Every major town will have a Gate Keeper that lets you teleport instantly to another town. Not all Gate Keepers will let you go to every other Gate Keeper, but the vast majority of the time you do not need this. These Gate Keepers do cost a small amount of in-game Gold, but it not exactly hard to get.

In later episodes of the game there is a Guild House, which has several Gate Keepers to many strategic locations [Dungeons, PvP zones etc] and these are free. Although it does require maintenance on the guilds behalf.

/return and /town commands. When typed into the chat window a 10 second countdown begins, when the time is up you are teleported back to the nearest major town on the map. Brilliant. Whats more, if you move or are attacked in the 10 second countdown period it will be aborted – so you can’t abuse it to escape from a fight.

Movement and Party Member Summon runes. The Movements let you teleport [after a short "casting" period] to a member of your party. The Summon runes have the opposite effect, when used they [again after a short "casting" period] teleport your entire party to your current location. The cast time prevents you instantly moving/teleporting people to you [it can be interrupted by moving/being attacked] and the runes themselves have a cooldown period, meaning you can’t spam them.

Teleportation Stones. These stones allow you to set up to 4 locations as bookmarks. Think of it as a portable Gate Keeper with destinations of your choosing. There are some limitations on the bookmarks – for instance you cannot save locations in most dungeons so you cannot use them to instantly warp to a boss spawn etc.

Mounts, as with any MMO, are available and these do a good job of getting you places a Gate Keeper can’t take you in a short amount of time.

There are a lot of options there for getting to places quickly, and in some versions of the game a lot of those items are available only from the Item Mall. So their “abuse” is somewhat limited.

But as people have said so many times, once you have seen a place, there is no point trudging there each and every time thereafter.

In the end it’s the suits who get to decide. So, it comes down to:
What’s the business case – If we put this in, will people spend more of their time or money with us?

From a business perspective, either is good. Money is obvious, time may be less so, but time spent in your game is time not spent in another’s. This is why MMOs are like softdrinks and their ‘taste panels’ – the business does not care about what people say, but what they do. If people say they prefer the taste of A over B, but they actually drink more of B, which of the two versions will go on the market?

Why do about 90% of the comments read the title not as it is actually writte “Why Can’t I… Teleport In MMOs?” but as “Why Can’t I… Teleport In World of Warcraft?”

Go play something else less formulaic, like EVE-Online, first then come back & try whining about how travelling from generic fantasy town x to high level XP/loot/quest farming area y is too boring.

Diablo 1.

Town portal scroll. (Creating them for any town would cut down on travelling times enough to please people who don’t have the alt-button and tab-button on their keyboard) ;) Similarly the time to open a portal could ”warn” server of incoming spikes that need be loadbalanced.

It’s the single most annoying genre of games ever created when you think hard about it.

They try to get you hooked to something you don’t need. It’s like fastfood. It never truly tastes good (except for people with pathetically low standards perhaps), but for some reason people keep buying it.

Just like fastfood, playing MMOs tends to be unhealthy. The whole reward thing through stat-grinding is pathetic from a game designer’s point of few. ( Of course, Jon Blow argued more or less the exact same thing and to no-one’s surprise I agree fully with him here. )

It’s potentially a great genre, because people could do a lot of crazy stuff with open-ended worlds and lots of lots of people. But so far all MMOs have been doing the same annoying thing.

Also, to be honest, no fast-travel wouldn’t be an issue if normal travel wouldn’t be boring people to death.

http://www.wow.com/2009/06/30/fast-travel-and-why-its-hard-to-find-in-mmo-games/

The problem is that at the higher levels, this falls down a bit, as the most advanced players just want to *get there* and aren’t concerned with what’s in-between.

One thing I enjoyed about Asheron’s Call all those many years ago was that not only was the world truly huge, but it also *felt* huge, with the restrictions on travel. And it also utilized a trick that WoW (and maybe others) don’t seem to use – the day was not 24 hours. If you ran from Yaraq to Rithwic directly, it’s likely the sun would set at least once during the journey. It’s a trick, but it’s an easy and useful one. And it’s a shame more designers don’t try to make the game more “epic” in ways like that.

Who would have thought that a simple increase in movement speed would feel like such an accomplishment! It’s obvious there is no technical problem with letting characters move faster – everyone gets to eventually, once you get to the proper level and shell out ever-increasing piles of gold for learning the skill and buying the steed. There’s also no technical problem with teleport-on-demand – mages get to do it eventually, and warlocks can summon eventually.

It’s like starting out with a 100-lb pack on your back. When you finally get to take it off you feel light as a feather! It’s a cheap way to feel like you are being rewarded, when really they are just taking off the burden they started you out with.

Every time I teleport, I wonder why, if I can use this magical power freely, can´t I just blow up kobolds or Flame Leviathans for free. After all, the power to transport me from Thunder bluff to Stormwind is free and at my disposal. Hell, innkeepers appear to have these magical hearthstones. How about taking some of that power and weaponizing it! If I can use a heathstone as a warrior, why can´t I at least use a wand?

So in my ideal RPG, I´d remove hearthstones and make sure that any teleport devices cost lots of money.

It already takes very little time to run the length of Kalimdor. The World of Warcraft is a small world, indeed. Teleporting just makes it smaller, and introduces a jolt in the RPG experience. I´d rather it wasn´t made worse.

Seriously though. If you allowed people in MMO’s to jump from any point to any other point at any time in the game gameplay and balance would be thrown out the window. The main reason for travel is so that when you get to the other side of the map with your giant zerg of people and you get wiped out, you can’t just pop right back in and fight again. You have to reorganize, travel back to your destination and mount another attack.

You kids and your insta-travel. In my day, we rolled 2d12 on the random encounter table for every hex of overland travel before we even got to the dungeon, and we liked it! We loved it!