel faster. Let them get faster and faster as they level up. But keep the world as real as possible. No portals or magic gateways, please.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Myst lets you teleport to places you've been and can see. Seems like a reasonable compromise.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
In the Myst games, once you'd traveled to an important destination the slow way, you could use Zip Mode to teleport there again easily. You never had to, but you always could. That's the solution I'd like best.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Yes, travel is a timesink, but it also adds flavor to the world. Makes it more real. An excellent example was Star Wars Galaxies. At one point, travel between planets was only with transports that arrived every 30 minutes. A HUGE nuisance that led to much complaints and people milling about, entertaining each other, making jokes. It caused no end of problems for parties where everyone had to arrive at the right time and thight rushed to arrive just in time.
The wait time was later reduced to about 5 minutes if I remember correctly. Did it improve things? Yes and no. Together with other changes that made the game lighter it made interstellar travel trivial. people hopped back to get some supplies they left behind or to go shopping or to visit a trainer. When it was a 30 minute wait, people grouped up and once the group started to come together, someone would check the wait time and that would be the start time of the group. Miss your flight and you simply did not take part as no group was going to wait 30 minutes just because you need to kill one more critter or whatever is so important that a dozen other people got to wait for you.
You can't just teleport into mordor. If you can, the places looses something. I bring up LoTR for a reason, the MMO based on it is taking travel to a new low. In its sequel it has added automatic travel routes that are straight to enemy spawns, making it completly silly. The horse you get at the end of volume 1, can't be used in volume 2 and once you can afford the mount from volume 2, you are out of the area. Lots of quests send you all over the place, like you got nothing better to do then run back and forth. Fast travel options only become available when you no longer need them.
So yes, I agree it is also a time waster. The nature of MMO's means there has to be a delay vector. If you can play a massive RPG such as Kotor in a couple of hours or at most a day or two, then how the hell is a game company supposed to pay for content that will last years of play? Almost impossible, even if a company could afford it, just how many stories are there to be told anyway? Harlequin, the trash woman books has published in holland 3000 books. 1200 writers. That would be a MASSIVE cost to replecate for a game and then what you got? Boy meets girl, there is some confusion, it is all solved and they kiss. Players are hardly going to want to read the entire story of a quest in one dialog, so you got to travel between the parts of it, fight some mobs on the way and then there comes a fine line between time wasting and story telling.
SWG was the better game when travelling to far away places took at least some organising and grouping. Just teleporting to your destination whenever would get old very fast. Why do you think that in Star Wars the teleporter breaks down so often?
In fact, I think SWG did it right. With the 30 minute delay, it turned the journey into a staging point. Alright people, we gather at the space port in 15 minutes, get all the stuff you need, if your late, then you can try to follow us alone half an hour after every mob in the area respawned. It created focus and a sense of size without making you just sit through 30minutes of watching some animation. You could do something while waiting. Practice your craft, tell jokes, duel, etc etc.
When they removed it, together with things like the doc-buff, the game lost something. It ain't right for a straggler to be able to catch up on dagomir, slaying anything on the way alone.
Remember this, part of fellowship in lotro had already travelled far. Would have ruined the movie if they had teleported straight to gondor. Hell, they might just have teleported to rivendell, then get a lift straight to mount doom from Elronds mapping location. He been there once already, so he should be able to fast travel there according to your logic. Player friendly, but would make for a short game/story.
That is what I do, taking a flight path, pressing the autorun button are ways I have to take a break, go empty the diswasher, grab a snack, go read something online, mandatory cuddle time with my GF (she plays too) during a play session, remove that and will be a endless gring more akin to work than play.
The article writer should try or have tried Asheron's Call. The game had a gigantic world to explore with little details everywhere. It would probably take days to run end to end. The game did have ways to travel fast though.
Like other games players needed somewhere to reappaer when they die, AC had lifestones, AC had HUNDREDS of lifestones. Towns had them but some wilderness areas had them as well, there were even a few rare ones inside dungeon areas. Early on in the game players had to die to get back there but that was eventually fixed, much later players got the ability store a second one accessible with spells.
