1) There's a teleportation skill that, once learnt, allows you to set a grounding point via The Rock's menu, then teleport instantly to there from any place. It costs 50 energy but is well worth it!
2) There's no need to keep holding the left arrow key. You can click on somewhere on the minimap of the location, and you start walking there as if by magic. Clicking on a signpost (on the minimap) will automatically send you to the next street once you reach it (if it's a one-way street sign that is. If it's multiple options - you select which street).
3) This came up in a forum topic recently... to which Stoot said 'almost certainly, nodes in a public transportation system (as distinct from teleportation).'.
I love the idea of cycling/rollerblading through hubs :3
"2) There's no need to keep holding the left arrow key. You can click on somewhere on the minimap of the location, and you start walking there as if by magic. Clicking on a signpost (on the minimap) will automatically send you to the next street once you reach it (if it's a one-way street sign that is. If it's multiple options - you select which street)."
Just keep an eye peeled because if the terrain gets levely, like if you run into a mound of something, you just stop, you don't jump onto it and keep going.
Of course, even though I would love to be able to just teleport everywhere under my own steam, I know that doing a walkabout in the world is really important to gameplay, and an auto-jump addition to auto-walk would be great.
But I also wish that while I am roomba-ing from signpost to signpost that I could be stopped by other players who want to speak with me, so if someone I just auto-moved past (passed?) typed my name in local chat, it would stop my avatar in its tracks or something. And especially since individual the person-to-person IM section of the chat window NEVER seems to get my attention for some reason, it would nice if something happened to my avatar when someone opened an individual IM session too.
I guess I spend an inordinate amount of time staring at my avatar during gameplay, so really it would be great if it could provide all kinds of indicators for me. That or the rock. But now I am getting off topic.
"But I also wish that while I am roomba-ing from signpost to signpost that I could be stopped by other players who want to speak with me, so if someone I just auto-moved past (passed?) typed my name in local chat, it would stop my avatar in its tracks or something."
that would be annoying. i don't want that.
i think local chat is just never going to work*. even with the kind of intrusive hacks that you're describing, it'll only really half work. so be it.
i think there's this myth that "bumping into people on the street" [or venue/media specific equivalent] is the most natural, wholesome community interaction possible. i used to believe that too, but now i think it is a kind of nostalgia for a false past. or high school hallways. same thing, really.
bumping into people isn't going to increase the social character of the game. generating common interests and common purposes and making socializing easy in those contexts will work better. using attention nagging hacks to perpetuate the myth of the random "street-bump-into as pinnacle of social interaction" will not work at all.
actually, if socializing in common purpose/interest situations easy enough, the interaction will *feel* more serendipitous than a street bump, tho it really isn't.
*at least not in a "people running around doing things type super-public environment"
"I guess I spend an inordinate amount of time staring at my avatar during gameplay, so really it would be great if it could provide all kinds of indicators for me. That or the rock. But now I am getting off topic."
Well, I could count on half of one hand the number of times someone has actually typed my name in local chat, even back when it was Lalu. And unless his/her little speech bubble was in my section of screen at the time, based on where his/her avatar was respectively, I would have missed it anyway. Maybe it's just me, but i feel super intimidated about trying to say hello to someone in local chat, especially since it often involves running after them and trying to type hello at the same time.
The whole local chat thing is...still an opportunity, I guess.
Right now, people are the only thing you can't actually bump into in the game, and I wouldn't want that to change. I wasn't getting at creating that kind of interaction.
Does that really seem that intrusive? How about a giant hook exploding from caller's chest that chases you and drags you back to the person calling you? Now THAT would be intrusive.