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Zone Travel Updates in Issue 27

Jimmy

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Posted by Number Six,

Back when I posted that, I wanted to make it clear that the behavior of enterbasefrompasscode was not intended, and using it for fast travel was technically an exploit. It wasn't (as far as we knew) a game-breaking one, so it wasn't a high priority to fix, especially because fixing it properly would be a non-trivial task. However, it needed to be said because metagame commands like that are too sandboxy and not consistent with the game design philosophy of the team, so it was destined to be remo
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Jimmy

Jimmy

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Zone Travel Updates in Issue 27

Issue 27 was released today, and it contains numerous changes to Zone Travel. The relevant section of the patch notes can be found in the expand at the bottom of this post.

 

Changes to the /enterbasefrompasscode Command

What is /enterbasefrompasscode, and why was it available to players?

The command is used by the base portal interface to access bases via their passcode (when you type a code into this window, behind the scenes it’s using the command). It was never intended for players to be able to type it in directly, or be used anywhere in the game. Essentially, it's a simple case of poor implementation.

 

Why is it being removed?
Firstly, it’s not being removed. You can still use this command anywhere you would normally be able to access a base (ie: near a base portal or after using a base teleportation power, including Base Transporter and Long Range Teleporter), which is how it should've always behaved. It can also be used if you're already inside a supergroup base.

 

As for why it’s being changed, well that’s simple: You should not be able to teleport to any base, instantly, with no cost, regardless of your character’s level or progress, by using a simple slash command.

 

Additionally, this command and other related commands had numerous other lesser-known exploitable issues.

 

Why wasn’t the command disabled when it was discovered?
Because the command had a beneficial side-effect - it allowed players to easily “bookmark” bases with macros and popmenus. We did not want to remove the ability to easily share and access bases without providing an alternative actually built into the game.

 

It was always our intention (which we communicated a long time ago) to fix the command in a way which preserves the ability to bookmark bases, but removes the other problematic aspects of the command. The changes in this update achieve precisely that.

 

Zone Travel Improvements in Issue 27, Page 1

Issue 27, Page 1 brings numerous improvements to zone travel. For the full details you should read the patch notes, or check out the excerpt at the bottom of this post.

 

New Accolade Power: Long Range Teleporter

A new accolade power which can be used to instantly teleport to another zone, or a supergroup base, once every 10 minutes. You can unlock this power by earning an exploration accolade (which you get for finding all 8 exploration badges) in any zone with a base portal, or by spending an hour in Pocket D. More destinations by collecting a single exploration badge in any zone with a base portal.

 

image.png.7f41ffb93865e002f48f671321f6c0c2.png

 

New P2W Power: Supergroup Portal

A new power which summons a portable base portal has been added to the P2W vendor. These summoned portals can even be customised at the tailor!

 

screenshot_201123-17-22-12.thumb.jpg.5fafa43cf7a889513e0b5b48ae86e14b.jpg

 

Fast Travel Menu

A new Fast Travel macro accolade has been added to provide easy access to the various zone travel powers. This menu is unlocked as soon as you acquire one of the powers available in the menu, and can be found in the Accolades section of the powers window.

 

image.png.fbcfa6bbb624b9730c766de047010b09.png

 

Base Teleportation Network

16 new base portals and 7 new base beacons have been added to the game world, including several in Praetoria and The Shadow Shard. Additionally, using a base teleportation beacon now drops you at the base portal in that zone, and many base portals have been moved to more convenient locations.

 

Base Portals in The Rogue Isles and Praetoria also have a fancy new Red and Gold skins!

 

screenshot_201123-17-26-25.thumb.jpg.9feb84b3eef5a944f74d71d45f68f6df.jpg

 

Other Smaller Improvements

Various other special teleportation powers have received smaller improvements:

  • Base Transporter's recharge has been reduced from 30 minutes to 10 minutes, and now activates in 2 seconds rather than 17 seconds
  • The Ouroboros Portal can now be summoned whilst flying, doesn't despawn when you leave the zone, and can be acquired from level 1

 

Additionally, the Hero and Villain TUNNEL networks have been merged together, and the network can now also be used by Praetorians, and a new Free Fire Zone Helicopter Line has been added, linking together the various PvP zones for easier access.