Traversal of the great seemless world could be accomplished the same way as going inside/outside of dungeons - portals. In some areas there would be loops of quickly accessible portals to use like a transit system through the towns. Others would send the player to far off areas without a return. Players could save two of these with magic and summon them for themselves and others so that players could get back to that very far away place instantly, and bring friends. More and more special portal spells were added to the game over time giving the player instant access to special areas, usually islands added onto the game in patches.
The addition of landscape housing made traveling anywhere in this gigantic game easy. Near towns there would be portals to a dozen settlements of housing, Now 90% of the mainland in the game was accessible in less than 5 minutes.
AC had a large unique sandbox world to explore and did not force the player to spend hours running if they did not want to. It was the todays "next generation mmo" in many ways but released in 1999. Oh and players ran really fast!
[20:36] wwwdot/.dotorg
Everyone who plays an MMO seems to want the developers to spend months of time developing a huge, intricate world full of easter eggs that they can discover once. Then, everyone wants to get from point A to point B as fast as possible.
Take a game like Dungeons and Dragons Online. You scarcely had to run anywhere. Everywhere you needed to be was a few steps away through an instance portal. Anyone who played it complained it was "claustrophobic", even though those same people would have complained just as much if they'd had to run ten minutes across a huge landscape to get anywhere.
In short, players are idiots who want to have it all ways. Personally, I'd like to see less time wasted making continents full of pretty trees and more time spent on game balancing and bug fixing. I'm sick of the new expansion = new explorable area model. There's tons of unused real estate out there that nobody ever looks at. Develop some of it. Make the world dense and interesting!
Are people seriously saying that 15min of doing nothing in a game is not that bad?
You just need to have a game with a bigger scope....of course WoW is going to have screwed up travelling, its like, medieval or something. Unless you went with full magic and allowed player to warp anywhere at anytime, you are going to have limits. In the SOE game Planetside, they have a wide scope - a slightly futuristic all-out war game with all kinds of infantry and vehicles. Because of the huge-ass worlds, people would tend to always purchase an aircraft cert, then fly that to the fights. After a while it became clear that aircraft were just the most superior vehicles because of this quality. Of course, some of the aircraft had immense firepower as well, which was arguably unbalanced; but the biggest aspect was fast travel. It was important because, you could get to fights faster, then, if you found out there was way too much shit to deal with at the fight, you could turn around and get the fuck out of Dodge way fucking fast.
in PVP. If you can die and be back in combat instantly, where is the penalty for dying ? Where is the advantage to the side doing the killing ?
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
You're growing up. The real test is if you will find something more meaningful than a "pet rock" game to do with your time.
This is why I loved Ultima Online so much, and refuse to play any MMORPG since UO. UO gave the player so much freedom, including being able to mark rune stones (I think that is what they were called) at any point in the world. You could then cast the recall spell on the stone and you would appear back in the same spot where you put the mark on the stone. In the early days, this caused some hilarious problems, whereas a player would mark a rune stone on a open field, someone would build a house on it, and then you could recall into their house and steal their stuff. LOL.
But this teleportation made the game so much more fun. If a friend signed on and was somewhere in the World and wanted to party up with you, you probably had a stone for near the location where he was at, or if he was a higher level mage, could open a portal for you. Also, if you go out and explore and find a really cool thing (such as when you could buy a boat and sail the high seas and find an island) -- you could mark it and return there later, without having to go through the whole ridiculousness of the said journey again that is no longer fun (why do you think console RPG's lose MAJOR points on backtracking)? That said, there is something cool about not being able to easily get back to a really rare but cool place, but there has to be a balance.
One thing I find lacking in modern MMO's in the realistic representation of death. UO actually allowed you to kill people, and loot their corpse. None of this , you die but magically keep all your stuff. That is so lame. Just my opinion, but I cannot stand WOW. To me its so watered down and lame (no offense to WOW players). I would just love to see another UO type RPG. I am surprised no one has made one.
This is why I loved Ultima Online so much, and refuse to play any MMORPG since UO. UO gave the player so much freedom, including being able to mark rune stones (I think that is what they were called) at any point in the world. You could then cast the recall spell on the stone and you would appear back in the same spot where you put the mark on the stone. In the early days, this caused some hilarious problems, whereas a player would mark a rune stone on a open field, someone would build a house on it, and then you could recall into their house and steal their stuff. LOLZ.
