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."
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No, they use it because it introduces massive downtime that is easy to justify as you can get some players even believe it is for their own good.
MMO 101: Downtime and timesinks are good thing for business. It means you get away with having less actual content while players take longer to do something, making sure they will be around in next month.
I have been playing instant teleport-anywhere game (Guild Wars) and frankly it is single most awesome thing. Worls still feels big in parts where cotnent is and small where player runs out of it. Just like in WoW: Areas which you outlevel just shrink in your head. By time you are done with walking on feet, you are indeed done and any travel-related downtime is pointless and punishing.
Game would not be bigger if i had to spend 30 minutes getting to some location "for your own good". It would be oxonobiously anoying.
Ive actually quit WoW over lack of instant movement. Waiting 30 minutes for group to ssemble is not fun, neither well spent time. When you spend more time afking game and reding book while you wait for someone than playing, something is very wrong...
Your thoughts are jaded as an ex-player and your reasoning is par with a conspiracy theory about the moon landing. You act like the travel timesink is good for business, yet mention you quit because of it. As if they got paid by the mile you traveled? Guild wars is a different type of MMO. It's not a virtual world per say.
Although MMO's are full of timesinks and carrots, they really are a labor of love designed by big-time geeks like things like MUD's and D&D.
Worlds do appear small, and less of a consistent world, if transportation is instant. They're been lots of comparisons and feedback on this. Go back to EQ's day. You spent 45 minutes real time running from one major city to another. You spent 20 minutes standing on the docks waiting for a boat to take you to another island, and the boat ride itself was 10 minutes long. But it felt like a huge world. Now about 10 years after release they do have instant travel, it was added as a gimmick to try and keep older players around in lieu of other games like WoW.
In WAR on the other hand, transportation is nearly instant. Yet, one of the biggest complaints about it was it didn't feel like a continuous world. It played like levels in an old school FPS. To go from one level to the next you take the epic "10 second cutscene of your journey".
WoW takes the approach of speed increased flights that are controlled by the game.
To be honest, I'm not really sure what RPS's complaint is. Most MMO's have travel options that go well beyond "I've run this one, I don't want to run it again". Several times in the article it mentions running over and over. In the 800 lb gorilla in the room, there are personal mounts, flight paths that allow you to revisit almost every area you've already been too at least once, instant transportation to all the main cities in both expansion hubs, a class that can transport people instantly, and transportation to bind locations. Etc... To do what Guild War does they wouldn't make a continuous world. And "gasp" GW didn't. It's clear the true MMO's try to make travel painless, but at the same time preserve the essence of a virtual world.
WOW could keep that big feeling and make players happy if they did one simple thing. Make the griffin flights instantaneous. They are from major point to major point, but then you still have to walk (or ride a mount if you are high enough level) to the area of the quest and some of them are still quiet far from a griffin flight path.
Sure flying on the griffin was fun for probably the first 10 times. After that it became a major pain in the @ss especially if you were flying a long distance, say Menethil
Mounts still take time to get you to where you're going; and he is right in a big way; they may not charge you by the "mile" but they certainly do charge you by the minute. You pay your $15 for a month's worth of play, minus server maintenance; you could break that down to time in minutes or further into paying for time in terms of the time you have to play it. Every minute spent traveling is time, and money wasted.
Seeing as no one plays for 1 month continuously, that's a rather weak argument.
I suppose you could argue that while you're traveling, you're not casting spells and stuff, reducing server load *shrug*
It's not really that difficult to grasp his point, but you seem to be doing a great job of missing it anyway.
If you pay for a month of play, there's only a certain number of minutes you can physically play the game - that would be your play time (not sleeping, working, or doing other normal things). Let's say you only have 1800 minutes of play time every month - that's 60 minutes per day, the amount of time a normal healthy person with a life would have to play. Now, that 60 minutes could be spent battlin
Ive actually quit WoW over lack of instant movement. Waiting 30 minutes for group to ssemble is not fun, neither well spent time. When you spend more time afking game and reding book while you wait for someone than playing, something is very wrong...
