Rant on Travel

Nothing but more speculation. y'know I've got a stadium full of people behind me who all think minimal fast travel is the bee's knees and they intend to play until they die then pass on their accounts to their children. There, that settles that.

 

*Points to strech goal that was never reached.*

Non-combat Horses.

Might have made traveling vastly faster between region/CP, etc. Hopefully, it'll work its way into the game later somehow?

 

I am glad I made my point. Being that regional economy is what will keep the remote areas of the map in high residency, instant travel should not be possible except in rare occasion and for recreational purposes, IE not carrying a significant quantity of raw materials.

This is exactly what the devs have communicate is coming.

 

It will, Devs have already said that the unmet stretch goals would be implemented post game launch.

 

I have heard the same thing in the other threads that lead to change eventually. I have the patience to see better travel options come into being. I do not care if I am wrong either as I can simply play games that have fast travel already

 

Instant travel, as of the last hangout, will be possible for anyone with a crafted consumable, to reach their friend to play with. (replacing the /zone LordBritish command)
If I play with my friend every day, I need to be able to travel to him, every day. (or hour, or multiple times per day) If that's possible, regional economies are done, stick a fork in it.

If they intend to attempt to restrict the flow of money and/or goods between each economic region, while slow and fast travel between them is possible for both single-player and friends-only modes, there is no viable solution that will accomplish that goal with that feature in play. The only way would be restricting the use, equipping, and/or carrying of items to & from that economic region. It would be the equivalent of isolating three unique games, including preventing friends from interacting. Not gonna happen.

 

For what it's worth, I've been making an effort to avoid /zone in R26, and I've never liked /stuck for travel. (I still say they should make it return you to wherever you entered the overworld, because that should inherently be a non-stuck place.) I'm using OCD temptation in control areas as a motivator to deter me from simply going through them often.


As for the things becoming more boring with fast travel, my anecdote is FFXI. Travel used to be relatively difficult between areas. There were originally only a few methods of fast travel.

There were two spells, Warp, which was a spell that sent the caster to his designated "home point" (you could only have ONE home point, and there was a later version of the spell that could be cast on any party member to send them home after doing group content), and Teleport, which transported the whole party (within about a 6 meter range) to one of three relatively remote (from cities) places in the world.

There were mounts (chocobos) that went at 2x walking speed that you could rent at cities, or for twice the price at a Teleport destination. Anywhere else and you had to WALK. With no overworld map. It could take 15 minutes to walk to the far side of a zone. There were also "outposts" in many wilderness zones (but still far away from dungeon-type areas) that you could quest for the right to travel to them. Oh, and your nation city (out of three) had to control the region of the outpost that week for you to even start that quest. (Afterward, if it didn't control the region, the travel fee was doubled.) There were a few effects from who controlled the region for the week, but economically it mostly determined what you were able to buy in your home nation city. There was some cross-nation importation for profit because each city had its own auction house.

And there were ferries that went between fringe cities every 30 minutes. And airships that would go between the nation cities and the big central city every 15 minutes... but you had to get pretty far in mission content before you could use the airships.

When I was but a young white mage (didn't even have a sub-job yet for those who know what that means) and was invited for a party halfway across the world, it took me a long time to go to the nearest city with a ferry, then when everything was over, I had to come back. I managed to get ambushed by some goblins on my long walk back, and lost a level from dying.

In extreme cases, it could take much longer to get to a boss fight for mission-line content than the fight itself lasted. Too bad if you got there and found out you forgot to bring something. (And some of the fights were infamously long, like one that was capped at 45 minutes, which was barely enough if you learned efficiency tricks!) Some areas had level caps imposed, even outdoor areas along the way. It was not possible to simply get more levels to zip through these areas, as the monsters would ALWAYS be of a higher level than you. It was a pain in the ass.

That was the way it started. Eventually they added something where from many areas you could pay some points (earned mostly through "kill N monsters" quests) to teleport back to your home nation (of the three, which was distinct from your home point). Oh boy, TWO places you could always teleport to! But it still took some effort to get around.

Eventually when the population went into old-age-MMO decline, they merged all three nations' auction houses (and a fourth one from expansion cities), so there was no need to travel to find something for sale. That didn't matter much because the fourth one served the two cities that everybody hung out in for years anyhow.

Then they went totally nuclear and made the home point crystals be able to send you to any other home point crystal. (There's a few other systems of linked teleport networks too.) Now nobody has to take more than a few seconds and a few moneys to get to anywhere else in the game that matters, though you might have to think a bit about which teleport system gets you closer. The plus is that you can effortlessly go to endgame stuff (since that's all most people do anymore), but nobody ever goes anywhere else without a good reason (like leveling another class or an alt character, or farming monsters for specific drops.)

While it was sure nice not to have to deal with the problem of slow travel when doing stuff with other people, now the whole game is more boring since there isn't any barrier to going anywhere important, especially when doing stuff alone. Now it's just a theme park without the long lines for rides.

So I like having some reasonable amount of travel time. I've had to deal with both extremes, and I want something in between.

