I randomly stumbled across this page and just had to post ^ =D wonder if you remember me from the long lost days

~Theos

Yeah we’re both alive, still. What exactly do you do in the games industry, btw? And which company? SPEAK.

Sorry for the slow reply, Tarinoc – hope you still get to see it! Maybe when you return in 4 years. :P

That’s neat. Though I’m starting to have my doubts that Norwegian Wood will ever be playable, it’s cool to see that you’re designing games in another environment.

I too have joined the games industry recently, working, in fact, with one of the people that runs a design blog you link to. Interesting. Small world. I’ll drop my head in again in another 4 years, I imagine.

Maybe Norwegian Wood will be up and running then… :P

However, restricting the feature to characters below the level of your highest level character would make it a pretty useless feature for players who’ve only got the one – or even a few – characters in the mid-level range.

I guess that could either be a good thing (they have to experience the content at least once before they can boost their way past it, and can’t just skip the entire leveling process which includes learning how to play, how features work, etc), or a bad thing (they won’t be able to use that extra level to gain an edge when facing seemingly insurmountable opposition at certain levels, with certain content) depending on your point of view.

This is essentially what EVE does; while you can set a skill to train that could take months, you still do have to log in periodically to set the next set of skills to train. This is important, because without something to pull people back into the game, you lose some level of social cohesion. Even if it’s just once in a while, when they’re forced to log in, they’ll check up on guild mates and any community contacts that they’ve made.

One other thing that may be of benefit is preventing this auto-leveling from allowing you to raise a character past the level of your highest level character. The reason for this is not because you want to prevent players from leveling without work, but because there are other tangential effects to being leveled past the range of content that you’ve completed. Given AoC’s reliance on gear, and the fact that quest rewards scale with level, it’s possible for a character to be unable to properly equip themselves for like level content, having leveled past everything they were geared for. Making sure they have another character capable of providing gold and other necessary items would help make sure this doesn’t become a problem. Alternately, adding some sort of equipment upgrade as part of the offline level system might work to solve this issue as well. Trade offs would need to be better examined.

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.