Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Consider a distance that initially took 20 minutes to travel on foot, but is entirely enclosed within secure (factional) borders and fully integrated into the fast travel system; a faction which controls two nearby cities and the land around them.
How long should it take to travel between those two cities? 2 minutes (10x speed?) 5 minutes (4x speed?) As quickly as the client can load the destination area (instantly?) Suppose I go out on a long scouting trip, and end up in a location two hours from the nearest place anyone else has ever been- should it be radically faster for me to get killed by a bear and sacrifice my inventory to get back to my home, or should I be able to get back rather quickly? Should I still be able to get back quickly if I have a load of rare hides, ores, and timber?
Goblin Squad Member
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How long should it take to travel between those two cities? 2 minutes (10x speed?) 5 minutes (4x speed?) As quickly as the client can load the destination area (instantly?) Suppose I go out on a long scouting trip, and end up in a location two hours from the nearest place anyone else has ever been- should it be radically faster for me to get killed by a bear and sacrifice my inventory to get back to my home, or should I be able to get back rather quickly? Should I still be able to get back quickly if I have a load of rare hides, ores, and timber?
Here's my take on fast travel: True fast travel should only be possible in civilization. I'm thinking Guild Wars, but without the arbitrary restriction of "you have to have been there first to warp to it": If you're in a major city, you should be able to quickly travel to, if not instantly warp to, any other major city within some distance of hexes. If you're in a smaller city, you should be able to fast-travel to any other city. In a small town, fast-travel is still possible, maybe a bit slower.
Out in the wild... I don't think fast-travel shouldn't exist, just that it's more dangerous. Maybe you can fast-travel between corners of a hex, or from one hex to an adjacent one. Not much more than that. That would make the wilderness feel more wild; when you're out there with a small adventuring party, civilization is a ways away.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The form of fast travel you mention is the basic movement of EVE due to the scale and simply the form of gameplay. I'd compare it to simply using a horse in Pathfinder.
No, that's not right.
To make a WoW analogy, you'd do the following:
Every source of content in a given region your character could visit would be reached by a flight path. Once you got to a place, you could start walking in any given direction and walk forever and you'd never find any more content. All the content would be centered on the landing point on the flight path.
You could fly between encounter areas within a region without having to go back to the starting point first.
Most of the time in most of the regions you would be immune to harassment while flying from point to point. But sometimes, in some regions, you might not be.
Some of those flight paths would be generated on the fly just for you. But someone could use a magical scrying device to find them once you visit them, and show up to harass you while you interacted with the PvE content.
From time to time, you'd take a boat to another region. While on the boat trip nobody could harass you, but once you debark, you might have to run a gantlet of bandits - but only in certain hazardous regions and even in those regions such a bandit camp would be rare.
There would be many such regions reachable by boat, but in order to get to them you'd have to follow specific routes - you can't get to any given region from any other region. These routes form a web of travel paths.
In play, you'd take a boat (or series of boats) to a region. Then you'd fly to various encounter areas, and fly back to the boat landing in between each encounter to drop off stuff you've harvested and to get healed up and repair your gear. From time to time you'd take a series of boat rides to get to different regions to access needed game features that are unequally distributed (like banks, auction houses, skill trainers, etc.)
There would be no role for mounts, except as a way to move around within an encounter area more quickly than running.
RyanD
Ah alright, good clarification Ryan ^^
This web of travel, formed of safe and unsafe paths - is this just for the sake of an analogy or is it how you envision fast travel?
So, is there is no reason to suspect that there will be local markets where market values vary from other local markets, or will there be some cost to using fast travel other than a trivial amount of time?
Whether or not such a thing as local markets exists is now my main concern as well. Also unsure of what to think of fast travel but I imagine we'll be waiting a while for the full details. Hoping it's nothing that shrinks the world too much xD Nonetheless thank you Ryan for spending your time to discuss some of our concerns ^^
Edit : Didn't expect a post within seconds before mine - To be fair I haven't played EVE in over a year but I do recall plenty of autopilot sessions taking extensive amounts of time and that wasn't even for massive travel. Regardless, now that you've said the fast travel is different than EVEs, of what relevance is whether or not they have local markets?