In WoW there are at least 2 options for getting other players to a dungeon virtually instantly - the meeting stones (requires 2 players be there already) and warlock teleporting (requires 3 players be at the desired location). If you're at a level where you're doing content that doesn't have a meeting stone (raids, pretty much) you are going to have the ability to travel to any location in the world in much less than 30 minutes, at most about 10 minutes, and that would be the most extreme possible case I can think of. The *only* time there is a longer trip involved is when you're first exploring an area with a given character. If you don't have the flight paths connecting one point to another, then prepare for World of Walking - but at the level where you're still getting flight paths it isn't like you're raiding or doing dungeons much, so waiting for people for a raid isn't happening.
People take so long to get to instances and raids not because of travel times, but because they are doing other things before the raid, like selling stuff, repairing, getting potions etc. ready for the raid, chatting, whatever. If travel time were the real determinant of how long it takes to get a raid together, the wait times would be down to 10 minutes, 15 minutes tops.
Further, WoW has done quite a bit to change the way you have to travel:
Original WoW had mounts that you could get at level 40 that would boost your speed by 60% for 100 gold (a decent amount of money back then) and 1000 gold at level 60 (the maximum level) would get you 100% movement speed increase. You could boost that another 2-3% by getting a trinket that would speed you up.
Then they added the Burning Crusade expansion with flying mounts. The level 40 mounts dropped to 60 (I think?) gold, the level 60 mounts dropped to 640 (I think?) gold, and the flying mounts were now 1000 gold for the riding skill (easy to get along the way to level 70) for a 60% speed flying mount and 5000 gold (about as hard to get as the old 1000g mount) for a 280% speed increase - as fast as the flighpaths, but quicker because you could do this point to point kind of travel rather than take the long way with flight paths that swooped around. You could boost those numbers by 10% or so by getting new trinkets.
In addition, they added Shattrath which has portals in it to every major city in the game. You could set your hearthstone to Shattrath and teleport to either continent in the old world (and close to other travel options) instantly.
Then they added Wrath of the Lich King. The level 40 mounts now unlock at level 30. There's a new city - Dalaran - that has a set of portals to all major cities. Cooldowns on hearth stones and other similar abilities were reduced to 30 minutes from an hour. 5000g for the VERY fast flying mounts is now pretty easy to get.
It isn't instant travel, but it's not 30 minutes, either. And if you're really impatient to get around, roll a mage or deathknight. Mages can teleport to many places in the world inside of 10 seconds, and deathknights have special abilities that make their mounted speed quite a bit faster than usual - it feels pretty peppy.
Guild Wars also uses a different model from WoW. They actually make more money if you buy the game and then stop playing because it's a pay once (and pay for expansions) kind of thing. WoW is a pay per month set up. Guild Wars doesn't really require timesinks for their business model in the same way WoW does. I think WoW does a pretty good job of varying the timesinks and even making them a little more entertaining (the people on boats can be fun to talk to; flying under your own control you can find interesting places) all things considered - and certainly the rest of the game is more than fun enough (for people who still play) to compensate for the travel stuff.
Apprentice Riding (Skill 75; normal land mount): Can now be learned at level 20 for 4 gold. Mail will be sent to players who reach level 20 directing them to the riding trainer.
Journeyman Riding (Skill 150; epic land mount): Can now be learned at level 40 for 50 gold. Mail will be sent to players who reach level 40 directing them back to the riding trainer.
by Anonymous Coward
on Sunday June 28, @12:58PM (#28505471)
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...
Because I like zombies and trolls and giant bats and magic swords and stuff more than I like apples and bananas and pennies.
Obviously I'm not the AC, but I actually really enjoyed the old badge system. I'd prefer a proper progression system for 5-mans but if Blizzard is unable to grasp the concept of "raids and small group content should be parallel, not sequential, progression paths", at least let us buy high end gear with large amounts of tokens dropped off heroic dungeon bosses. I liked the fact that,
I'd prefer a proper progression system for 5-mans but if Blizzard is unable to grasp the concept of "raids and small group content should be parallel, not sequential, progression paths", at least let us buy high end gear with large amounts of tokens dropped off heroic dungeon bosses. I liked the fact that, even though I can't raid and can only run a heroic or two a night after the missus was finally asleep, I could still work on my gear and progress my character.
