Zones, Zone Transfers, War Walls, and Neighborhoods

I would really love to see an end to the warwalls and the current zone transfer system.

Yep, I know there's tons of arguments to keep the zones the way they are, but I'd really like to be able to walk from say, Atlas Park into Skyway without a zone transfer screen or even if the Devs changed to tunnels, so we could go through them. No, just a subtle shifting over several blocks where the "terrain" shifts and different mobs begin to appear. All the zones are fairly distinct and would be recognizable as the shift proceeded.

That would truly make this feel like a large city. Be nice to get on a train, and actually ride through the zone to the next stop too. Waste of time? Not necessarily, and actually would help growing players get a better sense of the city. As they level, they outgrow the trains anyway, and begin hopping through other means. Right now, there's essentially no difference between boarding the train in Atlas and going to Steel Canyon, or going through the warwall tunnel. You even end up in about the same place. What kind of flavor is that?

Yes, you're going to have your hazard zones like Perez Park, Dark Astoria, and Terra Volta where there should be barriers. Yes people will go where they will be smacked down by something that's too high a level for them. So? That's what a hospital is for.

What about all that space? What about it? How hard is it to fill that space with buildings and as the city fades into rural areas, forests and rivers/lakes etc.

Yeah, it'd require a different setup from the devs. There'd have to be "buffer" servers or something like that which handled the actual transfer from one zone to the next. But overall, something like this could be transparent to the player. And should be.

Anyway, my .02...
Skrid

The War Walls are there to protect us. Read the lore.

The biggest problem with making the entire city/isle 1 large map, or maybe 2 not really sure exactly what you would want when you say make it one map, is resource usage. Right now the download rate when I'm in Atlas park varies from about 285 kps to 10200 kps depending on activity level. I've tracked the download when I do a Hami raid and it's hitting it's head on my max download rate. I'm on a fiber optic line so I get 25-35 MBps downloads. That download is every piece of data that your system currently is told it needs to run the game. Every motion path on the map, Every NPC on the map, every color used on every costume part in every active costume on every toon in the map, every power FX that is used, and every color used to color those FX, Every line of chat in the channels, every trade taking place in the map.

Heres an example of what I mean. This is a recorded demo file from Atlas Park. Now, allow me to explain what you're looking at so you can understand why I'm giving you this example.
The DemoRecord files are organized into line items that coded by time since 0 in milliseconds. Basically it reads like this:

1 mili-second after the last event, do this.

The mili-second time is on the far left column. The second column is an identification number for that entity. Once an object, such as a character or an NPC, is identified, it is referenced by the number it was assigned at creation of the demo file. For instance. Object Manticore is assigned the number 1 in this demo file. Until Object Manticore is removed from the demo file, every time the demo references Object 1, it will be referencing Manticore.

Now, that I've give you a brief break down of the demo file, scroll through and take a look at it. I'm not going to tell you anything specific to check out while you're scrolling. Just scroll through it and look at it.