Rant on Travel

Coconuts should be in your bank.

Flaming coconuts are a limited summer telethon reward.

 

Well, if anything, this thread has shown the overworld map needs a lot more to make it fun and interesting. Sometimes the easiest route to something isn't the best route.

 

Hopefully they will be few of them. Anyway, Portalarium can only encourage the creation of an economy where, e.g. an Ardoris' blacksmith have to buy ore for another area, and wood for yet another area, and pay a guy to smelt the ingots, and yet another guy to work the wood. They hope, I suspect, to create economic chains so every quality item made in game will be the product of a teamwork, more or less like in real life.

People with money will surely be able to have a lot of alias and extra chars, but it will likely not worth the time and investment, getting the ore from a player devoted to mining will be a better deal, and so on.

 

I think I will finally weigh in on this topic, for what it's worth.

I am basically (still) a new(b) player. I have only been in-game a few times. My first "hat" was release 19 I think (black lupis hat) and I've only bothered to acquire three release hats in total. Just saying all this so you know where I am coming from and that I have not been around these forums long enough to get a grip on any inter-forum politics that there might be here.

On topic: The few times I came on these forums was to say that I thought travelling from point A to B in the game was too hard not to mention too time consuming. Later, I realized that my actual difficulty was that I didn't know how to get to where I wanted to go because the scale of the overland map was too limited; what was missing was a global map (a step "above" the overland map) that I could use to determine the overall route I needed to take to get from A to B. What I needed was basically this: http://www.sotamap.com/. As soon as I found that map, all my troubles went away and I began to love the overland map. (IMO SotA devs should really consider implementing that map, or something like it, in-game.)

Anyway, I really like travelling via the overland map now. I kinda feel like I am actually going somewhere. Yes, it means that if I have two or more houses that I want to travel between I will try my mightiest to make sure they are nearish to each other. If I want to attend an event in a far, distant city then I have no qualms about it being a journey (with possible perils) to get there.

My one concern is crafting. I imagine I will be out-and-about doing quests and stuff and no doubt will be acquiring crafting mats. At some point I will want to convert those mats to finished products. I plan to build my main home in a NPC hamlet (so none of the conveniences of a larger city) and I will be building my own crafting stations. Having to travel across the overland map to reach my home to do crafting will be a pain (further complicated if access to my banks is local to the towns they are in - is that still a thing in-game?). Currently, I can recall to home using my deeds and it sounds like there will be craftable items that can be used for this purpose going forward. Just getting my only concern out there.

 

@HairballHacker,

You don't necessarily have to go to your home to do crafting. Towns all over will have public crafting areas; you just have to find one. There will be all sorts of reasons to go into local towns, including selling extra junk you pick up, repairing your weapons, getting extra arrows or reagents, and going to a tavern for food, or even to look for party members.

IMO, this is a good part of the game experience the devs are trying to create. Meeting people while traveling, stopping into local towns and local taverns, stopping at camp. Eventually, they could even put in PvP-to-PvP encounters for people who are flagged. This is all good gameplay.

For huge home storage transfers, I hope eventually we'll be able to do bank transfers (with a fee and transfer time).

 

And, btw, the more people are using fast travel, the less people you'll run into when traveling or visiting local towns and taverns.

 

That was one of the problems I had with Bind and Recall in Ultima Online. The land ceased to be a Land, and became instead a collection of points of interest determined by your selections of Recall Runes.

 

Yep, and people just gave away runes teleporting you directly to their shops. So big guilds would just hand out runes, and you'd never actually have to find different places.

 

And in the other extreme people will get frustrated with travel and stop playing altogether. I guess those few who want travel that is a pain in the butt can then enjoy the land entirely devoid of those of us who rather go elsewhere

 

I've been here since R9 I believe so maybe more of the novelty has worn off for me, than for you. To be clear I really like the overland map and it's improved over time. And there are often situations when I'm perfectly happy to wander and explore. The overland map itself isn't the problem. The problem, simply, is the inability to either travel quickly from one place to another quickly when we need to.

