[Miller]

I've felt compelled to make this thread, one of my biggest gripes with Korvara is not what you'd expect it to be. Travel as it currently stands is nothing but a time waster that doesn't progress the game whatsoever.

Tongue in Cheek Example:
https://files.catbox.moe/ujiycx.webm

Why is this the case? Eight minutes for a round trip of the main loop isn't so bad right? Well... Eight minutes of having to actively press an arrow key or click around the screen can add up over time! Here's a few points of mine against it.

Point 1: Travel does not serve any purpose after a certain point.

What do I mean by this? Well, normally travel in games is to facilitate the exposure of a player to different mechanics or locations of the game while on their way. Let's say you're traveling from point A to B, if you came across a mob that was high leveled towards a fork that was Point C, you'd probably make a mental note of that for later; same for any harvestable material along the way. SL2 does have this to a degree.

But this only serves a purpose for your first few times through these new areas, which is why MMOs and other games often opt for a fast travel system that's designed to be accessible after you've traveled through these areas once or enough times or systems that encourage players to hang out in these areas, like random events which spawns mobs that give exp. (Black Beasts are a good example, albeit a disruptive one at times, while I prefer if we didn't have anything that could actively disrupt ongoing RP; they are an incentive to travel)

Point 2: Limited Fast Travel

SL2 has fast travel, to an annoyingly limited degree. You need to unlock Greater Sending (The Crystal Upgrade for fast travel) for each character and even after that it's limited to 1 per 8 in game hours. (56+ minutes roughly) This number can actually vary based on lag or potentially even longer if an EM decides to freeze the clock. Nothing against the EMs of course. There is a means of increasing this limit up to 3, but doing upgrades per character can be a time consuming endeavor. (which, while I disagree with the pricing on the later stages; they're not inherently part of the issue)

Point 3: Lack of easy travel encourages people to stay in specific areas.

Often people will cite that travel encourages people to RP, which is actually true to an extent. When people are often traveling and exploring, they're more prone to stopping somewhere and talking to someone about their experiences. Exploring is a key word here, because often travel mainly occurs out of necessity, not curiosity; which often leads people to going to specific spots as fast as possible due to having time constraints or just wanting whatever thing they're up to, done as soon as possible. Of course, there's always outliers to this. But how often have you heard someone bemoan that they had to travel across the map to deliver something or make a trade with someone? I'll assure you that the average player on this game has probably heard it dozens of times at least. Sometimes players even avoid bothering with RP because they're too far away, I've seen a few cases in recent times where someone didn't want to travel to Autumn Hills to RP because it was annoying to get there.

With that said, if people don't want to potentially waste 2 minutes per city trip, it's more likely they're inclined to bunker down and put up an LFG while playing something else or only check their immediate vicinity for roleplay.

Point 4: Travel is repeated hundreds of times across the year.

Have you ever counted how many loaves of bread you ate in your life? But no seriously, I've had to travel at least a few thousand times over the years to reach my destination. To put it into perspective, the average Telegrad to Meiaquar trip is likely two minutes long at least. Basic math should point out if you repeat this action enough, let's say just a 100 times. That's 200 minutes wasted, this is ignoring the possible factor of lag. Now this is just considering town to town trips, imagine how long it could take if you factored in each dungeon's travel time?

Point 5: All of SL2's Travel is 'Active' travel, not 'Passive Travel'

What do I mean by 'Active' Travel and 'Passive' Travel?
Active Travel is something I would consider as needing most of your attention if not all to reach Point A to B
Passive Travel is something I would consider as needing zero attention to reach point A to B.

An example of passive travel would simply be a caravan that opens up every minutes to take passengers and all you have to do is wait there to reach the next destination.

Now that I've complained (I could bring up more reasons or address counterpoints if need be); 

How exactly would we address or alleviate this issue?
Suggestion 1: Change Deeper Sending

Deeper Sending is the crystal upgrade and one of the two only means of fast travel in the game with the other being largely irrelevant. Currently it's limited to 1~3 uses per eight hours. What I would suggest is to change each upgrade to be the following:
Deeper Sending (1)
Allows you to warp to any 1-20 dungeon in the game for free, ignoring the teleport cooldown.
Deeper Sending (2)
Grants 2 Teleport Charges / Allows you to warp to any 20-40 dungeon in the game after the teleport cooldown for a fee which doubles after each use.
Deeper Sending (3)
Grants 3 Teleport Charges / Allows you to warp to any 41+ dungeon in the game after the teleport cooldown for a fee which doubles after each use. (Higher base price)

Suggestion 2: Add unannounced and announced events on the map.

There's absolutely nothing inbetween point and A and B besides a few sparsely laid out bundle of resources here and there that's not relevant to everyone. Which is why I suggest adding in random events you can sometimes come across that are neat. Travel should be rewarded or enable roleplay if you want to include it as a mechanic.

