Teleport

[Battlehawke]

Something new for the Devs to think about....

In the original AD&D so many years ago, when you cast the Teleport Spell, you could only teleport to places that you have already been to. You couldn't teleport to places you haven't been...

Wouldn't it be great if Turbine would make it so that we can teleport to places in dungeons that were "uncovered" on our maps. Places that we had already been to in a Dungeon?

..perhaps when you cast teleport in a dungeon, your map comes up and you can click on a spot that you have already uncovered and instantly go there...

Thanks
Battlehawke

[MalakRevan]

Interesting idea. Maybe have a sub section of the teleport spell like Fire Shield or Resist energy where you can pick Location Teleport or Dungeon Teleport?

[ProdigalGuru]

And can we have motorcycles?

We need motorcycles, too.

And kazoos.

KAZOOS FOR EVERYONE!!!

[Dirac]

This would be really cool, a step up from dimension door, and would make the spell actually usable in quests. I have no idea how difficult it might be to implement.

[MalakRevan]

And can we have motorcycles?

We need motorcycles, too.

And kazoos.

KAZOOS FOR EVERYONE!!!

Hey you!

http://www.davidthedesigner.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/09/20/quiet.jpg

[Bogenbroom]

While it would be great for us, I would be remarkably surprised if it were ever implemented. It one of those things like Fly and Telekinesis that would be potentially game breaking.

[Ratnix]

While I kind of like this idea, they would have to make it so as not to be able to exploit it.

Something like, you can only go someplace you have currently been to in this run of the quest.
By that I mean, say you run quest A and you have to bypass a few locked doors. You complete this quest.
You cannot then repeat this quest on your own and the instantly teleport past all those locked doors to get to the end of the quest.

So then you look at wilderness areas. You go into a wilderness area then just teleport to the rare spawns, bypassing everything else.
They would have to make the casting components prohibitively expensive to prevent people from just doing this. Or possibly making it a rare collectible/loot item.

[Alavatar]

While I kind of like this idea, they would have to make it so as not to be able to exploit it.

Something like, you can only go someplace you have currently been to in this run of the quest.
By that I mean, say you run quest A and you have to bypass a few locked doors. You complete this quest.
You cannot then repeat this quest on your own and the instantly teleport past all those locked doors to get to the end of the quest.

I agree with this. It would make quest design trivial and pointless once you get a wizard with GT in the party that has already completed the quest. Making the mechanic only work for locations you have only seen in the current quest instance would solve that problem.


So then you look at wilderness areas. You go into a wilderness area then just teleport to the rare spawns, bypassing everything else.
They would have to make the casting components prohibitively expensive to prevent people from just doing this. Or possibly making it a rare collectible/loot item.

I don't see this as a problem at all. Teleporting to the rare is no different from casting Invisibility and running to the rare, except it is a little faster.

[Aloro]

Teleporting to the rare is no different from casting Invisibility and running to the rare, except it is a little faster.

It's not "a little faster", it's basically instantaneous. :)

It's the time and difficulty that matter. Then, too, this would have a profound impact in the economy.

To take your argument and apply a reductio ad absurdam... when I kill stuff I get loot and exp. Why not let me just get the loot and exp by pressing a button? I'm going to get them anyhow. The answer is: shortcuts in games can lead to a shortage of gameplay. There comes a point after which the shortcuts are really removing the fun from things, and that point is VERY hard to define.

Let's say for instance that it takes me an hour and a quarter or so to do a full circuit of the Vale and hit every rare spawn (18 of em if I recall correctly). Maybe it only takes me 40 minutes if I can get by unseen. But if I can just teleport to each of them and see if they're present, I could probably check on all of them in, what, 5 minutes maybe?

Game designers worry about how much income flows into the world, and about how much they can extract through various sinks like repairs and consumables and guild amenities. In this example, the loot coming from the rare chests could be accessed as much as 8 times as often, meaning those items become 8 times more common in the economy. Sure, everyone who wants a bloodstone would probably like this idea, but it could cause all sorts of problems down the line. For instance, items looted from rare spawn chests in wilderness areas would become rapidly devalued as their supply skyrocketed; at the same time, items looted from chests in quests would increase in price as the influx of cash overall in the world leads to inflation.

This kind of change seems like a fun idea but can well and truly destroy a game on several levels, stripping away both the challenge and sense of size of the world, while also applying devastating and unexpected effects to the economy.

I'd love to be able to Greater Teleport from public areas. And I'd definitely like a longer list of locations to teleport to. But otherwise, I think changes to teleport functionality are probably a bad idea.

[Ratnix]

I don't see this as a problem at all. Teleporting to the rare is no different from casting Invisibility and running to the rare, except it is a little faster.

I have no experience with invisibility but I always assumed that there were mobs that could still detect you.

[Aloro]

I have no experience with invisibility but I always assumed that there were mobs that could still detect you.