Why would you need tier 8 items to continue to run heroics? The heroic gear is the entry into raids (that raid gear into higher level raids, etc).
And this is exactly the crux of the issue. There is NO 5-man PvE progression past heroics in WotLK. At least in Burning Crusade you could grind heroics for badges and then when you did have the odd chance to raid, you were geared enough to participate.
The other problem is, of course, that there's nothing particularly scary in heroics once you get some heroic gear. Instead of progression path going:
Dungeons -> Heroics -> Raids -> Harder Raids
they need to build it so that it goes:
Dungeons -> Heroics -> Harder Heroics -> Even Harder Heroics
Dungeons -> Heroics -> Raids -> Harder Raids
I'm guessing by your entitled-raider attitude that you don't have a wife with Raid Radar(TM) and a magic ability to interrupt any raid you join? I'm happy to put in say 4 hours play time per piece of gear (a lot more than it takes if I score a run with my raiding guild), I just can't do those 4 hours in one big block any more without being dragged afk for 45 minutes in the middle. Believe me, it's quicker to get gear from raids than by grinding badges, and the gear from raids is better itemised.
Don't worry, you'll still have your full tier set to prance around capital cities in. Badge gear just gives non-raiders the ability to get almost-equal gear. If you can't tell the difference between someone in full badge gear and someone in raid gear then... well, I don't know what to say. It's people like you that I make sure I always equip one end-of-raid piece for, even if it's not quite as good as the badge gear, just to prove that I've cleared it.
No, they use it because it introduces massive downtime that is easy to justify as you can get some players even believe it is for their own good.
I'll state right up front that you're off base, close minded, and completely lacking in aesthetics.
I played EQ back in the days of Velious. Traveling from Faydwer (eastern continent on Norrath) to Erudin (western continent) by foot, was about a 2-3 hour journey. So, if you wanted to travel that way (for free), you expended playing time. The land felt huge,
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.
I wouldn't call Guild Wars "Wow-Lite" although that's admittedly what they are planning for the vaporware Guild Wars 2. I left WoW for guild wars because, despite the smaller size, I found it a better game, definitely a more enjoyable one.
The key differences from WoW are big ones.
Instanced world - Outside the outposts, the area is yours. You want to caravan from Temple of the Ages to Ascalon City, feel free. You don't have to worry about twats trying to gank you, training monsters onto you for giggles, and
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.
You've never played D&D, at least with the sort of crowd I've played with. You usually spend half an hour per round of combat because no-one can focus, and it just turns into a chore.
> Chess is not funner because you can teleport your piece all over the map and make any one of your pieces attack another. Let me know when the world scale of chess leaves the microscopic 8x8 and reaches the macroscopic 1 million by 1 million.
> There's no sense in making a huge world with diverse regions and items, then giving the player the ability to hit any one of them at a whim. 1. Maybe you should go study the masters of this: Casino games _already_ do this, and they make _billions_. Let me know w
Yes, because obviously the most selling item is the highest quality item with the best return on investment. (See: Big Mac, Britney, Titanic)
People don't know what they want. They think they want to have action 24/7. They think they want to push the limits of effects and all the new things that have come out... then within a few weeks they are complaining that the game is boring or they are off to a new thing. I suppose as a game designer, that works great for you since you will always have a job replac
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.
That only works provided people keep playing. If they go as silly as say that Penn and Teller Sega CD game where you drive a bus to Vegas, subscriptions dry up.
I don't see why. You pay monthly regardless of how long you spend in the game and what you do in it. If anything long, unnecessary travel times will tend to put people off of subscribing for another month.
You'll play the game untill you run out of things to do, so basically they have to extend the time needed to achieve your goal as much as they possible can.