But this teleportation made the game so much more fun. If a friend signed on and was somewhere in the World and wanted to party up with you, you probably had a stone for near the location where he was at, or if he was a higher level mage, could open a portal for you. Also, if you go out and explore and find a really cool thing (such as when you could buy a boat and sail the high seas and find an island) -- you could mark it and return there later, without having to go through the whole ridiculousness of the said journey again that is no longer fun (why do you think console RPG's lose MAJOR points on backtracking)? That said, there is something cool about not being able to easily get back to a really rare but cool place, but there has to be a balance.
One thing I find lacking in modern MMO's in the realistic representation of death. UO actually allowed you to kill people, and loot their corpse. None of this , you die but magically keep all your stuff. That is so lame. Just my opinion, but I cannot stand WOW. To me its so watered down and lame (no offense to WOW players). I would just love to see another UO type RPG. I am surprised no one has made one.
LESS QQ. MORE PEW PEW.
I typically don't find myself bothered by travel time anymore other than to a few locations that are very far from a town that I can port to from Dalaran in WoW. The area around blackrock mountain can be the worst. I assume if people actually needed to go there much these days they'd change that. All it really takes is informing the developers that enough people would like it changed to make it worth their labor. Other than some vanilla wow content, no flight path seems to take over 5 minutes. Most of that time I spend either chatting with other players or doing other things around the house. It's also nice outside sometimes, you know?
Any system of transportation has to fit with the gameplay design. In a level based MMORPG time spent is inherently valuable to the player, and more time spent is equivalent to more accomplished on that character. In WoW for example, most of the auction house prices for commodities are based on the time required to gather them. In Diablo II however, value was closely tied to rarity. One couldn't simply take several hours to farm a boss and be guaranteed a proportionate value for that time spent. This is primarily due to the mechanics of loot being a lottery, which was a necessity that arose from the ease of movement and the ability to kill the same boss quickly in a short period of time.
Skill based games on the other hand, such as realtime strategies or first person shooters, place a much higher value on movement and travel, and present obstacles to force decisionmaking by the player. Instantaneous travel is only more fun if that travel is boring. The best solution to this problem is to make travel incorporate gameplay and trigger conscious decisions by the player.
One game which utilized this concept brilliantly was the Tribes series (1 and 2 primarily, much less so with Vengeance.) In Tribes, the player was given a plethora of options to reach the enemy base. One could use a speedy Shrike fighter to reach any part of the map quickly, but would have to deal with possible dogfights against other fighters, or evading ground to air missiles. Another option was to take a fast ground vehicle, which could evade missiles and most fights, but required the player to navigate a path and take longer. And of course there was the scout armor, which allowed the player to fly for short periods of time, moving quickly across the map but do relatively little damage. This mentality was countered again by the heavy armor, which excelled at sheer firepower but was painfully slow and often a sitting duck when outdoors. A given player had to consider carefully how he preferred to fight, what his intended target was, and how he got there played a large role in this decision.
In WoW movement has been simplified to effectively remove it from any complex decisionmaking process. PVP focuses on either a player moving, or being frozen/stunned, while PVE the movement is little more than a script players follow once they learn an encounter, the decision is made for them.
It wasn't by accident that the only hindrance to players' movement in WoW is time or direct combat with monsters/players, those can be influenced by the game mechanics directly, and encourage the player to weigh his options. In Ultima Online, movement was instant if you could afford the runebooks, and a struggle if you couldn't. The most fun i had in UO was simply walking from one city to the next, fighting my way through jungles, fending off PKers, finding/making food and weapons which were consumed along the way, that sort of environmental interaction was a blast. I personally think UO was ruined by runes (no pun intended) because of all the gameplay that players skipped because of it.
I've been somewhat long winded on this, but my point is that if a game is all about killing some mob at the destination, then the journey won't be nearly as interesting, and it really should be.
If an enemy faction has blocked your transport route to destination FOO, then allowing you to simply teleport anywhere makes that whole gameplay aspect redundant.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
A certain Post-Apocalypse MMO out there has you ride a horse or ATV *everywhere* - some trips can take 5 hours of real time!
