Lets face it, everyone at one point or another has intentionally killed themselves in-game to avoid having to walk back to town.  I myself have never played a MMO where I didn’t regularly kill myself as a means of travel.  However each time I do, I feel like I’m some how killing a part of the game for myself.  I mean the whole point to video games is NOT to die, however because of the extremely lame traveling rules nearly every MMO has, we gamers are almost forced to partake in the rediculas act of suicide in order to save ourselves time.

Let us examine the three traveling means that are most common in MMOs today.

Mount - The trusted mount which will about double your run speed (depending on the game) and be your primary form of transportation. While the mount is useful in many situations, it cannot beat suicide travel.  If I’m out completing a quest about need to go back to town to collect my reward, unless I’m very close, I’m going to be looking for a really high cliff to jump off of or a group of mobs so they can pumble me to death.  The mount is good for short distances or traveling to quest locations.

Waypoints - Nearly all MMO’s will give the player the ability to make any town their home location.  Then whenever they want they can just use that skill/item to instanly travel back there.  The problem with this is that most games have a extremly long cool down, 1 hr usually and you can only travel to 1 location.  While it seems very useful, I barely use this form of traveling, maybe once every time I play.  What I would like to see are multiple locations and a shorter cool down, which would make this acutally useful.

Town to Town Travel - Most games have some sort of instant travel from town to town, however there are almost always some sort of restriction. Restrictions might be something like, from Town A you can only travel to Town B, D and F.  Then from Town F you can get to A, C and R.  Then from R, you can get to E and H.  So if you wanted to get to H to begin with you’ll have to travel multiple times. Lame.  Other restrictions can be that each map only has one travel spot, so if you want to get to another town on the same map you’ll still need to run/ride across the map to get there.  There are a handful of restrictions depending what game you’re playing and all are just as lame.

I’m sure there are MMO’s out there that have a great traveling system, however I have yet to play one.  For me suicide is the 4th form of traveling and is actually the best in my opionion since most games have little to no death penalty and it’s instant.

My suggestion to developers is let it go, traveling around the map is boring as hell.  I should be able to travel from any town to any town(as long as I already visited once) in the game.  I should also be able to set more than 1 town using my waypoint item/skill.  I’m tired of killing myself, help me stop.