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Goblin Squad Member
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So, is there is no reason to suspect that there will be local markets where market values vary from other local markets, or will there be some cost to using fast travel other than a trivial amount of time?Regardless, now that you've said the fast travel is different than EVEs, of what relevance is whether or not they have local markets?
Daniel seems to erroneously think that travel times measured in tns of minutes across the map somehow preclude markets from developing with different prices. I just wanted to point out to him that was not the case in EVE, therefore it was unlikely to be the case in Pathfinder Online.
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Well this fast travel system just killed the game for me(not entirly but close enough) I love to explore places and try reaching places wiith no borders sometimes just scaling a mountain or something. But that was something I hated about eve, I couldn't just fly somewhere because I wanted to fly in that direction, I always had to go "somewhere" and never "nowhere", which defeats exploration as well as certain elements of strategic maneuvering. No scouting about to find a path that even the developers didn't intend on.
In other games I would not use fast travel except for finishing specific quests, because I would just explore on my way anywhere, blazing my own trail.
Well this fast travel system just killed the game for me(not entirly but close enough)
The fast travel system Pathfinder will be using wasn't actually disclosed. Just the information that it should never take longer than half an hour to get to a bank.
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Maybe but it does mean there is no point in being a boatcrafter( a mount for water)
Mr. Dancey, in the 12:32 post with the wow analogy, is that the travel system you're going with or were trying to say what eve travel would have been like? Cause to me it sounds exactly like eve just on ground instead of space which is just trappings.
Also will I be able to find just a spot in the wild with a terrain feature(like a gulley) I like and build around to have a camp away from everything?
How would underground then work?
Considering the penalties for death is just inventory, I can understand wanting to have such fast travel, but then travel through dangerous wilds is much less of a cost for those high-risk areas(I always saw part of the risk increase coming from a significant increase in chance to stumble into enemies which could be mitigated by being stealthy and going around if you don't want to fight them)
I wanted to be a boatcrafter or dungeoncrafter and the above will remove/retard one of those and likely the other.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Is it feasible in EvE to simply ship cargo between high-sec markets? Are major purchases typically made at the closest market, or is the value of an hour more than the difference in cost between markets? If it takes half an hour to get to any market, why would anyone sell at a market under the highest or buy at a market over the lowest?
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Daniel - yes, it's not only feasible, it's a constant part of the game. Fortunes are made and lost on arbitrage of a few percent. Moving the right kind of goods to the right system at the right time to capture business based on what a corp or a fleet are doing in a specific place can be a very profitable venture.
Many players can't be bothered to track the best price/location for a good. They can't be bothered to travel between systems. They pay higher than minimum price for the same reason people do in real life - convenience.
It may make no sense to you, but most people who play these games are focused on things other than getting th best deal.
RyanD
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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@Daniel - yes, it's not only feasible, it's a constant part of the game. Fortunes are made and lost on arbitrage of a few percent. Moving the right kind of goods to the right system at the right time to capture business based on what a corp or a fleet are doing in a specific place can be a very profitable venture.
Many players can't be bothered to track the best price/location for a good. They can't be bothered to travel between systems. They pay higher than minimum price for the same reason people do in real life - convenience.
It may make no sense to you, but most people who play these games are focused on things other than getting th best deal.
RyanD
So, the difference in cost (in numeric resources) is indeed less than the cost in time to find the deals. I hadn't considered the effects of surge demand on costs, especially if surge demand coincides with increased demand for player time to do something besides get resources.
'A few percent' is roughly the transaction cost of moving the resources; if it takes 48 player-hours of mining to fill a freighter and half an hour to transport it from the station convenient to the mining to a station where it is needed, then 4% of the delivered price is transportation; or from 8-16% if that freighter needs an escort that the miners don't. (1 hour freighter time: half an hour each way; up to two hours for an escort: half an hour to meet the freighter, half an hour each way on the transport trip, and half an hour to return to normal duty station) Escorts required for the miners increase the labor required to mine, but if the miners need escorts, surely the freighters need more escorts? Capital costs for the ships also need to be amortized in there somewhere, but I can't begin to guess the relative capital costs or depreciation/expected life of the system.