Actually, why is this a problem in general?
Should Mario just start at the stairs at the end of the level? Should Grand Theft Auto eliminate the driving aspect and take you to the site of the job?
No. It it is a level of immersion and I get sick and tired of people complaining they can't get from point a to point b instantly.
I tried out AoC and their travel paths were MUCH more tedious than WoWs. I believe they changed it, but originally you had to run through lowbie world zones to reach the higher level zones. Now, here is the huge problem with that. Lowbie characters would hide, losing them playing time because a high level was running past, and high level players would be bored senseless from all the requests to "help out" for the 15 mins it took to get through the zone.
My only gripe about WoWs travel is that I thought that multizone flight paths should be instant. I always hated when you had to go from Booty Bay to The Hinterlands or Hillsbrad Foothills and the flight took 25 mins.
But! The good news is that WoW did change the flight paths from their original design in that you had to fly to each point and then hop back on the gryphon which was extremely tedious.
I do agree that travel is a pain to deal with, but I remember first playing the game and thinking how amazing the world looked and how vast it seemed. With instant travel it would lose some of that.
The obvious reason for slow travel in WoW is PvP. What fun would it be to raid an enemy city if the entire enemy faction could teleport to the defense the moment they received word of an attack?
Different strokes for different folks.
Some people like the large, expansive world where getting to the capital city feels like an accomplishment and revisiting lowbie areas is a chore that few undertake (think FFXI).
Others like instant travel to any place they've ever traveled before (GW).
And, still others, seek some sort of balance (WoW does a good job of this).
I hate to say it, but, if you don't like the game, don't play it. I've played each of the games I've mentioned and have stopped playing each in turn, but I cannot say that travel time had anything to do with it (although, that was pretty annoying in FFXI).
Since it's not a time-sink game where everything has to be "earned" and a struggle to acquire those "skills", everyone in Second Life can instantly teleport anywhere on the google maps-type game map. you can share teleports, save landmarks for a quick return later, fly like Superman using pageup/pagedown keys, or buy any number of funky vehicles.
Travel is easy in Second Life.
Currently I'm trying to get the Midsummer Festival done on 2 characters. This requires me to fly all over the entire world of warcraft, three continents, and visit about 50 or so locations apiece. Some of the locations I have to use a ground mount to travel to. And the point of doing this? So I can get a 310% speed mount by completing all 8 or 9 of these seasonal events so I won't have to spend as much time flying around. See the irony?
I've tinkering with MMO design for years going all the way back to DIKU.
I will offer this theory for you:
SIZE in a game is actually a measurement of content density.
Imagine a grid and you put numbers in each box where there are X number of activities.
Given a 100x100 square box areas of high numbers are inheritly LARGER because a player spends more time in those areas. Areas with small numbers are SMALLER.
Players 'sense' the size of a game by this density not real world dimensions.
You want slower movement in areas of high density and quicker movement in areas of lower density. By tracking the measurement you give the world a consistent feel of size.
Early in an MMO where you have large phsyical distances between A and B with low density you place fast movement. This "shrinks" that distance so it feels like an area of higher density.
Outside of technical limitations this gives players a linear feel to the size of the world.
An analogy is running through a field versus a forest at a fixed speed. You'll do a lot more dodge, dip, dive, duck and dodging more in the forest then the plains and even though you are moving at the same speed you won't go as far in the forest then in the plains.
An ingame example is starting in WoW at Stormwind. The developers try to maintain a consistent sense of density by using quests (content) but once the quest is complete and the mobs are useless the density drops and Westfall all of a sudden is really big and boring. You want a mount at that point to regain that linear sense of density (size).
As the quests get more spread out and the content less dense the mounts come into play to control the percieved size of the game world.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
I managed to get a blue response in this thread regarding this topic: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=18031369399&sid=1&pageNo=1
DAOC originally had two modes of travel in the PVE zones: 1) you walk, 2) you buy a horse ticket and ride a pre-mapped horse route (out of the question for level 1 chars with no money). They had one mode of travel in RvR zones: you walk. Speed classes could make the "walk" option go faster.