Large travelling times, farming, releasing content slowly, etc etc are some of the mechanisms
Thankyou for stating what I was thinking. WoW is not an expensive past time. The amount of money I spend on my WoW subscription in one month, I can burn through in the pub in about 2 hours. Furthermore, it is unmetered, so Blizzard have no financial incentive to keep you traveling. It could be to reduce load on their servers I suppose, But I doubt it. When you fly you go through a number of areas in quick succession, rather than simply switching from one to another as you do using one of the various instant teleportation methods.
I have never been as pissed off with WoW travel as other people seem to be. Maybe its because I am older than a lot of players, but it seems to me that it helps pace the game properly. It is a big world, and flight paths help maintain that impression.
Oh, and it also gives me a chance to get myself a cup of coffee and go to the toilet:)
I have never been as pissed off with WoW travel as other people seem to be. Maybe its because I am older than a lot of players, but it seems to me that it helps pace the game properly. It is a big world, and flight paths help maintain that impression.
I agree. In TBC they introduced portal rooms which allow teleportation to any capitol city. With WotLK they removed barriers between alliance capitols in the old world. Very recently they changed the cooldown on the hearthstone (and the associated Kirin Tor trinket) to 30 minutes.
While there is some convenience involved, it used to be more fun planning your strategy around how to minimize your travel times.
It's very much a mixed bag.
I thought I was a slow, methodical player until I went after the Explorer achivement and was amazed at how truly big the World of Warcraft truly was, or appeared to be.
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.
Have you actually played the latest expansion? You get to Northrend at level 70. You can't fly there without "Cold Weather Flight Training" or somesuch, which you can't even get until level 77-- which is most of the way through the Northrend content, and costs a serious chunk of change to boot.
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.
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.
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.
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.
by Anonymous Coward
on Sunday June 28, @07:06AM (#28502763)
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.
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.
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As the great Bartle said (Score:5, Insightful)
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" [google.com.au], that's cause they've read Bartle.
Re:As the great Bartle said (Score:4, Insightful)
No, they use it because it introduces massive downtime that is easy to justify as you can get some players even believe it is for their own good.
MMO 101: Downtime and timesinks are good thing for business. It means you get away with having less actual content while players take longer to do something, making sure they will be around in next month.
I have been playing instant teleport-anywhere game (Guild Wars) and frankly it is single most awesome thing. Worls still feels big in parts where cotnent is and small where player runs out of it. Just like in WoW: Areas which you outlevel just shrink in your head. By time you are done with walking on feet, you are indeed done and any travel-related downtime is pointless and punishing.
Game would not be bigger if i had to spend 30 minutes getting to some location "for your own good". It would be oxonobiously anoying.
Ive actually quit WoW over lack of instant movement. Waiting 30 minutes for group to ssemble is not fun, neither well spent time. When you spend more time afking game and reding book while you wait for someone than playing, something is very wrong ...
Parent
Re:As the great Bartle said (Score:4, Insightful)
Although MMO's are full of timesinks and carrots, they really are a labor of love designed by big-time geeks like things like MUD's and D&D.
Worlds do appear small, and less of a consistent world, if transportation is instant. They're been lots of comparisons and feedback on this. Go back to EQ's day. You spent 45 minutes real time running from one major city to another. You spent 20 minutes standing on the docks waiting for a boat to take you to another island, and the boat ride itself was 10 minutes long. But it felt like a huge world. Now about 10 years after release they do have instant travel, it was added as a gimmick to try and keep older players around in lieu of other games like WoW.
In WAR on the other hand, transportation is nearly instant. Yet, one of the biggest complaints about it was it didn't feel like a continuous world. It played like levels in an old school FPS. To go from one level to the next you take the epic "10 second cutscene of your journey".
WoW takes the approach of speed increased flights that are controlled by the game.
