I know a lot of people are always complaining about how Ur is dying, and home streets are more useful, or how routes made Ur redundant, et cetera et cetera. Routes have endless series of whatever resource you're looking for, home streets are the most efficient meeting places, and towers stock the best stores in the game. All of this is true, and will always be true. But it seems like a lot of these strengths of home streets are amplified by the fact that you can travel to them at any time, for free, via teleportation.
Access to the world however remains constrained and downright difficult compared to home streets. Teleportation takes skills (five of them), and it still has low map teleport limits (3 per gameday), low teleport points (3), cooldowns, teleport script management, and energy costs. And before you can even teleport, you're either hoofing it, or traveling by subway. The system was elegantly balanced for a world where resources only existed in the world, but that era is over. Now Ur is competing with an alternate world where you can go anywhere, do anything, get anything, instantaneously. It's like a newspaper competing with the internet.
The convenience of traveling to home streets is what's really killing Ur. Its the deciding factor that will always make people meet on home streets, meet and complete group quests on home streets, repetitively and exhaustively gather a single resource on home streets, or pop in for that random resource they need for crafting.
Do you think that access to the world should still be meted out so slowly, with so many constrictions when a level 1 player could alternately instantly travel to any resource on a home street via a site like seriousroutes.com? It seems like the balance of convenience is so disproportionate that it eventually needs to be adjusted.
Would you like to see the system stay the same? Use a similar system with fewer constrictions? Scrap/overhaul the current system? Or maybe completely eliminate them and allow free travel?
Do you think any of these options would make visiting the world more viable or common, and create a better overall playing experience?
If you have any ideas, thoughts, or feelings about the teleportation system, in relation to its impact on the exploration of the world, feel free to post it here.
A few of my ideas for tweaks:
Dramatically more map teleports
With 3 per game day, I always feel like rationing them and I'm afraid to use them. Without ample map teleports, players are restricted from visiting areas they don't visit often, or meeting up with players on the streets of Ur.
More saved locations
Are we really expected to only have three favorite places in all of Ur?
Teleportation Hubs
Like subway stations, but for teleporting. Hub streets we can always teleport to via the Map for free, without using a map teleport. Multiple hubs for large regions. This way even if you used up your map teleports, you're no more than a five streets away from where you're headed. Perhaps access to them could be quest or project related, on a region by region basis. Or use completionist badges as a prerequisite.
Condense the skill tree
Let new players gain the ability to efficiently explore the world even sooner. Maybe just three skills total, with lower completion times.