The Road Goes Ever Ever On

When Tolkien, the father of modern fantasy, wrote "The road goes ever ever on," MMOs took him at his word. A large part of online gaming consists of traveling from one point to another, but when it takes so much time to get anywhere, frustration mounts. If I'm picking up a book or alt-tabbing to web surf or check e-mail instead of playing the game, there is something wrong with the dynamics.

Read Full Article

Well said. I'm playing LotRO right now (as in while I'm typing this). I moved to my laptop to surf the web while my LotRO prospector smelts barrow-iron ingots. I queued up 164 of them and moved to my laptop because I knew this would take over 20 minutes. That's right, TWENTY+ MINUTES! What's the point? Why does Turbine feel that I should waste over half an hour (I've got nearly 250 ingots of various types to smelt) watching a progress bar repeatedly fill? Why can't they move to a cutscene, say "2 hours later" and show me putting 200 ingots in my bags? The amount of time wasted standing around watching the same action and progress bar repeat for crafting in LotRO is mind boggling. I save it up as long as I can and do it all at once so I can go take a shower or eat dinner while it completes. That's ridiculous in my opinion. Another time waster: why do I have to wait 25 seconds EVERY time I switch to a different character? It doesn't matter if I'm in combat or not nor does it matter where I'm physically standing in the game world. It doesn't sound like much, but those seconds drag on when you're just standing there watching a timer count down. I'd rather watch a 30 second commercial every time I switch.

Turbine: I have a job. I know that you have to work for things. I know that the game world is big; I have a map of it. I know that ore doesn't turn to ingots by magic. I don't smelt metal for a living, but I know what it's like to put in 8 or more hours. I don't need to stare at a progress meter for 30 minutes to get a since of accomplishment from smelting ore. I also don't need to watch the ride from Trestlebridge to Esteldin 20 times to get a sense of how large the North Downs is.

By the way, my prospecting tools broke while I was smelting the barrow-iron, so I lost some production.

Agreed. I think the MMORPG with the best travel system created to date is Ultima Online. The first large scale MMORPG, launched over ten years ago, and today's games still don't have a clue how to do travel properly? Hell, even solo games, from Baldur's Gate to Fallout 3, have instant travel.

Honestly, every game has time and money sinks. That is part of mmo design world. Mounts cost money because they are a place to balance the economy as well as items to work for and achieve. I've played LOTRO a lot at this point and didn't have any trouble affording my horse just through questing. In addition to the monetary rewards from quests, a lot of the quests have 'kill x of y' components. I just looted every corpse and vendored the bits. If you choose to craft or to buy armor/weapons at low levels then you will have less money, but that is by choice.

Travel takes time. In part, this is because the world is a big place and to maintain that feeling of a large persistent world you have to see it and take the time to move around in it. The joy is supposed to be in the journey of the game. Do I get annoyed when I am halfway across the game map and need to meet up on the other side for a raid? Sure - sometimes. That is why certain classes in most games have the ability to transport or summon others. Otherwise, if you are able to just blip from one city to the next to complete your objectives, you are not really interacting with the world and game environment.

To each their own, I guess - I actually *like* traveling in a game as long as it doesn't get ludicrous. I like having goals to save money for like mounts and houses.