Public Transport facilities: more airship towers and teleport arches needed

[Captain_Pengie]

Given the cost of obtaining and maintaining a Guild airship the facilities provided are a bit underwhelming as a transport mode, particularly to smaller guilds that cannot afford to fill up the limited number of crew positions with navigators. You would think that these magical vehicles would be able to transport you anywhere you desire - let's face it you don't really need a tower as you can just jump off and let gravity (plus your handy feather falling boots) take care of the rest. Getting on in a hazardous zone may be a bit different but drop-off should be simple and there is no reason why there should not be a tower in every friendly zone. Teleport arches are the same - friendly zones should be freely accessible via these handy devices.

I'd like to see airship towers and (where not already existing) a teleport arch (plus the wizard spell appropriately altered) added to the following places:

1) House Cannith: this one I really cannot understand. Of all the houses these guys are probably the most likely to have given assistance in creating the airships so it is completely baffling as to why the do not have a tower. Some say that you can just get off at the marketplace and run to House C so it is not needed - well that is the same of all the Houses so why is House C the one discriminated against?

2) Inspired Quarter: again this needs a tower so you are not having to jump off in the harbour and run thus incurring an extra time wasting (and potentially crash causing) zone change.

3) Marketplace: this is so badly in need of a teleport arch. It is completely ridiculous that you can bamf into the marketplace from everywhere but once there you are stuck holding your shopping bags trying to hail a passing demon-cab to get a ride home. Stick a teleport arch in the marketplace near the trainers (the same place that the training dojo door appears on Lama would be ideal) so that we can get about faster without having to see our environmentally friendly paper shopping bags get ruined by standing about in the rain.

4) Necropolis, Gianthold & Reavers Reach: these are fairly major places and you can spend a fair bit of time in each questing. They have most of the major facilities (bank, tavern, auction house, component vendors etc) but are sadly lacking for public transport. Slap a teleport arch and airship tower in each so we aren't seeing our ship buffs dwindle away as we make the unwanted multiple zone changes from ship to quest entry. Restricting these to high level guilds who can waste crew points on navigators is very discriminatory - small guilds need some love too.

5) Eveningstar: having to go through the 3 zone changes to get from the Harbour to Eveningstar is terribly boring and time consuming. Sure it was a great way to gain entry to the new area when the zone changes involved a quest but as a repeat visitor you need a way to bypass the metal detector and strip search and instead use the VIP gate to go straight to your seat. Once you have done the entry quests there should be no reason why you cannot just zip back and forth through either teleports or via airship - anyone who does not meet entry requirements can simply be blocked.


Stop making it hard to get around - hazards to movement between the zones should be removed or reduced as much as possible so that people have more time to play and less time spent hanging on loading screens wondering if this will be the one which crashes you to desktop. Please put airship towers & teleport arches in all zones to make movement between areas as simple as possible.

[oliocean]

I agree with you. One of the reasons I really like this game are the short ways between the quests. I want to jump straight into action instead of running around for minutes to get to the entrance (like in all other MMOs I know). Please add more transport destinations to the airship and some more teleport arches to the zones.

Please don't add more items to travel faster (like the Key to Eveningstar or the Phiarlan Pendant of Time). They just waste space in the much too small inventory.

[Uska]

You shouldnt be able to take a guild ship or teleport to evening star PERIOD! that said there should be more teleport options like memo'd locations you can use or at least more options for the spell with in the area you are in such as when on FR you should be able to teleport from any area back to evening star.

[ForumAccess]

I actually have some pretty strong feelings on this, both from a Lore and mechanical perspective.

1) House Cannith: This really is crazy. Why is there no airship tower in the primary industrial zone?!

2) Inspired Quarter: I would kind of rather have a tower on the island for the chain after this. But.... that would make absolutely no sense at all from a lore perspective. So an airship tower right along the docks would be much appreciated.

3) Marketplace: This is not a bad suggestion. Though, I would say not a terribly pressing one either. Most teleporter locations are already linked to the Marketplace, and those that are not are just two steps away. This is something that would be nice, but I don't see being terribly high on Dev-to-do lists.

4) Necropolis, Gianthold & Reavers Reach: I really disagree here. These are close to established Airship Towers. And it isn't exactly hard to work your way up to Pawlo Mapmaker..... It's hard to argue that guilds under level 25 need some love, when you could just use the time typing up that argument and level your guild to 25.

5) Eveningstar: I agree that this is a problem. I disagree that Guild Airships are the answer. Just.... it's bad enough that the characters are traveling to different realities. Guild Airships making this voyage as well is just.... ugh! Would be nice to have the Iconic Hero's character selection buttons to choose to either log into Eberron or Eveningstar, having ships pass between them just seems wrong.

[Captain_Pengie]

I actually have some pretty strong feelings on this, both from a Lore and mechanical perspective.

I think any consideration for D&D lore went out the window (along with the ability to type a forum post without having to log back in several times) the moment they chose to link Eberron and Forgotten Realms and use it as an excuse to break the level 20 barrier of Eberron's e3.5 base rules instead of just going to the 4e version of Eberron (the world, not the horrid 4e system of course). There was a ton of content around for Eberron, but with WoC pushing FR I guess they had to submit to the will of the great god Hasbro (I am just waiting for Warforged to get altered to look like transformers - urgh!).

If it was just transport with a basis in lore at issue I'd be asking that they bring in House Vadalis so we can get mounts (thundering about Gianthold on a trained panther - priceless) but my main concern is actually reducing needless zone transitions and with it the time it takes to get around, the vast majority of which you seem to spend on loading screens. While the ideal would be to get rid of zones completely and go to a seemless map change ala LOTRO, I think the current old-school map/zone approach is a bit too entrenched in DDO for that sort of conversion. However if we could at least get to the point where going from A to B only meant one or at most two zone changes so that you could do a bit of shopping/banking/buffing between dungeons without having to re-zone multiple times (and thus risk an attack of the CTD or lag monsters) it would make a big improvement.

... it isn't exactly hard to work your way up to Pawlo Mapmaker..... It's hard to argue that guilds under level 25 need some love, when you could just use the time typing up that argument and level your guild to 25.

No it isn't that hard to get your first ship (my guild is lvl 39 so that isn't the problem) but with such a massive gap between airships (level 25 to 50 is just too far, there should be level 40 and 65 ships) and only 4 crew points wasting one of them on a navigator just to get the 3 or so extra drop points you need to avoid the multi-zone hassle is a cost that the guild is not willing to pay.

[Turtlsdown]

I think any consideration for D&D lore went out the window (along with the ability to type a forum post without having to log back in several times)

Oh man sorry to derail but this just happened to me for the first time on the new forums. AARGH :C

Beyond annoying...

[Phaeton_Seraph]

Yeah, I'd upvote the OP.