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Goblin Squad Member
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It would be extremely unusual in EVE to spend a half hour moving a load of minerals, especially the lowest margin minerals. Common ore is usually harvested close to where it is needed for production. And it is also unlikely that you'd pay for a guard for the limited time you'd be moving the minerals - the space you'd be traversing is usually perfectly safe. (You're more likely to need guards while you harvest).
Profit in mining is in huge huge quantities of commodity ore produced by organized mining corporations or mining high risk/high reward ore deep in dangerous space by solo or small team crews that work fast and run at the first sign of trouble. You can eke it out solo on low value ore but thats not much fun. Its more of an initial bootstrap option.
It's much more common for solo traders to be moving finished goods rather than ore. Trade in intermediate components and finished goods is where most traders make thier profits. And that scales into high risk/high reward options too.
From the buy side, it's very common to drop in at a pilots's home station and buy ships, ship modules, and ammo at whatever the local traders are selling for, almost without reference to any other price. If the traders get too greedy, they're likely to attract competition that will undercut them, so there's a lot of art to pricing goods for sale.
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Goblin Squad Member
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It would be extremely unusual in EVE to spend a half hour moving a load of minerals, especially the lowest margin minerals. Common ore is usually harvested close to where it is needed for production. And it is also unlikely that you'd pay for a guard for the limited time you'd be moving the minerals - the space you'd be traversing is usually perfectly safe. (You're more likely to need guards while you harvest).
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It's much more common for solo traders to be moving finished goods rather than ore. Trade in intermediate components and finished goods is where most traders make thier profits. And that scales into high risk/high reward options too.
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actually, tritanium (which is cheapest mineral) is rarely harvested locally in null-sec. it's cheaper to buy it Jita and transport it where one needs it. anomallous? maybe, but true. mining veldspar/tritanium simply does not pay off. it's more viable to do... just about anything else, and then buy trit.
and when trit is transported, it's compressed in a product, for example, large gun turrets (which happen to have much less volume then minerals they are made of). these are recycled at/near destination back into trit.
as for how long trips take: two closest major trade hubs, Jita and Amarr, are 9 systems apart (high-sec); freighter needs 3 min per system with live pilot; that's easily half hour (9 jumps plus warp to station). other two important hubs are Dodixie at 15 jumps (~45 min) from Jita and Rens at 25 (~75 min). that's for one-way trip.
a smaller ship can do it faster, but carries considerably less cargo.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Trying to figure out what Ryan Dancey's 'WoW analogy' thread actually says. Shared here for anyone that cares to read.
Ryan, feel free (nay, encouraged) to correct or confirm!
Once you got to a place, you could start walking in any given direction and walk forever and you'd never find any more content. All the content would be centered on the landing point on the flight path.
Reading this I realize we need to understand how the world is built. Based on the above I started thinking it will -not- be a single seamless map but rather separate regions (hexes?) with limited ways -ie fast travel- to get from one to the other.
My mental image was Neverwinter nights with entry/exit points (effectively teleporter gates), so for this post I will assume each player has a Map of fast-travel locations (some known at start, others discovered/learned in game).
You could fly between encounter areas within a region without having to go back to the starting point first.
This states severeal 'encounter areas' per region and implies that fast travel within regions may be different to fast travel between regions. This ties in with the comment (below) that every region isn't reachable from every other region.
Some of those flight paths would be generated on the fly just for you.
..interesting.. this implies one-way travel triggered by non-geographic elements (such as mission completion? or maybe "you've reached the edge of the current map, do you want to watch random terrain or should we transport you back to the action").
Technically it could also mean the _destination_ is generated on the fly, but that would surprise me greatly.
There would be many such regions reachable by boat, but in order to get to them you'd have to follow specific routes - you can't get to any given region from any other region. These routes form a web of travel paths.
This simply says that some regions are trickier to get to. (My imagination tells me there will be some travel hubs with lots of pvp activity, but that is just me).
...you'd fly to various encounter areas, and fly back to the boat landing in between each encounter to drop off stuff you've harvested and to get healed up and repair your gear. From time to time you'd take a series of boat rides to get to different regions to access needed game features that are unequally distributed (like banks, auction houses, skill trainers, etc.)
