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."

Comments

As the great Bartle said

[QuantumG]

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.

Re:As the great Bartle said

[zwei2stein]

No, they use it because it introduces massive downtime that is easy to justify as you can get some players even believe it is for their own good.

MMO 101: Downtime and timesinks are good thing for business. It means you get away with having less actual content while players take longer to do something, making sure they will be around in next month.

I have been playing instant teleport-anywhere game (Guild Wars) and frankly it is single most awesome thing. Worls still feels big in parts where cotnent is and small where player runs out of it. Just like in WoW: Areas which you outlevel just shrink in your head. By time you are done with walking on feet, you are indeed done and any travel-related downtime is pointless and punishing.

Game would not be bigger if i had to spend 30 minutes getting to some location "for your own good". It would be oxonobiously anoying.

Ive actually quit WoW over lack of instant movement. Waiting 30 minutes for group to ssemble is not fun, neither well spent time. When you spend more time afking game and reding book while you wait for someone than playing, something is very wrong ...

Re:As the great Bartle said

[Liquidrage]

Your thoughts are jaded as an ex-player and your reasoning is par with a conspiracy theory about the moon landing. You act like the travel timesink is good for business, yet mention you quit because of it. As if they got paid by the mile you traveled? Guild wars is a different type of MMO. It's not a virtual world per say.

Although MMO's are full of timesinks and carrots, they really are a labor of love designed by big-time geeks like things like MUD's and D&D.

Worlds do appear small, and less of a consistent world, if transportation is instant. They're been lots of comparisons and feedback on this. Go back to EQ's day. You spent 45 minutes real time running from one major city to another. You spent 20 minutes standing on the docks waiting for a boat to take you to another island, and the boat ride itself was 10 minutes long. But it felt like a huge world. Now about 10 years after release they do have instant travel, it was added as a gimmick to try and keep older players around in lieu of other games like WoW.
In WAR on the other hand, transportation is nearly instant. Yet, one of the biggest complaints about it was it didn't feel like a continuous world. It played like levels in an old school FPS. To go from one level to the next you take the epic "10 second cutscene of your journey".

WoW takes the approach of speed increased flights that are controlled by the game.

To be honest, I'm not really sure what RPS's complaint is. Most MMO's have travel options that go well beyond "I've run this one, I don't want to run it again". Several times in the article it mentions running over and over. In the 800 lb gorilla in the room, there are personal mounts, flight paths that allow you to revisit almost every area you've already been too at least once, instant transportation to all the main cities in both expansion hubs, a class that can transport people instantly, and transportation to bind locations. Etc... To do what Guild War does they wouldn't make a continuous world. And "gasp" GW didn't. It's clear the true MMO's try to make travel painless, but at the same time preserve the essence of a virtual world.

Re:As the great Bartle said

[Talgrath]

Mounts still take time to get you to where you're going; and he is right in a big way; they may not charge you by the "mile" but they certainly do charge you by the minute. You pay your $15 for a month's worth of play, minus server maintenance; you could break that down to time in minutes or further into paying for time in terms of the time you have to play it. Every minute spent traveling is time, and money wasted.

Re:As the great Bartle said

[fractoid]

Why would you need tier 8 items to continue to run heroics? The heroic gear is the entry into raids (that raid gear into higher level raids, etc).

And this is exactly the crux of the issue. There is NO 5-man PvE progression past heroics in WotLK. At least in Burning Crusade you could grind heroics for badges and then when you did have the odd chance to raid, you were geared enough to participate.

The other problem is, of course, that there's nothing particularly scary in heroics once you get some heroic gear. Instead of progression path going:
Dungeons -> Heroics -> Raids -> Harder Raids

they need to build it so that it goes:
Dungeons -> Heroics -> Harder Heroics -> Even Harder Heroics
Dungeons -> Heroics -> Raids -> Harder Raids

I'm guessing by your entitled-raider attitude that you don't have a wife with Raid Radar(TM) and a magic ability to interrupt any raid you join? I'm happy to put in say 4 hours play time per piece of gear (a lot more than it takes if I score a run with my raiding guild), I just can't do those 4 hours in one big block any more without being dragged afk for 45 minutes in the middle. Believe me, it's quicker to get gear from raids than by grinding badges, and the gear from raids is better itemised.

Don't worry, you'll still have your full tier set to prance around capital cities in. Badge gear just gives non-raiders the ability to get almost-equal gear. If you can't tell the difference between someone in full badge gear and someone in raid gear then... well, I don't know what to say. It's people like you that I make sure I always equip one end-of-raid piece for, even if it's not quite as good as the badge gear, just to prove that I've cleared it.

