Customized Travel Tool (Please read all before commenting)

The current tool used to travel only takes us to 5 different places (Kamadan, Kaineng, LA, Temple and Embark Beach). This then makes map travel longer if you want to go to other places (especially if you want to go into the realm of torment which causes you to have to go to 3 different places).

This can cause problems ranging from just waiting for people to go fetch stuff to missing messages while you're doing all that zoning.

My solution is that Guild Wars allows us to save our own selection of locations to that list on when we use the travel tool. For example: I go to Gate of Anguish a lot to do farming, however, each time i wanna go there i must travel to Kamadan, then go to gate of torment and finally i can go to gate of anguish.... hopefully by this time I have enough consumables in storage so I don't have to go to Gunnar's Hold or Rata Sum and back. With this idea of saving certain locations, I might have previously decided to save Gate of Anguish to list so I can click on it and I'll be there in one without having to zone to 2 different places before hand.

A limit on how many locations we can save at a time I think would be suitable (just like how there's a limit on how many friends we can have, guild members, etc.) and because it seems a bit silly to have every location saved onto one list...maybe a limit of 10??? maybe vary depending on how many campaigns you have. And obviously you would have to have been to the location before in order to save it to the list. (maybe add an NPC to every location that you can talk to in order to save the location).

I don't see any reason against having this feature and wanna see what all you think.

There's a travel tool already: Embark Beach.

You can use it for that and many other things, for example, getting from Droknar's Forge to Gate of Anguish without splitting your party, or getting to The Underworld and Fissure of Woe with people that don't have all campaigns. It also has consumable crafters, so you don't have to go back to Eye of the North towns for that.

A good idea, as I have the same problem. But maybe the idea for saving a location can be averted. Instead, maybe we can choose a campaign in map travel, continent, and then a location on that continent. For example, I could choose Factions-the kurzick forest area, and then House Zu Heltzer.

As Mithran says... this is pretty much what embark beach is lol

Might be a bit too many travel options to have embark + maptravel + this suggestion.
So yeah... long live embark beach.
It's not that your idea is bad as such, but there pretty much already is a tool like that.

What I would like is that the travel agents in embark would be able to take you to all outposts and not just the mission ones.

More so, those five places are available for map travel from other continents because they serve as 'harbors' for respective parts of the world. Hence they lie on shores, hence there's the boat icon... it'd be odd to travel directly to House zu Heltzer from LA. Embark Beach is enough.

Agree with Mithran, EB is everything you need.

The only features i'd like to see implemented about travelling is a "Return Back" button, that return you to the last outpost visited before mapping away....

I'd MUCH rather be able to map travel to anywhere from anywhere (that's unlocked for my character and all other characters in my party, of course).

Embark Beach is a waste of time, for the most part.

Embark is crap.

Just give us a pull down list availible at any time.

I can zone from anywhere in tyria at any time, even in explorables.

But if I want to go to torment, I have to go to embark, run to NF NPC, then find a torment mission. By the time I run to the NPC it'd been faster to Kam->Torm->DoA

@Sheik:
That's because EB isn't an outpost designed to be a shortcut for people like you, it's a place to gather into parties. Sure, while solo - or with a guild group - it's much faster to go the 'normal' way, however if you'd like to PuG a mission in Torment, there are better odds to find people at EB.

I agree, but this thread seems more about map traveling than forming a PUG.

I'd like something like a button on the zoomed-out map screen to choose which continent map is shown and be able to travel to any outpost/city directly.

Now that someone brings this up, might aswell repost the idea I've had in mind for years, shame I never saw this happening.

The idea is simple, when you open the map you have two buttons (or even one will do), You can "browse" through the 4 game maps.

These would be available depending on which campaigns your account has and you can only browse only the continents your character has been to, that way no spoilers.

To me this seems the best solution to the multi loads

This is how I picture my idea:



I'm not an artist, but that's where i'd imagine the buttons would be placed or maybe at the top.



As a way of seeing embark beach It's a half-shaved job, I see the area too big for it's purpose, to find the teleport npc's you sometimes get confused cause they're all spread into their own "camp" and sometimes it's annoying with highlighting due to the mass of npc's.

I realize the devs made an effort into this and the aim was for a meeting place so players can group up easier and faster but the way it turned out it's a bit bloated.