To be honest, I'm not really sure what RPS's complaint is. Most MMO's have travel options that go well beyond "I've run this one, I don't want to run it again". Several times in the article it mentions running over and over. In the 800 lb gorilla in the room, there are personal mounts, flight paths that allow you to revisit almost every area you've already been too at least once, instant transportation to all the main cities in both expansion hubs, a class that can transport people instantly, and transportation to bind locations. Etc... To do what Guild War does they wouldn't make a continuous world. And "gasp" GW didn't. It's clear the true MMO's try to make travel painless, but at the same time preserve the essence of a virtual world.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
WOW could keep that big feeling and make players happy if they did one simple thing. Make the griffin flights instantaneous. They are from major point to major point, but then you still have to walk (or ride a mount if you are high enough level) to the area of the quest and some of them are still quiet far from a griffin flight path.
Sure flying on the griffin was fun for probably the first 10 times. After that it became a major pain in the @ss especially if you were flying a long distance, say Menethil
Re:As the great Bartle said (Score:5, Insightful)
Mounts still take time to get you to where you're going; and he is right in a big way; they may not charge you by the "mile" but they certainly do charge you by the minute. You pay your $15 for a month's worth of play, minus server maintenance; you could break that down to time in minutes or further into paying for time in terms of the time you have to play it. Every minute spent traveling is time, and money wasted.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Seeing as no one plays for 1 month continuously, that's a rather weak argument. I suppose you could argue that while you're traveling, you're not casting spells and stuff, reducing server load *shrug*
It's not really that difficult to grasp his point, but you seem to be doing a great job of missing it anyway.
If you pay for a month of play, there's only a certain number of minutes you can physically play the game - that would be your play time (not sleeping, working, or doing other normal things). Let's say you only have 1800 minutes of play time every month - that's 60 minutes per day, the amount of time a normal healthy person with a life would have to play. Now, that 60 minutes could be spent battlin
Re:As the great Bartle said (Score:5, Informative)
Ive actually quit WoW over lack of instant movement. Waiting 30 minutes for group to ssemble is not fun, neither well spent time. When you spend more time afking game and reding book while you wait for someone than playing, something is very wrong ...
In WoW there are at least 2 options for getting other players to a dungeon virtually instantly - the meeting stones (requires 2 players be there already) and warlock teleporting (requires 3 players be at the desired location). If you're at a level where you're doing content that doesn't have a meeting stone (raids, pretty much) you are going to have the ability to travel to any location in the world in much less than 30 minutes, at most about 10 minutes, and that would be the most extreme possible case I can think of. The *only* time there is a longer trip involved is when you're first exploring an area with a given character. If you don't have the flight paths connecting one point to another, then prepare for World of Walking - but at the level where you're still getting flight paths it isn't like you're raiding or doing dungeons much, so waiting for people for a raid isn't happening.
People take so long to get to instances and raids not because of travel times, but because they are doing other things before the raid, like selling stuff, repairing, getting potions etc. ready for the raid, chatting, whatever. If travel time were the real determinant of how long it takes to get a raid together, the wait times would be down to 10 minutes, 15 minutes tops.
Further, WoW has done quite a bit to change the way you have to travel:
Original WoW had mounts that you could get at level 40 that would boost your speed by 60% for 100 gold (a decent amount of money back then) and 1000 gold at level 60 (the maximum level) would get you 100% movement speed increase. You could boost that another 2-3% by getting a trinket that would speed you up.
Then they added the Burning Crusade expansion with flying mounts. The level 40 mounts dropped to 60 (I think?) gold, the level 60 mounts dropped to 640 (I think?) gold, and the flying mounts were now 1000 gold for the riding skill (easy to get along the way to level 70) for a 60% speed flying mount and 5000 gold (about as hard to get as the old 1000g mount) for a 280% speed increase - as fast as the flighpaths, but quicker because you could do this point to point kind of travel rather than take the long way with flight paths that swooped around. You could boost those numbers by 10% or so by getting new trinkets.
In addition, they added Shattrath which has portals in it to every major city in the game. You could set your hearthstone to Shattrath and teleport to either continent in the old world (and close to other travel options) instantly.