Re:As the great Bartle said

[oracle128]

Seeing as no one plays for 1 month continuously, that's a rather weak argument. I suppose you could argue that while you're traveling, you're not casting spells and stuff, reducing server load *shrug*

It's not really that difficult to grasp his point, but you seem to be doing a great job of missing it anyway.

If you pay for a month of play, there's only a certain number of minutes you can physically play the game - that would be your play time (not sleeping, working, or doing other normal things). Let's say you only have 1800 minutes of play time every month - that's 60 minutes per day, the amount of time a normal healthy person with a life would have to play. Now, that 60 minutes could be spent battling new monsters, going on raids, exploring new areas, etc. Things that might be considered fun. Or, from that 60 minutes, you could spend 10 minutes fighting and exploring, and 50 minutes travelling to/through places you've already been. That's 50 minutes worth of content that that Blizzard don't have to create, and it means you have to spend 5 more days to do what you should have been able to do in 1 day.

And then what do you think happens? The player is left unfulfilled because they didn't get much done that month because of all the time spent travelling, they didn't get to fight that new monster on the other side of the map, they barely even reached the entrance to the new dungeon, or they didn't reach the level they wanted to, or whatever it is MMO players do (I'm not one). So now they have to pay for another month. Ergo, wasting the player's time with bullshit like travelling leads to more revenue for the developers.

Pretty simple

[omgarthas]

More time travelling = more time playing

More time playing = more money earned

Re:Pretty simple

[omgarthas]

You'll play the game untill you run out of things to do, so basically they have to extend the time needed to achieve your goal as much as they possible can.

Large travelling times, farming, releasing content slowly, etc etc are some of the mechanisms

Re:Pretty simple

[damburger]

Thankyou for stating what I was thinking. WoW is not an expensive past time. The amount of money I spend on my WoW subscription in one month, I can burn through in the pub in about 2 hours. Furthermore, it is unmetered, so Blizzard have no financial incentive to keep you traveling. It could be to reduce load on their servers I suppose, But I doubt it. When you fly you go through a number of areas in quick succession, rather than simply switching from one to another as you do using one of the various instant teleportation methods.

I have never been as pissed off with WoW travel as other people seem to be. Maybe its because I am older than a lot of players, but it seems to me that it helps pace the game properly. It is a big world, and flight paths help maintain that impression.

Oh, and it also gives me a chance to get myself a cup of coffee and go to the toilet :)

Re:Pretty simple

[SL Baur]

I have never been as pissed off with WoW travel as other people seem to be. Maybe its because I am older than a lot of players, but it seems to me that it helps pace the game properly. It is a big world, and flight paths help maintain that impression.

I agree. In TBC they introduced portal rooms which allow teleportation to any capitol city. With WotLK they removed barriers between alliance capitols in the old world. Very recently they changed the cooldown on the hearthstone (and the associated Kirin Tor trinket) to 30 minutes.

While there is some convenience involved, it used to be more fun planning your strategy around how to minimize your travel times.

It's very much a mixed bag.

I thought I was a slow, methodical player until I went after the Explorer achivement and was amazed at how truly big the World of Warcraft truly was, or appeared to be.

Timesinks

[nxcho]

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.

Re:Obviously no one here reads Hitchcock....

[LordKaT]

Wait ... running around in a big world, causing people to spend massive amounts of time traveling and not actually doing anything else in the game is ... suspense?

I don't think you quite understand what Hitchcock was saying.

Developer Laziness or UO, Rune Books, SWG and WoW

[The_Myth]

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.

Re:What do you want...

[imashination]

The Deeprun Tram?

It comes down to content and things to do!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Transport based on level

[hal9000(jr)]

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.

Because of overcrowding

[Peter Cooper]

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.

The answer is, unsurprisingly ...

[Lazy Jones]

... 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.

Mimick the Human Mind

[Spinlock_1977]

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.

Re:Guilds Wars method

[Draek]

Guild Wars' method also has one *very* important advantage going for it: 'lowbie' areas still have people in them.

I can be playing with my Warrior main, doing a mission on Cantha's mainland when a guild mate asks for help on a new Nightfall character. I just hit 'M', select the little ship, select the continent of Elona and 30 secs later I'm standing in the middle of Kamadan, port city of the Elonian continent and 30 secs away from any outpost in the Nightfall campaign ready to help him out.

That ease, in turn, also means many 'lowbie' areas are full of lv20s selling their wares and giving free stuff to newbies, since there's only a 30-sec difference between idling on the Realm of Torment or idling on Old Ascalon and helping/pestering newbies more than compensates for that.

But who's gonna spend from 30 mins to an hour in WoW going to a lowbie area and back just to help somebody else? let alone sell or give out stuff to random newbies. From what I've heard playing the lv1-60 content in WoW these days is pretty much like playing a single-player RPG, except with a monthly fee, and that's very much a result of long travel times, IMHO.