Now what would really work is the way I picture fast map travel combined with embark beach as the meeting point for groups to form.


It would benefit both solo and party players. Also coming to think of it now that Friend's list shows where your friends are. Anet could add another context option when you click on a friend's name with a new button saying "Teleport to this friend's location" it would teleport the player to the same area and dist that friend is in (of course full dist rule would still apply).



I guess that's all

I like the scroll map option posted above ^^

This is actually one of the least radical, more seemingly practical and upper-end-of-the-scale ideas I have seen in a while on guru. I agree with practically everything in this post and would have been convenient yesterday as I found myself mapping some of my chars from cantha/tyria to torment realm and it was very tedious. I would enjoy this if it was implemented, provided it was really easy and non-time consuming to implement. Still hoping that if they speed things along quickly I may yet see a large scale skill balance/hardmode armor update to not make ele damage the equivalent of throwing peanuts.

Oh and do feel sorry for embark beach not being too...popular since I think quite a bit of work went into it.

note that you still have to travel to embark beach before going to any other place... the whole idea of this is so that you don't have to keep going through other places to get to places that you frequently use (thus why you save them before hand)

EDIT:
And yeah, the map travel seems like a great idea too either one i'm fine with... just something to make it possible to travel to places straight away!!!

and the only reasons against this idea are pretty much "we don't need it so let's not have it".... just don't use it if you don't need it!!

/signed, pugs are poo!

The ROI is too low to make this of any real value to pursue. With a small development team you want to focus on changes and fixes that will have a bigger impact on the game. As it is it takes 2 map travels to get anywhere you need to go (except Realm of Torment, that takes 2). Yes it is a minor annoyance but only takes a minute. There are many other things that we be more productive to work on.

I've got an even better idea! Why don't we scrap embark beach, map travel and let everyone buy mounts, that way we can all spend 30 minutes going from where we are to where we wanna be and really experience the world.

Also, they should make us wait like 30-60 seconds for the boat to another continent.

If you want map travel, they should build Asura gates in main towns/mission outposts and charge people 100g a trip. That'd be much more fun. It just doesn't feel like an adventure anymore.

Oh, and they should make chat work only in the map you're currently in, if you want to talk to someone in a different continent, they should require you to use the in-game mail system, which would have a 30 minute delay. That'd make it feel more like a period fantasy game.

Oh and if they bring in map-travel, they should allow you to transport your entire guild to the endgame missions and all the elite areas from the guildhall and increase the party size and kill the bad guys in like 10 seconds so you can get the end-game weapons. That'd be a nice balance. Just to be fair.

are you for real?....

No, he's not. But he pointed out a very important thing in regard to GW's map travel.

Judging by your ending comments I can tell you're not serious at all.


First of all mounts would be great yes but with the concept of GW they wouldn't be fun (not many places to run around) especially when the game isn't designed as a single persistent world like other mmos.

Secondly waiting 30-60 sec for teleport in this game would make it more frustrating than convenient.

As for the mail system, I've been to other games where you send text mails and even items, it would be a great addition to GW to send items or money to someone offline.

What you mentioned is a absurd, changing the traveling rules like that doesn't fit for this game. I know a game that has everything you mentioned and they work well but it's a whole different style compared to GW, the only thing I agree with you is the mail system, it would be a great addition.

For all of you snorting and giggling at this.. it is pretty much travel as it exists in most of the big MMOs.. Time sink= money in subscription games.

In Everquest2, Vanguard, AoC you can spend 20-30 minutes just in travel time to many destinations..

Embark is fine.. and waaay more than most traditional MMOs offer.

/notsigned , i think people can afford 1 more double click and it's not a must to the game...

Even if it was done , there would be still problems remaining on same occur :
- I rolled character , unfortunately, ToA ad1 is full they took someone else
- I rolled PvP character , unfortunately , HA id1 is full they took someone else

I hope i understood your problem which was about people who can't even wait 15 sec when you go craft consumables or roll character then go to DoA... But those probles i mentionned wouldstill remain....

...because mapping directly where you want to instead of otherwise needless stops on the way is an inconvenience?

Practically everyone would use this and benefit from it at some point, and a lot would benefit from it on a regular basis.

This isn't other MMOs BTW; this is GW.