What has happened is that the designers have created all sorts of mechanics that, when considered independently, can be justified for various reasons:

• Weight limits/encumbrance (realism, anti-camping, etc.)
• Random encounters (realism, fun, unique situations, etc.)
• Control points (regional economies, etc.)
• Limiting (and now eliminating) /zone (exploits, stalking, etc.)
• Limiting /stuck and giving it a casting time and making it interruptable. (exploits, etc.)
• Instanced scenes necessitating loading screens. (fundamental game design)
• Doing away with the "start on overworld map".
• Two separate continents (and more to come in future releases). (fundamental game design)
• Introduction of "bind" and "recall" which are limited strictly to your lot or a town crier, require crafting (alchemy) and harvesting/purchase of reagents. (balancing ability to travel)
• Teleport to people on friends list only. Not on your friends list (which will require 2-way confirmation)? Sorry. Also requires crafting/reagents, casting time, and cooldown, and is interruptable. (balancing ability to travel)
• EDIT to add no universal banking
• EDIT to add the eventual removal of the current ships (Novia to Hidden Vale most prominently) and replacing them with ships on a schedule (more waiting)

All these features restrict free travel and have blended together to create an untenable travel situation. They are trying to strike a balance, and I understand the design considerations fully, but IMO the balance that has been struck, is a draconian set of solutions, when considered together. I'm not against any particular feature in the list above, I'm against the reality of terrible travel conditions when these features are considered in their totality.

The travel situation is EASILY fixed with:

• Use-limited zoning to people and places (for example a few times a day to zone to people but perhaps more often if going to your house/POT/guild HQ) and/or
• UO-style recall runes/recall spell to multiple locations

For those of you who are not bothered by the current state of travel and seek immersion through overland travel for every single errand, you're free to do so. Meanwhile for those of us who are frustrated by the current state of travel, we would be able to travel more freely without creating excessive abuse via unlimited /zone, /stuck, /etc.

 

Yea, but its easy as it is. If people are rage-quitting because travel across the map takes a few minutes, then there's fundamentally something else wrong with the game.

 

I rarely used any teleportation while I played UO (10+ years). One effect of ubiquitous runes and runebooks was that no one knew where anything was anymore. Ask directions and the most common response was, "At the end of this rune."

 

Given there's a keenness to make things possible but 'have a cost', might it not be reasonable to have a NPC caravan master or carriage renter in towns, you can pay them to go quickly to another town in their area (not through control points, obviously, since those are dangerous and nobody sane would drive through them, only us avatars and adventurers are that crazy). Then it's up to you how you choose to travel the map a little more than having to walk the entire route.

Eit : And adding the pots in their region to their destination list might get more folks to go out and visit pots as 'sightseeing' trips, rather than them having to stumble across them if they're not using a map that shows all their locations.

 

Redfish I can tell you that I may quit the game if travel, and a couple of other features including combat most importantly, don't meaningfully improve. I won't be the first or the last.

But it won't be from rage. It'll be from boredom. The frustration evident in my posts comes from seeing a potentially GREAT game sabotaged by a small number of VERY important and deliberate design decisions that make the game a chore rather than a pleasure.

 

These features you are disparaging are constants to almost every rpg.

 

Hey, Budner, and from my perspective, if they water down the travel, it'll sabotage the game and make it something I'm less likely to enjoy and more likely to shelve away.

But I'm not going to agree that travel is difficult and time consuming when its not. We should focus on things we agree on, then.

 

It's a bad thing for the game a great thing for the player, it's not a position that can be supported.

 

Crappy combat and the inability to travel in a reasonable way are constants in almost every RPG? I had no idea. Rune you are always teaching me new stuff, thanks.

 

It's a tough task.

I meant weight and travel, nice spin though. Reasonable to you is unreasonable to others...for reasons I have said already.

 

Fun to me is travelling through every zone with the risk of unpredictable encounters, even at risk of other players. Time and distance having meaning which leads in part to a sense of accomplishment. However, this is obviously not what everyone wants so having some kind of compromise, and maybe the current system is already that, is good for the population as a whole.