I19 Transit Merger Additional Tweaks

Bah. Confusion is annoying. I think for the time being I'm gonna go with the Dev answer from the panel, and hope really hard the reporter for Massively got it wrong.

I like the idea of expanding the BHC line and would also suggest adding one in PO that goes from somewhere around the Arena District out to Fort Hades.

I'd also like to see an Indepedence Port South station added.

Mmm...

Useless, senseless travel has been a pet peeve of mine for years, I do believe a portion of the devs believe in using retarded travel as a simple time sink to make you play the game longer, and perhaps because down deep they are a sadistic bunch.

So I have little reason to believe they would be open to the ideas of placing new transportation stops that would alleviate the sensless cross map travel. For instance look at the missions at Independepence Port, the train, oro or base entries to IP are always on the opposite side of the map to were the missions normally are at, why? So we have to travel the entire length of the map! Notice that many TFs for instance really abuse the use of Steel, Sky and IP which are long rectangular maps and the mission entrances bounce you from opposite end to opposite end with a consistency that defy's the so call randomness of the door entrance.

Frankly if they were to revise the door mission entrances and make them closer to each other, and cut back on inter-zone travel, the need to create new lines would go away.
Even WoW, which has a lot of problems, once you start a thread, it may make you travel a long way to another zone, but once you make it to the zone all the missions of that thread are in that zone (there a few exceptions to this).

But at least, connecting the green and yellow line is a tremendous improvement or counter to the sadistic travel driven developers...

Stormy

Much of that "useless, senseless travel" is a relic of MMO game design circa 2004, when everyone - even WoW - was doing it. Some of it was to add to sense of world, but yes, a lot of it was to stretch out playtime.

You'll note that things have already gotten better and will continue to do so. Heck, I was an early member of the Taxibots and I can tell you the need for our services has gone way down.

I still want to see travel powers expanded by two more tiers.

At roughly level 30ish you could take "Map Travel". IE: Click on a spot on the map and Run/Jump/Fly/Teleport there instantly.

At roughly Level 40ish you could take "Zone Travel". IE: Any Zone you have previously traveled too (Providing you can go there now with regards to alignment) you click the power and a pull down menu allows you to select the zone to Run/Jump/Fly/Teleport to instantly. . .

They aren't "stupid", they simply serve a different set of goals. You mentioned arcade games - what about all the ones that were designed to suck maximum quarters out of the average player's pockets while giving him just enough playtime to be "worth" it? (i.e. most of them?) The goal there is not to maximize the player's fun, but the arcade owner's profit.

That's actually why I mentioned it... they were another example of a similar technique, but...

The most popular titles did it less. Pac-Man got stupidly hard at the highest levels, but didn't use anything that was an obvious ploy to artifically take quarters. In the better games you would not be charged if you didn't lose. Naturally, the diffuculty could be high, but that enhanced the experience to go with its economic motives. It wasn't blatantly just a way to #$%^ the customer. And at least most arcade games did not include huge expanses of nothing just so you would have to pay more.