Then they added Wrath of the Lich King. The level 40 mounts now unlock at level 30. There's a new city - Dalaran - that has a set of portals to all major cities. Cooldowns on hearth stones and other similar abilities were reduced to 30 minutes from an hour. 5000g for the VERY fast flying mounts is now pretty easy to get.
It isn't instant travel, but it's not 30 minutes, either. And if you're really impatient to get around, roll a mage or deathknight. Mages can teleport to many places in the world inside of 10 seconds, and deathknights have special abilities that make their mounted speed quite a bit faster than usual - it feels pretty peppy.
Guild Wars also uses a different model from WoW. They actually make more money if you buy the game and then stop playing because it's a pay once (and pay for expansions) kind of thing. WoW is a pay per month set up. Guild Wars doesn't really require timesinks for their business model in the same way WoW does. I think WoW does a pretty good job of varying the timesinks and even making them a little more entertaining (the people on boats can be fun to talk to; flying under your own control you can find interesting places) all things considered - and certainly the rest of the game is more than fun enough (for people who still play) to compensate for the travel stuff.
Parent
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Not only that, but WoW is dropping the mount levels again in 3.2.
According to the WoW Under Development [worldofwarcraft.com] page:
Re:As the great Bartle said (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
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Timesinks are stupid. Period. I don't play a game for awfully boring timesinks.
Then WoW is clearly not for you.
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Obviously I'm not the AC, but I actually really enjoyed the old badge system. I'd prefer a proper progression system for 5-mans but if Blizzard is unable to grasp the concept of "raids and small group content should be parallel, not sequential, progression paths", at least let us buy high end gear with large amounts of tokens dropped off heroic dungeon bosses. I liked the fact that,
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I'd prefer a proper progression system for 5-mans but if Blizzard is unable to grasp the concept of "raids and small group content should be parallel, not sequential, progression paths", at least let us buy high end gear with large amounts of tokens dropped off heroic dungeon bosses. I liked the fact that, even though I can't raid and can only run a heroic or two a night after the missus was finally asleep, I could still work on my gear and progress my character.
Progress this character for what exactly? If
Re:As the great Bartle said (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would you need tier 8 items to continue to run heroics? The heroic gear is the entry into raids (that raid gear into higher level raids, etc).
And this is exactly the crux of the issue. There is NO 5-man PvE progression past heroics in WotLK. At least in Burning Crusade you could grind heroics for badges and then when you did have the odd chance to raid, you were geared enough to participate.
The other problem is, of course, that there's nothing particularly scary in heroics once you get some heroic gear. Instead of progression path going:
Dungeons -> Heroics -> Raids -> Harder Raids
they need to build it so that it goes:
Dungeons -> Heroics -> Harder Heroics -> Even Harder Heroics
Dungeons -> Heroics -> Raids -> Harder Raids
I'm guessing by your entitled-raider attitude that you don't have a wife with Raid Radar(TM) and a magic ability to interrupt any raid you join? I'm happy to put in say 4 hours play time per piece of gear (a lot more than it takes if I score a run with my raiding guild), I just can't do those 4 hours in one big block any more without being dragged afk for 45 minutes in the middle. Believe me, it's quicker to get gear from raids than by grinding badges, and the gear from raids is better itemised.
Don't worry, you'll still have your full tier set to prance around capital cities in. Badge gear just gives non-raiders the ability to get almost-equal gear. If you can't tell the difference between someone in full badge gear and someone in raid gear then... well, I don't know what to say. It's people like you that I make sure I always equip one end-of-raid piece for, even if it's not quite as good as the badge gear, just to prove that I've cleared it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I'll state right up front that you're off base, close minded, and completely lacking in aesthetics.
I played EQ back in the days of Velious. Traveling from Faydwer (eastern continent on Norrath) to Erudin (western continent) by foot, was about a 2-3 hour journey. So, if you wanted to travel that way (for free), you expended playing time. The land felt huge,
Guild Wars - WoW Lite (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I wouldn't call Guild Wars "Wow-Lite" although that's admittedly what they are planning for the vaporware Guild Wars 2. I left WoW for guild wars because, despite the smaller size, I found it a better game, definitely a more enjoyable one.
