[MUD-Dev] Transportation (was: UO rants)

[Norman Short]

----- Original Message -----
From: Brad Wyble <wyble at wjh.harvard.edu>
To: <mud-dev at kanga.nu>
Sent: Tuesday, August 29, 2000 9:50 PM
Subject: Re: [MUD-Dev] Transportation (was: UO rants)


> Patrick writes:
> >
>
> This isn't quite true in EQ.  People pay the travel time price until they
> have friends who can teleport them. They bitch, they complain, but they
> suffer it just the same, all 300K of them.

EQ doesn't even have the PK issue to justify its travel times.  Speaking
personally, I quit EQ for 3 reasons:  1)Grouping with friends became
impossible unless you pretty consistently played the same times and amount
of times; 2)I couldn't justify giving money to a company that so callously
regarded its playerbase, and 3)I hated the long travel times, didn't want to
have to beg for a taxi all the time, and didn't want to be told "well you
really should have been a druid then".   Playing a melee type made it even
worse since you had to bind at a town perhaps far from where your friends
wanted to fight.

EQ's time restraints were purposeful to make people spend long amounts of
time in a single game session.  Why 300K people still play, to hear Abashi
crap on them as the company's PR representative and deal with the rest of
the problems in the game I don't know.  Addiction and "my friends are here
and nothing better is out yet" would be my main guesses.  Travel may not
have been the primary reason I quit, but it was a major annoyance.  One of
my criteria for a game I am willing to spend significant time in is the
ability to meet and play with friends without long delays in making it
happen, and the ability to continue to play with them even if some of them
have spent considerably longer in the game.  Travel and grouping in EQ were
both problems that made those factors criteria for future games and made me
happy when I erased it from my hard drive.  Maybe I'm just weird though.

Norman Short aka Shakkar






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