This again states that content will be spread in 'encounter areas' reached by fast travel from the 'region hub'.
To sum up, my expectation is now that "the world map" is a (large number of) encounter area maps linked together (directly or via fast travel only) in regions, and that said regions are linked together via the mentioned web of travel paths. (which makes sense from adding new content and other technical perspectives)
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Goblin Squad Member
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Ryan, you mentioned that one could spend months traveling in Eve and never get anywhere. Will there be a similar vastness to PFO, where you can fast-travel along roads or something, but if you just head off into the plains or the forest, you could spend vast amounts of time wandering around?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Will there be a similar vastness to PFO, where you can fast-travel along roads or something, but if you just head off into the plains or the forest, you could spend vast amounts of time wandering around?
No,I don't think so. The game space will be defined as opposed to EVE where it's just a series of grids.
I don't know how we'll handle getting to the edge of the map. The easy solution (and the thing we'll probably implement) is just a hard barrier - the game won't let you keep moving forward past the edge of the map. Sucks a bit for immersion but there's a tradeoff in development time & resources to deal with this case vs. content for everyone.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The easy solution (and the thing we'll probably implement) is just a hard barrier - the game won't let you keep moving forward past the edge of the map. Sucks a bit for immersion...
As long as you eventually come back and fill in more of the map :)
Speaking of maps and immersion-breaking... Will rivers actually flow in a direction? I've been trying to figure out the Sellen river for a while now. I understand you're already committed to that map, but it would be nice if you could force the artists to actually create geologically reasonable features.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Since the discussion is about the map specifically now..
I currently beta test a game called Linkrealms. In it, the game world is divided basically into squares called "realms". You leave one realm, have a small load time, and you're in another realm. Each realm represents a piece of the game world. Fundamentally, there are two types of realms. Developer made realms usually have things such as important dungeons, towns, and newbie zones. Player made realms are realms that players discover and lay a claim stake on to claim as their own. They can use the realm to place a house or make their own dungeon or just simply use it as farmland and a place to craft. It becomes a persistent part of the game world that other people may walk through to get to their destination.
Will hexes in this game be similar, or are the hexes mentioned in the Crusader Road blog just a way of presenting the scale of the world to us?
I'm guessing this game is on a bigger scale though, since in Linkrealms you only really have enough space to place a house or make a small dungeon. Each realm is intended to be owned by one person in that game.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I've been trying to figure out the Sellen river for a while now. I understand you're already committed to that map, but it would be nice if you could force the artists to actually create geologically reasonable features.
I'm assuming it flows from north to south. I don't know if there's a topographical map of the Inner Sea region but by default I always assume rivers flow to the ocean.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I've been trying to figure out the Sellen river for a while now. I understand you're already committed to that map, but it would be nice if you could force the artists to actually create geologically reasonable features.I'm assuming it flows from north to south. I don't know if there's a topographical map of the Inner Sea region but by default I always assume rivers flow to the ocean.
I think they should always flow downhill...
It's not a big deal, just something that has come up a couple of times when discussing the game with friends and family. It's far less important than many other things. And I don't mean to be a nuisance...
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Goblin Squad Member
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I've been trying to figure out the Sellen river for a while now. I understand you're already committed to that map, but it would be nice if you could force the artists to actually create geologically reasonable features.I'm assuming it flows from north to south. I don't know if there's a topographical map of the Inner Sea region but by default I always assume rivers flow to the ocean.
And remember that the poster map is only a very rough guide to what is in an area. When they get down to creating the actual region for the game they will have plenty of room to embellish details. The only rivers on the poster map are going to be major ones, like the Mississippi and its major tributaries.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Will there be a similar vastness to PFO, where you can fast-travel along roads or something, but if you just head off into the plains or the forest, you could spend vast amounts of time wandering around?No,I don't think so. The game space will be defined as opposed to EVE where it's just a series of grids.
I don't know how we'll handle getting to the edge of the map. The easy solution (and the thing we'll probably implement) is just a hard barrier - the game won't let you keep moving forward past the edge of the map. Sucks a bit for immersion but there's a tradeoff in development time & resources to deal with this case vs. content for everyone.
Well, shouldn't people just fall off the edge of the earth...like in real life?