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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."
More time travelling = more time playing
More time playing = more money earned
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".
The Howling Fjords starting zone is built heavily around sheer drops, switchbacks, irregular terrain and slow lifts. Its very existence is a poke in the eye for people who thought that the nether drake mounts they spent weeks grinding faction for made them the kings of shit mountain.
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.
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.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
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...