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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
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.
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.
a WoW Undeground?
If you don't know what you're doing, you can't make mistakes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
WoW has to be against bots, mostly because the game is easy enough to be scripted. There is very little "intelligent" decision making involved in the average battle, you dish out damage, you stop when you go over the aggro threshold, etc. There is little to observe and react to.
If WoW had no strong opposition against bots, farmers would kill the game even more than they already do.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
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)
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.
That is actually a great idea. I might start developing a work commuting simulator. Driving to work in real time. Spend up to 2 hours on congested freeways per trip depending on actual server load. With all the great distractions of way-too-cheery morning radio show hosts and spilling hot coffe on your lap (cup holders can be purchased at higher levels, or stolen if you are a rouge character). That is time well spent on those boring weekends or for the unemployed. A game that with a huge potential demographic.
... 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)
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.
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
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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.
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.