Throw in fishing events at the Autumn Hills, toss in random meteors that can be harvested in worsong. Throw in random surges of activity in the wastes beyond the wall defense. Toss in bosses that show up in certain areas of the map randomly that can give solid drops if you do them. Plenty of ideas you could do for this, but I'd stress that it's best to avoid anything that could randomly disrupt RP without warning like the initial draft of Black Beast attacks on G6.

Suggestion 3: Add in MMO Boats.

No seriously, having a free/less expensive means of travel to specific parts of the map that might be annoying to get to would be huge, let me idle on a ship and talk to people who come aboard. This was always one of my favorite little things in MMOs that was lost in recent years due to the need to keep attention spans. Don't make it just travel either, you could have fishing events on board or locations only accessible by the boat. Long travel times is less annoying if you can open up a second game or roleplay on the side while you wait.

TLDR; Travel is near pointless and hinders roleplays more than it enables as it currently stands, please make it more worthwhile to do or alleviate it.

[Caboozles]

I have been planning a group/place of setup, to be handled after I finish the last event in my line.
I found a nice spot.
But pretty much everyone I've spoken to has said "It's too far away from fast travel spots for me to want to go there."

The MMO boat option is seriously something I think would be cool, but in general more "mundane" or "human" forms of fast travel sounds good.

No, that wagon ride you're taking is not ICly sending you across the continent in a second.
But it can send you from the gate of Telegrad to the gate of Geladyne without having to run to the nearest dungeon.

It's convenience while maintaining the lore.

[skull1129]

begging for boats.................. (i will FIGHT for boat travel icly if i must .........)

[Druby]

I agree the basically all of Miller's points, save for a few things, but those end up being minor nitpicks or disagreements about how exactly to solve the problem. Overall though, yes. Travel in Korvara has been really annoying in my opinion ever since it's launch. It's gotten moderately better with "roads" which is really just easier travel with less random dense tiles to run into, stopping you from being able to make a dead beeline to where you're going, though things like this still exist.

One thing I would like to tack on is the concept of "first time play experience". Korvara's maps are pretty, with a lot more attention and detail put into them. There are things to see, nooks and crannies to explore and find things in and quests integrated into the world even (though whether or not they're always valuable is up for debate). However, this sort of stuff is only really worthwhile your first time, or maybe first few times, running around exploring because, once you get to know everything and what purpose it serves, you don't really care about it anymore, especially if it's simply a gathering site for a craft you don't have, or it ends up just being another empty cave or one with static low level mobs.

I think the "first time play experience" thing can apply to a lot of Korvara's experience and how it differs greatly vs the experience of those who end up sticking around and getting to know the game, but in terms of travel specifically... I don't need to stop and smell the roses or appreciate how nice the 2D sprites that were bought from a webstore online look. I understand and appreciate that a lot of time and effort was put into them, and the incentive to try and have RP be more dynamic or appear in more random places, but these things at an inconvenience to gameplay or user experience, or even at an inconvenience to finding RP is not a solution.

Getting on my usual soapbox so ignore this little paragraph if you don't care for it, I think the world map from G6 was a better implementation, allowing for the feeling of city to city travel without it being bogged down. If G6 had zero teleports, it'd have been a bit annoying, but not to the same extent as Korvara, because the "dead space" of random wilderness where almost no one hangs out is cut down drastically assuming we were given boats or some other form of transport to other continents. You could walk from Cellsvish to Dormeho in half the time it took you to walk from Telegrad to Meiaquar.

I can understand not wanting total free quicktravel, if only because I have no idea who would want to walk from city to city in Korvara if they're not on the grind themselves explicitly, which would lead the "dead space" feeling even more dead and that probably goes against the basic premise of Korvara being more of a living environment, but little inconveniences really do add up and SL2's playerbase already struggles to fulfill this with the amount of players we have. Certain levels of compromise ought to be made.

[Trexmaster]

https://wiki.mabinogiworld.com/view/Moon_Gate

As of the Starlet Update all Moon Gates are now permanently open regardless of the time of day (as opposed to 6:10 PM ~ 6:10 AM), and have been added to many more locations on Uladh in addition to Belvast. Some of the old Moon Gates that were removed in the Generation 11 Update were readded, though some are not in their original spot.

18 minutes up down and they still changed that because it was considered too inconvenient.

You want to know the time windows for our version of Moon Gates? That I figure a lot of people don't even know exist? (They're in the ruins located in each of the four Outskirts maps outside the main four nation's maps.)

Up from Hour 1 to Hour 2. Down from Hour 3 to Hour 24.

15 minutes up. 165 minutes down.

I don't think I need to say anything else about how travel is handled in this game.

Please grant us clemency. We're spending days of our lives clicking through a barren wasteland, it's no wonder the game is struggling.