[2022] Town Portal - QoL Suggestion (-> see new thread)

New Thread: Journey Back (Town Portal) - Additional Information and Background

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Hi all,

Having the ability to fast travel via teleport, or at least teleport back to a location that you are bound to or have recently visited is commonplace in almost all MMORPGs. It is a great quality of life feature as it gets rid of unnecessary travel times (people sometimes refer to this as a “horse riding” or “walking simulator”.)

Now, as many of you know, the reason why Albion does not have such a feature has to do with it’s risk vs reward design, in particular when it comes to transportation of items and material being a major part of its game economy.

We have thought about this time and time again and believe that we might have found a concept for a new feature we want to present to you here and gain your feedback.

Here is how it would work:

• When entering a city or hideout, you get the ability to teleport back to the said city or hideout until you enter another. There is no way to manually influence this. Your home binding also does not matter.
  
• This teleport is an ability with a significant cast time and a significant cooldown, and it is subject to certain restrictions, as follows:
  
  • If you pick up items from a storage chest, bank, market place or receive items from another player outside of a city or hideout, the ability to teleport is lost until you enter a city or hideout(hence, you cannot use it for transportation)
    
    • The ability is not lost if you pick up loot from a loot chest or from killed players. The 30% gear trash rate on death makes sure that it’s not really worth using this as an exploit for fast transport.
      
  • The teleport will be temporarily disabled there are too many other players close to you. This means that it won’t work if you are in a zerg or a large group. This makes sure that the teleport cannot be used as a tactical tool in zerg vs zerg fights.
    
  • The teleport can only be used out of combat, in the open world or Roads of Avalon. This means you cannot use it while inside a dungeon.
    

We think these restrictions would allow us to have the convenience of a town portal feature while making sure that the risks associated with transport and travelling in general remain in place.

What would be the impact on gameplay here?
The design is aimed at small scale and solo play. People will be able to go into the open world, do their gathering and PvE and then teleport back to where they started, cutting down unnecessary (and potentially boring) travel time. This is a huge convenience gain.
For gankers, it means that ganking people on their way back from an excursion will become less common.
On the other hand, we expect this change to make the Outlands significantly more active leading to a lot more action overall.
The change will also encourage gankers to go out into the world to find targets as opposed to trying to block or camp certain routes, which should lead to more dynamic encounters.

In general, with this change we intend to continue on the path started with the Lands Awakened update, which is to encourage open world activity as much as possible. The feature will also work really well for solo players and small groups in the Roads of Avalon.
We are aware that this sounds like a drastic change, but believe that this will integrate itself nicely in the outworld experience and be a massive gain in accessibility and quality of life for Outlands gameplay.

We are looking forward to your feedback