 

image.thumb.png.6766c314e17eef568cd38fa485a82444.png

 

Potential Future Developments

Now to talk about what might come next. This isn't something we normally do for a variety of reasons, but primarily because we can never guarantee something is actually going to make it into the game until it's actually finished and released to the live servers. Any number of things could cause an idea or feature to get scrapped, so with that in mind, we'll begin this section with a big read caveat:

 

NOTE: Nothing in the below list is confirmed. It's just some options we're investigating for the future.

 

Exploration Badge Missions

The first thing we're investigating is introducing an in-game, organic way to discover the locations of exploration badges in each zone. The current thought is to have enemies in each zone drop tip missions, which would lead you to an exploration badge (that you haven't yet found) in that zone. If you keep defeating enemies and following the tips, you'll eventually gather all 8 badges and earn the exploration accolade in that zone.

 

The goal here is to make the Long Range Teleporter accolade (and each destination unlock) more accessible without needing to install VidiotMaps or read through the wiki.

 

image.thumb.png.3813c3a8fff989dfdbaf5cbe966f9967.png

Heavily work-in-progress

 

Teleporter Batteries

The next thing we're looking into is the idea of Teleporter Batteries. This stemmed from looking at more modern MMOs (such as Guild Wars 2), where fast travel is instant once you unlock a destination (like with Long Range Teleporter), but has a small currency cost.

 

Enter Teleporter Batteries - these would be a special type of Salvage, which would instantly refresh the cooldown of LRT. You'll be able to access them via the Fast Travel menu (or through your own macros, popmenus and keybinds, or from the Salvage window), and then instantly use LRT to zip to another zone.

 

We'll also be looking at integrating batteries into the relevant Day Jobs in order to replace the duplicate powers, but what form that takes (or if it even happens at all) is completely up in the air right now.

 

UI Improvements

Next, two common UI requests - we're looking into adding cooldown timers into the Fast Travel menu and headings into Long Range Teleporter's destination list to make it easier to navigate.

 

Auction House Teleporters

The Auction House Teleportation powers were removed from general availability because they really aren't that useful and are a bit of a "noob trap". These powers were extremely unpopular (less than 500 character per shard owned them), and they also had several bugs (such as consuming all charges with a single use) which were never reported, somewhat reinforcing how little they were used. 

 

However, if there's enough of a desire from the nostalgic ones among you, we may add a vendor which sells these powers in a less in-your-face-way than they previously were if you really want to buy them (they will not however receive any of the improvements to activation or recharge time that LRT has, nor will they appear in the Fast Travel menu).

 

Detailed Patch Notes

The full patch notes for these changes can be found in the expand below.

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Please use this thread, not the main announcement thread, to discuss these changes. Thank you!

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Glacier Peak

Glacier Peak

Posted
Posted
  On 11/24/2020 at 3:51 PM, Jimmy said:

That'll be posted soon once we're sure there's no need roll back.

Expand  

Ooh! I would like to know as well. The exploit I reported back in July this year was removed thanks to the new Long Range Teleporter Accolade. Very diligent work!

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Number Six

Number Six

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  On 11/24/2020 at 3:40 PM, Veelectric Boogaloo said:

So what were the mysterious game-breaking exploits we were going to be told about once the patch was live?

Expand  

 

  On 11/24/2020 at 3:51 PM, Jimmy said:

That'll be posted soon once we're sure there's no need roll back.

Expand  

 

We'll say some more about it at that point, but aren't going to go into a ton of detail because it's a bug that has existed since the retail days and there are other servers out there that haven't patched it.

 

I know it has been talked about a few places so the information is out there, but we don't want to amplify it unnecessarily.

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Glacier Peak

Glacier Peak

Posted
Posted

The Tour Guide Missions are a great tease! Knowing these are a work in progress, perhaps adding a separate tab for them in the Mission categories (i.e., Active, Inactive, Detective, Tips, Tour Guide Pamphlets) may distinguish them more for players.

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Greycat

Greycat

Posted
Posted

Hmm, tour guide missions sound interesting. Though I go after those explore badges anyway because quick merits. 🙂

 

(Also, I'm glad my WW teleport didn't go away. Biggest use is getting right to the Steel WW to pick up salvage and just hop down the hill to the university to craft. I rather like them.)