The key differences from WoW are big ones.
No, the technical term is "Dead Time" (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
> Chess is not funner because you can teleport your piece all over the map and make any one of your pieces attack another.
Let me know when the world scale of chess leaves the microscopic 8x8 and reaches the macroscopic 1 million by 1 million.
> There's no sense in making a huge world with diverse regions and items, then giving the player the ability to hit any one of them at a whim.
1. Maybe you should go study the masters of this: Casino games _already_ do this, and they make _billions_. Let me know w
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, because obviously the most selling item is the highest quality item with the best return on investment. (See: Big Mac, Britney, Titanic)
People don't know what they want. They think they want to have action 24/7. They think they want to push the limits of effects and all the new things that have come out... then within a few weeks they are complaining that the game is boring or they are off to a new thing. I suppose as a game designer, that works great for you since you will always have a job replac
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Peaks and troughs are good.
But left4dead doesn't have you travelling for 5 boring minutes. It's just a short pause before you have lots of stuff happening again.
As for creating a contrast between boring and exciting. The really boring bits can be saved for "real life" when I'm not playing games.
For example, I don't mind boring plane flights that much. I don't want too much excitement when travelling in real life.
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That's why you make travel to everywhere instantaneous, like in Game! [wittyrpg.com].
Just.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Free Realms (Score:3, Interesting)
Or, the alternative... (Score:3, Interesting)
Pretty simple (Score:5, Insightful)
More time playing = more money earned
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
More time travelling = more time playing
More time playing = more money earned
That only works provided people keep playing. If they go as silly as say that Penn and Teller Sega CD game where you drive a bus to Vegas, subscriptions dry up.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Large travelling times, farming, releasing content slowly, etc etc are some of the mechanisms
Re:Pretty simple (Score:5, Insightful)
Thankyou for stating what I was thinking. WoW is not an expensive past time. The amount of money I spend on my WoW subscription in one month, I can burn through in the pub in about 2 hours. Furthermore, it is unmetered, so Blizzard have no financial incentive to keep you traveling. It could be to reduce load on their servers I suppose, But I doubt it. When you fly you go through a number of areas in quick succession, rather than simply switching from one to another as you do using one of the various instant teleportation methods.
I have never been as pissed off with WoW travel as other people seem to be. Maybe its because I am older than a lot of players, but it seems to me that it helps pace the game properly. It is a big world, and flight paths help maintain that impression.
Oh, and it also gives me a chance to get myself a cup of coffee and go to the toilet :)
Parent
Re:Pretty simple (Score:5, Insightful)
I have never been as pissed off with WoW travel as other people seem to be. Maybe its because I am older than a lot of players, but it seems to me that it helps pace the game properly. It is a big world, and flight paths help maintain that impression.
I agree. In TBC they introduced portal rooms which allow teleportation to any capitol city. With WotLK they removed barriers between alliance capitols in the old world. Very recently they changed the cooldown on the hearthstone (and the associated Kirin Tor trinket) to 30 minutes.
While there is some convenience involved, it used to be more fun planning your strategy around how to minimize your travel times.
It's very much a mixed bag.
I thought I was a slow, methodical player until I went after the Explorer achivement and was amazed at how truly big the World of Warcraft truly was, or appeared to be.
Parent
Codswallop (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Codswallop (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Timesinks (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
What do you want... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What do you want... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Developer Laziness or UO, Rune Books, SWG and WoW (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
It comes down to content and things to do! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Transport based on level (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Problem is lack of dynamic content (Score:4, Interesting)
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)
Because of overcrowding (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The answer is, unsurprisingly ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Mimick the Human Mind (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Server Load (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Obviously no one here reads Hitchcock.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Where do you get your info from?
Neither running more than one copy nor spreading keypresses via software is forbidden.
Re:It is better to travel hopefully (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Guilds Wars method (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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