Yup. The biggest issue is that, while you might be invisible, you'll still make a lot of noise, and most creatures will hear you if you get at all close.

Invisibility is convenient but there's a night and day difference between trying to sneak around a zone invisibly, and teleporting to the rare spawns.

[cpito]

So Teleport and GT scrolls can go the way of DD scrolls?

[Alavatar]

I have no experience with invisibility but I always assumed that there were mobs that could still detect you.


Yup. The biggest issue is that, while you might be invisible, you'll still make a lot of noise, and most creatures will hear you if you get at all close.

Invisibility is convenient but there's a night and day difference between trying to sneak around a zone invisibly, and teleporting to the rare spawns.

1) Invisibility makes nearly everything easier. The "lots of noise" may cause a mob to activate and go investigate, but by the time the mob gets there you will already have gone past it. By the time the mob realizes what happened you will have already been out of the mobs perception for noise and sight. They only really notice you if you bump into them.

2) The time theory is blown out of the water when you think of various places/examples you can (a) farm xp in excess of 1000xp/min and (b) farm epic chests at around 4 chests every 8 minutes or so.

Teleporting anywhere you wanted in an explorer area would be a cool feature that would not be game breaking. However, I doubt it will ever happen because I bet it would be too complicated to calculate the "z" coordinate; since there are various landmarks a function would need to be created to account for what level you should be at based on the height of the landmark and the smarts to know if you should be on the top landmark (a bridge) or the bottom landmark (a valley).

[Rav'n]

OP- I think a better idea would be to use Dimensional Door. Change the spell so that instead of taking you to the quest Entrance, the Map opens and you click on the spot you want the Door to go to.

The only down side I see... A Rogue gets past the nast traps, runs back and opens a DDoor for others to step thru, bypassing the trap.

Maybe the only way to get to that point would be to make it so anyone going thru the door has to have been to that location.


The upside, you're changing the spell entirely... instead of adding options to another spell. I think the coding would be easier to do that way.

[Doxmaster]

Getting the Z, Y, X coordinates of the player would almost certainly be the easiest thing, actually (assuming you dont run into problems with little holes in a wall, bumps, caves, and other such nonsense while you are sending the player to said location which HAS been known to mess this up). At every single moment, the game is tracking where the player is. I'm not going to pretend that I know the code like a lover, since I dont, but saving a reference set of coordinates isn't too tough.

If it is possible in every other engine of basically every other 3D game, it is possible here unless this game's engine is truly terrible. The problem is Balance.


Anyone consider how this would affect a quest like Coelescence Chamber? Or Tear of Dakhaan?

[Battlehawke]

Ratnix,

Very good points.... I forgot that if you redo a quest back to back, the map is uncovered.... perhaps they make it so in dungeons have to get redone with maps each attempt, and that the teleport doesnt work outdoors....

Battlehawke



Ratnix
Community Member Join Date: Jul 2006
Posts: 84




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While I kind of like this idea, they would have to make it so as not to be able to exploit it.

Something like, you can only go someplace you have currently been to in this run of the quest.
By that I mean, say you run quest A and you have to bypass a few locked doors. You complete this quest.
You cannot then repeat this quest on your own and the instantly teleport past all those locked doors to get to the end of the quest.

So then you look at wilderness areas. You go into a wilderness area then just teleport to the rare spawns, bypassing everything else.
They would have to make the casting components prohibitively expensive to prevent people from just doing this. Or possibly making it a rare collectible/loot item.

[Ratnix]

I can think of 3 ways it would be exploited.

The first two are basically the same thing but for different purposes, that would be running a quest to completion or near completion and then coming back into the quest to either re-run the quest and skip everything or to ransack all the chests in the quest.

Using it to complete the quests would be a zergers wet dream, but in no way allowable.
Ransacking chests that way would just cause all kinds of hurt on the game.
I mean, you might as well just create a spell that lets you create a treasure chest of your level right in front of you to loot.

Those two are easily fixable as you cannot teleport to anyplace you haven't been to since the quest reset.
That would stop both of those two.

The third way is using it to hunt rares in wilderness areas.

I have a couple of ideas on how to stop this but really just not allowing it to be used in wilderness areas is probably the best.
Having casting components be very rare would help solve it, but at the same time it would also make it mostly useless in dungeons.
Only allowing it to be used 1 time in a wilderness area each time you enter the area would help some, but it would still be too powerful as you could just zone into a wilderness area, teleport to the rare and then recall back out. That would still make it too easy to farm rares.


Now, those are probably 3 of the top 4 uses people would want for a teleport spell.

I can think of a couple of uses for it. And while they aren't the most necessary things to use it for, they could halp save a bit of time.

The first and probably the 4th of the top 4 would be to have it be usable like the GuildShip navigator.
You cast teleport, a map pops up for whatever area you are in and then you can click on an area on the map or click on a dropdown menu to pick one of the other maps out there to teleport to a spot on that map.