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therealtitanman

therealtitanman

Posted
Posted (edited)

My suggestion is change to 1min recharge.

Players has alot of characters will fatigue with the zone unlock.

10min felt very convolution in mmo these days.

Most mmo now has charging either in game currency, or just unlock zone for instant tp.

 

I dont mind having cast time like ff14 instant tp for 5sec.

10mins felt like purgatory.

 

Update:

Just saw it, the local, lfg, boardcast chat, nobody likes, like as below comments, make casual player very unpleasant to move around.

Edited by therealtitanman
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Jimmy

Jimmy

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  On 11/24/2020 at 5:13 PM, Greycat said:

(Also, I'm glad my WW teleport didn't go away. Biggest use is getting right to the Steel WW to pick up salvage and just hop down the hill to the university to craft. I rather like them.)

Expand  

LRT for Founders, Cap and RWZ (possibly more zones too) drop you very close to crafting benches as well.

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Crowe

Crowe

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I'm already hearing the griping in SG chat and in game.  I don't think enough players actually use the forums and weighed in on this facet of the changes.  If there were exploits with the original, it should have been removed promptly.  Instead, it was left in place for over a year and during that time became a de facto feature of the game.  And it was enjoyable and made certain activities less burdensome (the Numina multi-zone hunt X mission, for example).  Perhaps if the LRT accolade was account-wide, it wouldn't have been such a bitter pill to swallow.  The re-design of the game encourages alting but the new LRT system penalizes it.  I have 70+ characters... I just looked at several of my 50s and they have NO destinations for LRT.  I'm not a badger but in addition to the penalty of per-character LRT, I'm also now forced to become a badger multiple times over to achieve what was taken. I'm certainly not happy with this change and would be thrilled to roll it back even if that took the all of the other new things with it. 

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Gilliam COH

Gilliam COH

Posted
Posted

Loving it and Moving PI teleport base was a nice touch.

There's only three alternatives: it thinks we're either a threat, food or a mate.... It's either gonna kill us, eat us or hump us.

amusingsn

amusingsn

Posted
Posted

There are no benefits that I can see to these changes.  You've made the game more unpleasant to play for casual players like myself.  I don't like hunting badges, and why did is there a charge at all for the P2W teleport powers (any of them)?  What would be broken in the game if you just gave all the teleportation features free, without badge hunting, influence cost, etc?

Even if I did jump through literally every hoop to get everything, because this game is so team oriented and alt-friendly (or at least it was), now I have to jump through all the hoops on all my toons.  And even if I jump through them all on all my toons -- and this is the worst part --- even if I do EVERYTHING 50 times over, my fun is still diminished because now I have to wait longer for teammates to get into position because you know out of the 8-man team, at least one of them is not going to have whatever teleport abilities they might need at any given time.

 

If you've every tried to do ITF with a pick up group, you know how often a teammate doesn't know how to get there, never mind doesn't have the badges necessary.  Now imagine a version of that over and over again, for every Task Force, where the team has to wait five minutes for someone to figure out how to get where you are, while everyone else just teleports there using their accolade based long distance transporters or whatever other thing they had to "earn."

 

Please, fix this.

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Crowe

Crowe

Posted
Posted (edited)
  On 11/24/2020 at 6:41 PM, Apparition said:

Thank you for these wonderful changes.  Now that the base macro has been largely removed from the game, I look forward to joining PUG teams again.

Expand  

And this would be the opposite for me -- going with a PUG means that I can't count on everyone having easy access to getting around now.  Instead regularly looking for PUGs, I'll be expecting we'll see more requests for TFs with "TT mandatory" to try and make them less painful.

Edited by Crowe
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Bushranger

Bushranger

Posted
Posted (edited)
  On 11/24/2020 at 7:00 PM, amusingsn said:

If you've every tried to do ITF with a pick up group, you know how often a teammate doesn't know how to get there, never mind doesn't have the badges necessary.  Now imagine a version of that over and over again, for every Task Force, where the team has to wait five minutes for someone to figure out how to get where you are, while everyone else just teleports there using their accolade based long distance transporters or whatever other thing they had to "earn."

