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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."
No, its not. Absolutely not fun at all. When you're doing a dungeon again, and again, and again because of the farming spirit of this game and you have to wait 30 minutes to get someone, it's awful.
You don't need more than 10 minutes ? If you got guys in a capital which isn't dalaran without their heartstone ready (reloading time 1 hour, so greaaat...), and you want to do a Lich King's dungeon, people will take so much time to come that you'll wonder why you're still playing this. Yes of course, you could ditch everyone and get another team and, if you're on a low pop server, wait forever.
Timesinks are stupid. Period. I don't play a game for awfully boring timesinks. And frankly people talking about "big worlds"... Who cares ! I've already explored this "big world", it doesn't seem "that" big, even if retarded automatic transportation methods takes a lot of time to go from one point to another. It's not because your character is slow as hell and takes 30-45 to run from one side of the continent to the other that a world is "big" and "nice".
People who wants ease of transportation in those games are people who don't care anymore about the landscape. They saw it so much times, they're sick of it. Flying mounts are slow, unless you want to farm as hell to get a "faster" transportation method, which you'll be unable to use if you're on Azeroth anyway, so it doesn't solve the problem indicated above.
Frankly, the number of timesinks of this game make me quit. Getting money by killing the fun with timesinks is completely stupid.
And, to finish this rant, "big" worlds comes with big citys. Almost all the "villages" look as big as highway gas-stations. The capitals aren't bigger than a small town. "Big" world ? Meh...