Everyone wants fast travel in MMOs, so why don't they just give it to us? Comments on this post and on the original post have several people saying Oblivion and Everquest were worse with fast travel. I felt that way with Second Life. Once they added teleportation, I never bothered seeing anything, and there might as well be no virtual world. Ultima Online's “bookmark” approach seems interesting. - Amit Patel

While I completely agree with the statement regarding the inverse relationship between access to quick and "painless" forms of travel and the feeling of vastness of a world (or the influence of the former in the latter) I don't think that we need one to achieve the other. In Guild Wars, for instance, they have instant travel between the safe hubs, but you still need to walk the long walk to get to some place in the wilderness. I feel like this method could be a happy medium. - Federico Figueredo

I liked the Guild Wars approach. I also like WoW's though, but it's a different feel. WoW encourages groups. For travel, mages and warlocks can transport others more conveniently than the NPCs do (with town to town flights), and that encourages people to join groups, or at least talk to other people to get their help with travel. In Guild Wars, I could do everything by myself, even get henchmen to form a party, and I never really needed to interact with strangers. In WoW, I interact with strangers all the time. - Amit Patel

If you've ever played City of Heroes you'd know that fast travel can be done very effectively while still showing the expansiveness of the game AND increasing the fun and gameplay. Why Blizzard didn't learn the major lessons from City of Hero (allow everyone to play with everyone, in fact incentivize it AND don't make people waste game time walking from one place to another) is still a mystery to me to this day. - Scoble, Alex Scoble

Most of the time in WoW when people (and I) complain about travel time it's while on a low level chara that hasn't gotten to the point of fastish travel. Other times it's because in a group we don't have a summon possible (a warlock or a stone outside the instance). To me, having instant transportation available to everyone at no cost (other then a hearthstone) is so unrealistic it takes away from the whole game. - Heather Rantypants

Doesn't _needing_ fast travel show the expansiveness of the game? - Andy Bakun

@Amit Patel -- True, I guess the fact that I could ditch people and play the game solo on demand was one of the reasons I bought it. @Alex Scoble -- And that means of transportation is? @Heather -- valid point, although this is often less wall breaking than you put it. Since the means present at this time are merely a balance sprung tool for gameplay balance (rather than coming merely from a narrative background.) Nothing says that we can have perfectly coherent fast traveling tools for everyone. - Federico Figueredo

In City of Heroes you get travel powers fairly early on (level 14 out of a max now of 60). The powers you can choose from are Super Speed, Super Jump, Flight and Teleportation. Super Jump is really fun as you can move just as fast as with Super Speed (which is like running at 80MPH or faster) but you also jump really high, so you can jump up to the top of the tallest buildings and jump all over the place. Really makes the game a lot of fun and cuts out unnecessary travel time. The fact that WoW doesn't give you anything like this until quite late in the game makes it a lot less fun. - Scoble, Alex Scoble