Expand  
  On 11/24/2020 at 7:13 PM, Crowe said:

And this would be the opposite for me -- going with a PUG means that I can't count on everyone having easy access to getting around now.  Instead regularly looking for PUGs, I'll be expecting we'll see more requests for TFs with "TT mandatory" to try and make them less painful.

Expand  

If your teammates don't know how to use the tram system, you probably don't want them on your team in the first place.

Edited by Bushranger
adding quote
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Zenogi

Zenogi

Posted
Posted

At least make this teleportation shite an account bound accolade or whatever like on WoW to make it easier than doing it over and over again on alts cause most of the your playerbase have serious altaholic syndrome, doing this lark over and over again and I'll end up getting PTSD, seriously greatful for bringing this game back to us and giving us a home again but just think about the feedback you're gonna be recieving 

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amusingsn

amusingsn

Posted
Posted (edited)
  On 11/24/2020 at 7:13 PM, Bushranger said:

If your teammates don't know how to use the tram system, you probably don't want them on your team in the first place.

Expand  

Yes, I agree with you.  The Tram system should be changed to take you to every zone.  Or we could add a power that costs 5 influence called "uber" that takes you to the mission door.  Good suggestion.  +1 this!

Edited by amusingsn
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Glacier Peak

Glacier Peak

Posted
Posted
  On 11/24/2020 at 6:19 PM, Crowe said:

I'm already hearing the griping in SG chat and in game.  I don't think enough players actually use the forums and weighed in on this facet of the changes.  If there were exploits with the original, it should have been removed promptly.  Instead, it was left in place for over a year and during that time became a de facto feature of the game.  And it was enjoyable and made certain activities less burdensome (the Numina multi-zone hunt X mission, for example).  Perhaps if the LRT accolade was account-wide, it wouldn't have been such a bitter pill to swallow.  The re-design of the game encourages alting but the new LRT system penalizes it.  I have 70+ characters... I just looked at several of my 50s and they have NO destinations for LRT.  I'm not a badger but in addition to the penalty of per-character LRT, I'm also now forced to become a badger multiple times over to achieve what was taken. I'm certainly not happy with this change and would be thrilled to roll it back even if that took the all of the other new things with it. 

Expand  

You and your SG members feedback could've been provided on Discord or via actually beta testing over the past four weeks. It wasn't just on the forums, a notification window in-game /gmotd tells you these changes were being implemented and sought feedback.

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Zenogi

Zenogi

Posted
Posted
  On 11/24/2020 at 7:26 PM, amusingsn said:

Yes, I agree with you.  The Tram system should be changed to take you to every zone.  Or we could add a power that costs 5 influence called "uber" that takes you to the mission door.  Good suggestion.  +1 this!

Expand  

Uber a fucking love that dude! 😂 I'd so totally use that but no tip 😛

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Dreamboat

Dreamboat

Posted
Posted
  On 11/24/2020 at 6:41 PM, Apparition said:

Thank you for these wonderful changes.  Now that the base macro has been largely removed from the game, I look forward to joining PUG teams again.

Expand  

The teams that previously expected/demanded you use the macro will now just expect you to use it in conjunction with a 10 million inf portal power. The problem there is the players, not the mechanics.

@Hissatsuman, you can mainly find me on Everlasting!

Crowe

Crowe

Posted
Posted
  On 11/24/2020 at 7:31 PM, Glacier Peak said:

You and your SG members feedback could've been provided on Discord or via actually beta testing over the past four weeks. It wasn't just on the forums, a notification window in-game /gmotd tells you these changes were being implemented and sought feedback.

Expand  

I'm well aware of that and did in fact post my feedback pre-changes (within a day that it was posted). I'm not a fan of Discord though (security/date concerns) and don't think it's an adequate replacement for forums so I wouldn't be an advocate for using that for anyone. 

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Jimmy

Jimmy

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  On 11/24/2020 at 7:26 PM, amusingsn said:

The Tram system should be changed to take you to every zone.

Expand  

That’s almost exactly how base portals now work. They are located in central, convenient locations in virtually every zone, with consistent entry / exit at the same location.

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