So it depends on how you structure it. Teleportation shrinks the world, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If the rest of the world is structured around that, you don’t necessarily lose anything, and you gain usability in the process. UO would be vastly injured by removing teleportation. It would have rendered the early days completely unplayable, and the later days hugely frustrating. The rune marking system *did* encourage people to explore too, as did the housing system.

Yes, in a theme park game, it basically destroys any need for the bits between the rides, but that’s basically down to poor level design. If every zone is a ride, you still need to go through all of them, and the teleportation just lets you skip previously viewed content. I’m not sure that WoW would be much impacted by making flight paths instant, for instance, but still requiring you to flag them, except that gold drops per hour would need to be rebalanced to take the reduced travel time into account.

There’s a line between experience and usability that needs to be carefully maintained. And teleportation, done properly, is easily on the right side of it.

And those Steam sales were crazy awesome.

That being said, I have to disagree with the teleportation point. Fast travel does cause one issue – the world gets smaller – but it doesn’t inherently move the game toward or away worldy. Other things are responsible for that. Instant gratification isn’t the enemy, incentive structure and core mechanics are; the issue is more in the heavy focus on content as gameplay rather than interaction as gameplay.

I’m getting mixed feedback from people who’ve gotten their own accounts hacked – some say Blizzard re-instated everything on their account, others that only the characters were fixed (if deleted, for instance) – and others still that their account was closed permanently by Blizzard.

I guess it comes down to the circumstances surrounding the event. Still no reply to my GM ticket, though.

There are people, bots… vast, cool and unsympathetic… that brute force passwords on mmos to do exactly what happened to you. The question these days isn’t if you’re going to get hacked, but when.

The problem is so bad that blizzard is selling these little USB dongles to increase security. I think that’s silly and extreme. There are lots of ways to increase security without going that route. But blizzard is all about the Lincolns.

I doubt blizzard will be able to help. They are one of those “I’m sorry I can’t hear you over the sound of how awesome I am” companies.

What puzzles me, Holmes, is what someone interested in virtual worlds is doing in a theme park to begin with.

Lovely how their system works.

Good luck