Another use would be, say you are in a quest and you come to a fork in the road. The path straight ahead goes to a locked door. The paths to the left and right lead to levers to unlock the door.
You take a path, getting past all the mobs, traps and doors and then teleport the group back to the fork and hit the other path.
This wouldn't be a game-breaking use, it would just save you a bit of time running back and forth through empty corridors.

A third would be, say you come to a room at the start of a quest that has a secret door in it but nobody can find a way to open it. At the end of the quest there is a lever.
Somebody hits it and then the group teleports back to the room to get past the secret door.
Again this isn't a game-breaking use for it, just a small time saver.



As long as they did something to prevent Teleport from being used to exploit the game, it could be a mildly useful spell. It wouldn't be a must have but if it was in scroll form it would probably see some use.

[Aloro]

The time theory is blown out of the water when you think of various places/examples you can (a) farm xp in excess of 1000xp/min and (b) farm epic chests at around 4 chests every 8 minutes or so.

It's possible to gain a lot of exp and loot right now. That doesn't however mean it's not a problem to allow people to gain a lot more loot and exp in the same amount of time.

Anything you do to make it a LOT easier to farm rare spawns and complete difficult quests is potentially completely game-breaking. Saying, "there's a balance problem now so it can't matter if we make things drastically worse" doesn't really make sense. ;)

[chrichton]

How about add a new spell called "CreateTeleportation Sigil", which marks a spot on a map as a teleportation destination. Have the sigil 'disintegrate' based on a timer, so that it will only last for a predetermined amount of time. Have any given map limited to the number of sigils that can exist at the same time.

Then, when the TP spell is cast, a popup/map will show the caster what sigils exist and where, and then they can choose from them.

[Battlehawke]

Dox,

Very good points...DDO Maps might bea bit ofaproblem....

Battlehawke






Doxmaster
Community Member Join Date: Jun 2009
Posts: 604




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Getting the Z, Y, X coordinates of the player would almost certainly be the easiest thing, actually (assuming you dont run into problems with little holes in a wall, bumps, caves, and other such nonsense while you are sending the player to said location which HAS been known to mess this up). At every single moment, the game is tracking where the player is. I'm not going to pretend that I know the code like a lover, since I dont, but saving a reference set of coordinates isn't too tough.

If it is possible in every other engine of basically every other 3D game, it is possible here unless this game's engine is truly terrible. The problem is Balance.


Anyone consider how this would affect a quest like Coelescence Chamber? Or Tear of Dakhaan?

[Arayos]

Here's a thought.

We already have set waypoints in wilderness areas, which we log as we travel through them. Explorer points.

Why not allow the Teleport spell to take us to those? We can select the area, then select an explorer we've already gotten within that area.

It covers the "Only teleport to places you've been" idea, yet doesn't break it by allowing much exploiting. It doesn't require the devs to code waypoints into the areas, or ways to set your own waypoints, since the waypoints are already added to the areas. It's just a matter of adding them to the teleport target list.

Of course, I'd settle for adding more areas to teleport(Korthos, The Twelve, the entire list of Greater Teleport locations, the Red Fens, Lordsmarch Plaza...), but if we're already adding new locations it would be nice to give the explorers a use.

[Archer001]

[common knowledge]When you re-do a recent quest or return to a wilderness area after it resets, even if you have been to the zone recently the map is not completely clear.

In fact you now have to three sets of shading: bright for areas you have seen in this venture into the instance, shadowed areas you have seen in previous runs, or black for areas you haven't been to yet according to this stored map.[/common knowledge]

So a simple solution would to allow you transport to any brightly lit areas on your map, this would also prevent additional zerging or teleporting directly into an instance you are not re-entering before the reset.

This reasoning still doesn't help with the z coordinate issue, and it falls apart for some quests such as The Pit which I recall does not have a standard map.


A work around for the quest issue is to only allow it within, to, and from public instances and places wilderness zones in the brightly lit map category. I would say the mishap mechanic would need changing though, possibly change it to a chance of being hurled off course in the zone you are aiming for? Possibly with some damage involved.

Without better maps the z axis issue will be a tremendous problem

[Nysrock]

How about add a new spell called "CreateTeleportation Sigil", which marks a spot on a map as a teleportation destination. Have the sigil 'disintegrate' based on a timer, so that it will only last for a predetermined amount of time. Have any given map limited to the number of sigils that can exist at the same time.

Then, when the TP spell is cast, a popup/map will show the caster what sigils exist and where, and then they can choose from them.

For anyone else that ever played Ultima Online this sounds very familiar. You could create a rune with a spell then use that rune to teleport to that spot. They even had books that you could place several runes into and just pick the one you wanted.

However, what happened in UO would happen in DDO. Everyone created runes to the rare spawns/chests and would just teleport around to each spot and check for them. While UO was geared towards this (everyone was in a dungeon not just your party) here it would just increase the prices of EVERYTHING as everyone would be ransacked on all of those chests.

Good idea in theory but I'd hate to see it in DDO.