I've been thinking that if fast travel could be inversely tied to encumbrance, that could prevent you from easily bringing "rare" resources to another region when going to social events. If you were limited to no more than, say, 40-50 weight of encumbrance, or 10-20 of non-equipped item weight, that might work.

I still need to watch the postmortem video to see what the Port folks were saying.

Disk cache does have some effect, in that if I start up the game fresh it takes at least 30 seconds to get to the title screen, but if I quit and reload it takes about 5 seconds. But wow, this game really does make your disk spin. Even with the disk cache and 16GB of RAM, it still hits the disk a lot.

I have an SSD already partitioned and ready to swap in weeks ago, it's even in an optical bay adapter, but I haven't had the time to sit down and run data migration to it yet.

I think that was supposed to be the purpose of things crawling around on the overworld map. Those would represent various encounters that you could avoid or chase.

 

All I'll say about regional economies is this - I thought there was questing in SoTA too? So while there is a huge focus on how implementing a better transportation system might somehow disrupt the regional economies, without a better transport system you're disrupting the players who just want to get out, quest, explore and have no use for crafting.

How do you balance the equation? I've said it before and I'll keep saying it...because older people get repetitive

Make the main cities transportation hubs for that region. Provide some kind of conveyance that can be used to move from one large NPC city to another. Rather like the ship from Ardoris to Kingsport only this would be overland connecting overland cities. At least then someone who wanted to quest in a different region would have the alternative to run there and explore along the way -or- take the fast coach and bypass the scenic route.

 

Not sure where you have been but they have already implemented control points for this specific purpose. They are flexing 'some' on limited fast recreational travel, but not the mass transport of goods over CPs. In no way does that prevent friends from playing together, youll just have to sell raw materials of high quantity locally and the crafted items can be traded in major hubs provided you're not traveling overweight, your guild takes a control point or provided you can get your pack animal across the CP without both of you taking a dirt nap.

 

Are you claiming that it's currently a design goal that you can't fast travel to a friend across a control point? If so, I would love to know the source for that claim, please.

 

Ohh. The value of property is one thing that I wasn't thinking about. Not going to lie, I'm not sure I understand what you are saying *but I want to.* When we are discussing regional economies are we talking about like the value of items/materials/etc, or are we talking about the value of property? I totally understand the concept of property A is worth more than property B because A is closer to a bountiful copper mining cave for example. I feel like no matter what property A is always going to be more valuable over property B . .the only way I see that changing is if there is suddenly another bountiful copper mining cave placed near property B also. Regional economy when it comes to housing value seems to be inevitable to me. Am I on the right track here? If I'm way off please tell me. Like I said I want to understand.

 

I like that the proponents of fast travel liked your post because this is exactly what is being implemented and that they are protesting in this thread.

The plan is just to make transportation of large quantities of goods difficult, IE a pack animal and an overweight player. Adventuring is what Id refer to as recreational travel and wouldn't be effected as much because you'd typically not be over weight, as you could process looted materials at local crafting stations and return to wherever you chose with moderate resources on character that wasn't overweight.

Transportation of high quantity of raw materials WILL be possible, but at either a cost or the effort of your guild taking a control point. None of this has anything to do with unlimited instant travel game wide, THAT is what breaks regional economy.

 

Regional Economies = You can get hard maple pine trees in Verdantis, but you can't get them in Grunvald. You have to trade with people in Verdantis if you want that. While Grunvald may have rare spices (or something) that is local only to that area. So players in Grunvald take their spices all over the world to trade in areas that can't get it organically and rely on the people of imports. Meanwhile, the smart merchants of Grunvald would not only take their spices to Verdantis for sale, but then on their way back they'd buy cheap hard maple pine wood to sell to people in towns on their way back to Grunvald.

This is a very basic example, now multiply this times 1000 and you may begin to see how much more interesting trade is with regional economies.

 

I never saw anyone propose *unlimited instant travel game wide*. Maybe my eyesight is going...damn old age...lol.

 

This is precisely correct. This game has 2 major unique features. 1 is regional economy and the other is player owned and managed cities. The regional economy must remain intact or the incentive to own land or even travel to remote regions of the map wont exist. At that point the value of player owned towns would plummet into nothing and half of the PotTs you'd come across would be totally empty.

That is not a game I would want to play. Fast recreational travel IS coming, but unlimited instant travel is bad, bad, bad.

 

That is what Rune marking in multiple locations is and what the OP wants. (Similar to what we had in UO.) If I can mark a rune anywhere I choose and I want to unload a high quantity of a rare resource, I could instantly travel to my point of sale to quickly unload the product. This promotes the UO commerce environment where you have a "Luna" or a Brit bank where everyone goes to buy and sell, rendering the need to travel to and reside within remote regions unnecessary.

 

Not a single person has advocated for unlimited instant travel.

 

Okay thank you I have learned a lot. So unlimited instant travel is something people would "exploit" in order to move large quantities of goods from one place to another, and we want that transport of goods to take time and effort?

 

Travel should be limited to walking. Are we done now?

 

To be honest, I sort of was. .or was at least about to. .but I just had some knowledge dropped on me so I believe my thoughts have now changed.