Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Bill of Player Rights: Travel Time Edition

1) If players use suicide and graveyards to move through a zone then chances are the average run speed might need to be adjusted.

2) The shortest route between two points is always a straight line by flight. Blizzard seems confused on this issue.

3) Quests should not force you to travel multiple times over the same path. Especially if you are moving across multiple zones.

4) A maximum travel time limit of five-ten minutes needs to be established for all automatic travel methods like flight paths. If your characters arrive AFK after using a travel method then the developers have FAILED.

5) Economic games need to use an automatic real time method of moving goods which don't require constant player attention. Players should be able to ship their goods without having to be at the helm doing nothing for twenty-five minutes.

6) Developers who make escort quests where the NPC moves slowly on a pre-set path need to be shot.

7) Methods of increasing run speed while out of combat should be available to all classes.

8) Player controlled mounts which increase movement speed should be cheap. The money sink should be the exotic and cool looking mounts.

9) Traveling back to your corpse more then once should never be mandatory after being ganked and corpse camped. Games should recognize level differences between players and offer the option of resurrecting you at a graveyard for free or deleting a item from that asshat's inventory.

10) Ships are cool but arriving at the docks right when the only ship leaves makes people want to kill kittens. Please consider having more then one ship at the docks so the wait time is less for everyone, think of the kittens.

*Serious discussion of Travel Time in my previous post here

8 comments:

Kaziel said...

6) Developers who make escort quests where the NPC moves slowly on a pre-set path need to be shot.

God, yes.

Gunn said...

The developers will tell you that the reason for these things it to make it feel more like you're in an immersive world.

Players like you want teleport from pt A to pt B and that just is not realistic for a MMORPG.

Most of your suggestions are silly

Anonymous said...

So the time sink has NOTHING to do with chewing up more of the monthly subscription and EVERYTHING to do with immersion? OK, that's a little overstated, but I can't imagine that that's not a consideration. Besides, if I can play a gun-toting 8ft. tall minotaur, why can't I go to other locations more quickly?

Talyn said...

2) The shortest route between two points is always a straight line by flight.

Oh oh oh! Can I pick nits? This is actually not true "in real life" since our world is spherical. See Great Circle for details.

But yeah, on a flat MMO world... I always just (RP) assumed the gryphons enjoyed swooping around rather than flying in a straight line like a mechanical ferry.

Relmstein said...

Gunn:
My Ten Item Posts are usually meant to be humourous. A serious discussion of travel time is in the previous article. Believe me I saw Everquest kill off huge chunks of itself by over using portals.

Tayln:
Yes, if you're on the earth its actually a curved line. I think I learned this watching the Animated Batman cartoon about 14 years ago. Anyone remember that one episode where they first introduced the Riddler?

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Anonymous said...

Maybe they should just put kittens at the docks.

Anonymous said...

Actually maybe the straight line principle is true and instead games should have a "super fast travel" option which is actually a giant mole (or giant grub for Forsaken lands) that burrows to the destination. Only well it already burrowed so it doesn't have to spend time digging just cruising through the hole.

To be serious for a second: Instant travel all over LOTRO doesn't hurt the immersion, I still feel more immersed there than in WoW. Immersion != annoying timesinks to make it "realistic".

This is Yunk again sometimes the new Blogger won't let me sign my posts.