Currently in DAOC, for PVE zones, you have portal stones that allow you to teleport *back* to your personal house, your guild house, or your current bind point. If you don't have a guild or aren't the character who owns the house on your account, those options aren't available. You have the old horse routes, flight routes, shark routes & boat routes, which are now free so lowbies can use them. You have teleports to "hub" locations for most regions. You have a few extra teleport options that require either (a) going there on foot at least once (Catacombs cities), or (b) grinding faction (the dragon zone village). You have fast personal mounts. Speed classes still make the "walk" and "ride personal mount" options faster.
For RvR zones, you can teleport from the zone entrance keep to keeps solidly controlled by your realm in your own lands (if an enemy realm takes any outposts of a keep, it "breaks" the teleport), or ride fast boats up the rivers and across the oceans to enemy realms on pre-determined routes with known endpoints (i.e., ambush zones. Always jump from a boat before it gets to the drop point if you want to live). You can walk, or ride personal mounts. Speed classes still do their thing. Portal stones do NOT work in RvR zones(no, you can't bug out of a battle by using a portstone). RvR dungeons are even more restrictive: you walk, period.
You can get reasonably close to anywhere fairly quickly by a combination of porting to the nearest portal, riding a rental horse/boat/flying critter/shark, and then running to the start point of your quest/raid/guild hunt on your personal mount (as long as you don't have to fight your way in...). Once you've finished the dungeon/killed the dragon/whatever and are way out in the back end of nowhere, you can use your portal stone to go home without having to fight your way back out again.
I like the mix. It allows me to bypass really boring lowbie country that I've seen every other day for the last 7 years, but still requires you to go slow through the territory you are interested in--or where the inhabitants are interested in you.
---dragoness
Try City of Villains (or, to a lesser extent, City of Heroes)
Travel powers by level 10 (day 3 of playing, tops) and convenient inter-zone travel augmented by multiple teleport powers that speed things up even further.
I get upset if I have to spend more than about 3 minutes to travel ANYWHERE in the game. Seriously.
WoW is work. City of Villains is FUN.
It reminds me of the old war plane flight sim's. You had the option of turning on/off real time travel time. If you wanted the realism (first time playing) you would turn it on. Then they made it where you could speed up travel time with a single key. I'm sure it wouldn't work on MMO's because someone would be playing it for the first time and enjoying exploring. I'm sure some people enjoy the trip every time. I could definitely see the want for Oblivion fast travel functionality though.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
In City of Heroes/Villains and the upcoming Champions Online, you get movement powers very early that whip you around the world pretty quickly, unlike WoW.
I was played WOW and hated the transportation aspect of it... I came from playing Ultima Online where I had books full of interesting locations I could visit at a whim. The world was small in comparison to WoW.. But you know what? I still love going on it once in a while and visiting some of those old spots. The world is pretty empty now, but sometimes I pop in and see an old friend that recognizes me and we chat about old times. I can sit and make armor, weapons or whatever new items that have been added since the last time I was in game. The game is amazing because you have time to socialize, meet with others, open gates for them even when you can be halfway around the world. Transportation in that game was a link to your friends not a burden that got in your way of meeting your friends and doing stuff. WoW, DAoC, FFXI made that all abundantly clear, transportation was a way to screw everyone and make timesinks. Since so many people had figured out how to macro their way up in levels, the new way to slow progress was through large maps, slow movement and expensive upgrades on vehicles/transportation.
I left WoW a happy camper, and have not looked back. Yet I still visit good old Ultima Online once in a while :) Teleportation and Gates FTW!!!
Who would have thought that a simple increase in movement speed would feel like such an accomplishment! It's obvious there is no technical problem with letting characters move faster - they get to eventually, once you get to the proper level and shell out ever-increasing piles of gold for learning the skill and buying the steed. There's also no technical problem with teleport-on-demand - mages get to do it eventually.
It's like starting out with a 100-lb pack on your back. When you finally get to take it off you feel light as a feather! It's a cheap way to feel like you are being rewarded, when really they are just taking off the burden they started you out with.
J. M. Barrie (creator of Peter Pan) wrote of Never Land that the place was very compact, so that adventures would never be far between.
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