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Please cancel my AP subscription. While I have enjoyed my subscription, I have more than enough AP modules to last for several years to come.

Preamble:
I've noticed a number of posts cropping up since the recent blog post about alignment. A lot of people are concerned about the direction the alignment system is taking, especially since it currently seems to want to push everyone towards being Chaotic Evil.

We all know that ethics/ethos is more complex than 2 sliding bars. People are complex beings that take a variety of actions for myriad reasons. At the heart of everyone's decision-making process, though, is the belief that one is always taking the best course of action available to them. The reason people make different choices given the same situation is often because of different priorities and knowledge. Whether you value your own comfort above another's is a huge factor in determining your inclination towards charity work.

Visible Issues:
Now, the primary reason for the outcry that I can see is that a whole lot of ways have been outlined to become evil and/or chaotic, but not much has been said on the matter of becoming lawful and/or good. According to the outlined system, if you see a merchant being attacked by bandits and leap to his aid, YOU SHIFT TOWARDS CHAOTIC. If any of the bandits die in the engagement, even if you did not deal the killing blow, YOU SHIFT TOWARDS EVIL. Thus the action of defending someone from bandits, clearly a Lawful Good act, has resulted in your alignment shifting towards Chaotic Evil.

This also creates the "Alignment Mountain" problem, where you will end up with a lot of players at the base of the mountain (Chaotic Evil) and a rare few at the top (Lawful Good) simply because climbing the mountain isn't something they have the willpower to do. If 90% of the players are evil, why bother trying to be good? You may still play as an honorable character, but according to the alignment system you are Chaotic Evil or close to it. The mechanics of becoming Lawful Good simply aren't worth the effort.

Possible Solutions:
The simplest solution I can think of is based on PC settlements. When a company of players forms a settlement, they determine the alignment of the settlement and the "laws" of the area. These "laws" can be used as a primary method of shifting player alignment. Especially in Lawfully aligned hexes, following those laws should shift in you towards being lawful regardless of the normal consequences of those actions. If one of the laws for an area is to attack players who initiate PvP against ANYONE, that would allow you to defend another player who is under attack and be considered a law-abiding citizen for doing so. It could in fact be possible for player guilds to be set up similarly, allowing players who are following the laws of their guild to mitigate or eliminate chaotic shifts. You could even mitigate abuse of this mechanic by making certain laws alignment specific.

I don't have as concrete of an idea when it comes to the good/evil axis, especially since the core concept of "Good" is placing great value on life itself. This is the reason, I think, that Paizo determined that killing is an Evil act. If anyone else has any ideas, please share them.

I read the thread about how mounts will ruin the game, and it dawned on me that he wasn't arguing that mounts would ruin the game so much as fast travel. I actually have to agree that instantaneous fast travel would be detrimental to how GW has prosed to design the game (a.k.a. with travel times for selling goods and whatnot).

So I got to thinking of how we can have a travel system that allows people to get from point A to point B without having to run/walk/ride all the way, because lets face it: no want wants to have to manually direct a character across a continent that is supposed the size of Asia. I came up with the collowing concept:

Travel Hubs
There will be 2 kinds of travel hubs: ports and caravan posts. These are the places that ships/caravans pull into to seek new cargo and passengers. Going into a travel hub will bring up a list vehicles appropriate to the hub and their itineraries.

Itineraries
This is where things really start to come together. Each ship/caravan will have its own itinerary. These will indicate when they will arrive at the given hub, as well as when they leave and when they arrive at other hubs. When your character choose to board a ship/caravan, they will be presented with a list of destinations and associated gold costs.

From here, they simply select their chosen destination and their character will automatically board the ship/caravan or wait until it arrives and then board it. Once on board a ship, you will still have access to all chat functions, but your avatar itself will be largely unavailable.

Now here is where the kicker comes in: The ship/caravan travels in real time. It will stop at each hub along the way, and will deduct the gold cost of transport as it arrive at each hub. At any time a player may choose to get off at an earlier hub instead of completing the full journey, and they will have already paid the cost for traveling to that location.

The player may log off their character at any time during this process once they have chosen a ship/caravan and a destination. Their character will automatically board, travel, and get off as they have chosen while they are offline or playing another character. This does mean that the player MUST be able to afford the full cost of the journey in order to select it.

Benefits
1) Maintains the "big world" feel that is integral to the setting GW has set out to create.

2) Provides a way to "autopilot" travel across the world, which is necessary in my opinion to prevent players from never leaving their home country.

3) Still associates a cost with travel and maintains the realism of travelling cast distances.

4) Doesn't lock players out of any interaction or punish them if they accidently click to travel to a hub much farther away than they intended.

Downsides
1) No instant travel means that forming groups will have to be coordinated in advance.

2) Placement of travel hubs by developers can artifically "force" players to congregate in certain areas (maybe have a way for players to build their own hubs or ships/caravans?).

3) Ability to implement difficulties during travel will be hard since players will likely not be online during travel.

Closing
I think this is a great way to maintain the feel that GW is looking for in having a large game world. Instant travel may still be available (I'm looking at you wizards), and players may be able to create their own itineraties via spells like Wind Walk.

The primary goal is to allow a way for players to travel from A to B without having to be online constantly guiding their character, and without said travel being instant. If anyone has any additional ideas or comments, please post em!

Also, if I seem unclear on anything, let me know so I can clarify it.