[CF-Devel] On teleportation

Mon Oct 27 01:29:38 CST 2003

On Sat, Oct 25, 2003 at 08:34:14PM -0700, Mark Wedel wrote:
>

        Anyways, back to teleporters on the big world:

     >

     >

        I don't have a problem with fast transportation to the various cities, for a 

     >

      fee.  So you can eliminate the scorn to navar city travel time to near zero if 

     >

      you want to spend xyz platinum.

The problems with fees, as always, is that they matter less and less
the more powerful the character becomes, hence they can be viewed as
a punishment for low level characters. Those characters that already
have to pay for word of recall, those that don't have town portal.
For high level characters they are only an annoyance, they have to
visit their appartment to fetch some money from the piles.

>

        I do have a problem with setting up teleporters that drop you near 

     >

      'interesting' dungeons.  As said, if we're going to do that, why not just put 

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      the dungeon right in the city then?

There is a fun element with the big map, you got to explore and find things,
something that wouldn't happen if all the dungeons are put in the city.
It also makes the world slightly more "real". There is also a bad thing
with it. Once you've found it, the fun goes away and it leaves you with
a boring "lets walk for 5 minutes from A to B".  That would of course
be fun if something fun would happen along the way, but it doesn't right
now. (Adding random encounters would, in my opinion, not make it more
fun, only harder for new players and prolonging the journey time for
higher level players.).

>

        I also think that such a change would make it more likely such dungeons are 

     >

      always cleared out.  Easier it is to get to, more players that will use it.

I play CF to clear out maps. If there were more fun things to do, I would
probably do that too, but currently clearing out maps is almost all
there is to do (with sideshows such as collecting objects to create
a cool weapon/armour, learning new spells or various alchemy, but it takes
less than 5% of the game play time).

Making it easier to reach more dungeons would of course mean that more
dungeons would be cleared out since people wouldn't have to waste their
time doing boring things, like walking the same paths over and over.
That should be countered with more dungeons, not making it harder to
reach them, if one wants players to enjoy the game.

Another thing to consider is to rebalance some of the dungeons.
The "interesting" dungeons are interesting because they have a high
reward/risk factor. Dungeons that are cleared all the time are cleared
because they give better rewards compared to the risk compared to other
dungeons. Dungeons that are seldom cleared out probably have a too
high risk compared to the reward (or it is too annoying to get there,
they give too little reward for the journey etc).

I'm sure people will add "auto walking" code to the client so one can
read email or something while waiting to reach the destination if there
is no other way to get to the more popular dungeons.

>

        As for moon or time based gates, that is fine by me - I also played whatever 

     >

      ultima it was on. There are of course numerous ways to do that.  If I recall 

     >

      ultima correctly, there were two moons.  The phase of the first moon would 

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      determine if a particular gate was active, and the phase of the second moon 

     >

      would then determine destination.

As a player, I don't want to end up with some "random" map, I want
to get to a map that is suitable to my level or to a map that contains
an object I am looking for (a certain spellbook etc). I feel that timed
teleporters would be next to useless (well, they would be fun the first
few times, just like most things are). If I have to wait a while for
the right teleporter to be active, I would rather walk to it from
the nearest point I can reach via some other portal. If it happens
often enough, I will not even bother looking that that timed teleporter.

/Sebastian

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