Impatience creep

What gets me is moving travel powers up from level 14 to level 4. I mean, for crying out loud, you already get jetpacks just for sneezing, why do you need to be getting inherent travel that early? (Not to mention it makes a mock of Kheldians' ability to fly or teleport from the get-go, and the "City Traveler" vet reward. :P )

I remember when travel actually used to be hard. And as much as I grumbled about it, and am happy with the recent merging of transport lines, Ouroboros travel ability, and SG base porters, I can't help feeling a little sad that they're making it so easy now.

A great book I read once with advice for fledging writers said "know what the chase is, and cut to it. If the first interesting thing happens on page 100, consider cutting out the first 99 pages".

There is no "impatience" in that. It's just basic storytelling. If your book or movie or game is about a hero beating up bad guys, you need to show him beating up bad guys, not spend a lot of time on how he gets to the place where he will beat up the bad guys. (Exceptions can be made for plots which are *about* the hero trying to get somewhere, because it's somewhere difficult to get to or there's a time limit. But something that could as well be copy-pasted from Google Maps directions? No.)

Because of the subscription model and the relative time of creating content versus the players getting through it, MMOs have long been mired in the paradigm of "add in as much pointless filler as possible so that everything takes longer". The current trend of moving away from that is a good thing.

Yes, coming from the crowd that had to Sprint everywhere until level 14, I understand the value of travel experience. Puts hair on your chest. But now I have too much hair on my chest, considering I've ALWAYS had a bad case of altitis (in my 5 years total playing, it took me 3 years to find a character that I was comfortable leveling to 50), so I can be a little impatient when it comes to getting places.

BUT, that's no excuse for complaining about travelling zone-to-zone when we have all of these resources available to us... Mission Teleporters (which I don't have), Oro portals, Base telepads, Pocket D teleports, Travel powers (at level 6 even if you've played long enough), and even temporary travel powers that you can buy in booster packs, which can make even regular travel powers obsolete now that Fitness is inherent.

I like to blame it on AE and the mission pads being 5 feet away from the entrance, but that's just the crazy old conspiracy theorist in me talking.

Yeah, the problem with the whole impatience creep (and it seems to inevitably reach every game, eventually) is that it tends to be a one-way progression/degression. Impatience wallops patience over the head and runs off quickly... as we watch things change.

Anyway, I am not too concerned about it within this game for a few reasons... One being the fact that we have travel powers and I simply love using them and will occasionally do so just to travel, period. Just the other night, I was out flying around zones just for the thrill of flying. It had been a while since I'd done that... been so busy doing stuff that must be done...

And, you know what... I think that has been the biggest culprit towards the patience creep within this game.
The general balance has shifted in this game, where the overall tendency within the community has become more and more focused on maximizing your time earning stuff (xp, inf, salvage, recipes, merits, ixp, shards, empyreans and astrals...).
This may have started with inventions... It may have been exacerbated by the initial AE xp BOOM... It may have become more prevalent with the Incarnate System... And it may all just be an inevitable movement with the life of a video game (and maybe bits and pieces of all of the above).

However, I think that it is this shift in focus that then makes the travel (and the time in-between earning stuff) less and less tolerable for players.

I'm not sounding off alarms and I know it is all controllable on an individual player basis... And that there is great variance among our player base.
However, there is always an overall sentiment among the community (it just may not be shared by all... and, in fact, never is) and I have seen the change come over players that I have known. Hey, I've seen it affect my own play on occasion.

I've been enjoying my recent change into the slow lane. I've even been pulling into the shoulder... getting out... smelling the roses... Flying around the trees. It's been fun.

But yeah... the traffic seems to keep on going by faster and faster, hehe.

What was I saying...