Zombie Man wrote:

Absolutely.
1. Travel to portal, usually a rectangular piece of wood.

I vote for more revolving doors!

Make it a mini-game. You click to enter the spinning door and again to leave it.. Time the second click properly, you're in the mission. Get it wrong, you're back outside.

Endless hours of fun!

WarBird wrote:

Geez, that reminds me. I remember gathering outside some weather-beaten door in a rocky cliff face, then going in to find an entire suite of pristine offices. That was an occasional laugh. Kind of off-topic, but worth a mention. I gotta hope, if its fans doing the dev-work here, that more/better maps will be near top of the priority list.

Yeah that was weird to get maps that didn't really match the doors they were attached to. I could see that happening every once in a while if it might make sense for the story (you know like some kind of secret spy base hidden in an unexpected place) but I'd say if the door for the average random mission is a set at a generic office building the map probably ought to look like the inside of a generic office building.

Instaport to every mission is not likely to happen. Neither are the tri-zone crossings in between every mission.

Zombie Man wrote:

Instaport to every mission is not likely to happen...

Great news! Why even have a city if nobody travels through it?

Some of the posts in the kickstarter campaign may shed some light into why "teleport to" would be unlikely:

1) there's talk about (for example) being able to choose how you enter a building. Do you go through the front door likely guarded, alerting foes) or sneak through an upper window, maybe take a manhole to look for a sewer/basement flood drain entrance, Teleporting directly in kinda limits some of these options.

2) there's a great deal of attention going into the actual zones. I'd wager that the travel to the instance through these zones is supposed to be part of he experience for the game and isn't something that they'd want to diminish by letting you skip directly there. The goal would be to make that journey rewarding enough that you don't want to skip past it.

Tangential to this discussion is something that Cryptic did VERY RIGHT in their Star Trek Online game. They gave everybody tricorders. What this means is that instead of having a triangle marker on your screen as a "go here, stupid" way of directing people to where they need to go, then instead just activate their tricorder and a beam of light (color coded by faction) shoots out giving you a bearing to your nearest objective. Nearest objective means either a glowie (not all glowies are mission related) or to a mission objective (which could just be a "enter this region" thing). This works both in space and on the ground, since it gives you a "go thataway" cue that is intuitively obvious and can direct you towards objectives that aren't even visible on screen, either due to obstruction or just simple range. The thing is, this system is "absolutely reliable" in that wherever it points to, you KNOW there's something there. Only failing of it is when an objective spawns *behind* an obstruction or inside terrain or whatever where it isn't accessible. It turns the task of being able to "find" an objective into an active rather than passive activity. It turns all kinds of "find this" kinds of tasks into something of a minigame ... and has the benefit of "directing traffic" towards an objective that otherwise could have been missed or overlooked, since it's basically a "gimmie a hint" system.

One of the things that always felt oversimplified about CoX was that a mission door was always marked so that you COULD find it in the clutter of the terrain. I always felt that it would have been more interesting (if potentially more frustrating) to do more of a "staged reveal" of where a mission door was, instead of just simply "knowing" when you enter the zone. So your Contact would send you to a particular [b]region[/b] of a zone map, and then once you were within that region you'd begin the process of finding the mission door, instead of just zooming straight to it (because it's "obvious"). Once the mission door is "located" by anyone on the team, it gets marked for everyone on the team. Actually finding the door inside of that region could be done as a simple matter of proximity (if within X meters then reveal) such that when entering a particular neighborhood you might (might!) need to do a little searching first in order to find the door. Alternatively, you could call your Contact to get a "hint" as to which direction you ought to go from where you are in order to get close enough to isolate the mission door's location. Thus you wind up with a sort of Exploration Mini-game that you play when you receive new missions, which has the side benefit of getting players to pay more attention to their surroundings than just speeding right through them, ignoring everything between them and where they want to be.

Ah ... but you aren't viewing the flexibility that you might have with such a system! Difficulty rankings are, of course, notional just to get the point across:

Rookie Level: mission door is revealed upon entering the zone
Qualified Level: mission door is revealed upon entering neighborhood the mission door is in
Veteran Level: mission door is revealed upon being within 400 meters of mission door when inside correct neighborhood region (think of Independence Port)
Champion Level: mission door is revealed upon being within 200 meters of the mission door when inside correct neighborhood region
Ace Level: mission door is revealed upon being within 100 meters of the mission door when inside correct neighborhood region
Insanity Level: mission door is only revealed when the "correct" door is clicked on (ie. no hints)

in other words, it doesn't have to be a One Size Fits All, meaning that people who don't want to play the mini-game of "finding" the mission door don't have to. You could then set up the Task Force interface so as to give everyone on the team a Vote as to which level of door hunting they want to have for the group, with a plurality of votes winning and in the event of a tie between two options, asks for a re-vote with only the two options available and gives the tiebreaker vote (if necessary) to the team leader in the runoff. Or it could just be that it would use the Leader's setting when launching the Task Force, much like CoH did. In short, there's different ways to finangle this, not all of which have to be tricky.

As for why anyone would want to set such a difficulty level for finding the mission door to be anything other than Rookie or Qualified, that sort of question would get into the Incentives offered for choosing the more arduous options. Such incentives could range from a slight bias in terms of drops, so a minor adjustment in the rate of drops, or it could be a slight XP bonus while inside the mission, or a slight currency bonus granted when earning currency while within the mission, or whatever. It wouldn't necessarily need to be anything more than a 0-5% bonus adjustment (ie. 1 for each level of difficulty, starting at zero) so it would be a minor thing, rather than a decisive one, and would only persist for as long as you're inside THAT mission door's instance.

Note also that a "give up" option could be offered in the form of simply calling your contact by cell phone and asking them if they have a better idea of where this place is you're supposed to be going to, and they just tell you (revealing the door) if you've tried and can't find it. You'd forfeit the "finder's bonus" for that one mission, but that would be the only penalty. On a Task Force, this call the contact option would have to be exercised by the Team Leader.

Also note that if you're playing on a Team, you could easily ratchet up the difficulty on this to a higher level and have your team "fan out" through the streets of the neighborhood, searching for the door so as to find it quicker, because once it is revealed for one, it is revealed to all on the Team. Of course, on Insanity Difficulty this would mean you'd have a team of players "knocking on doors" trying to find the right one (which would be "found" by the player who enters the instance first). Hey, as advertised, Insanity Difficulty would be pretty "insane" to try and do in a cluttered urban environment with plenty of Doors in it. ^_~

Just thinking out loud.

Lothic wrote:

Yeah that was weird to get maps that didn't really match the doors they were attached to. I could see that happening every once in a while if it might make sense for the story (you know like some kind of secret spy base hidden in an unexpected place) but I'd say if the door for the average random mission is a set at a generic office building the map probably ought to look like the inside of a generic office building.

In all of my time playing the game, there was only one mission that stands out as lampshading that problem; it was a 5th Column/Council mission that was always in IP, with the door being a warehouse and the map a standard 5th Column/Council tunnel map; the 'flavor text' window you got on entry said something about finding a concealed door in the basement of the warehouse that opened into the base. There were some entertaining examples of incongruity -- the bank map behind a tunnel door on Primeva in Nerva, the active businesses inside buildings in Perez Park or Boomtown (the first question is 'how do the employees [i]get[/i] to the office?').

But the rudest one was the "guest at a science-fiction convention" mission you got in the low 30s; until the devs changed its parameters, the mission door was always in Crey's Folly. That mission was also an example of spoileriffic mission objectives -- your contact is talking about your appearing as a special guest at a con, and as soon as you accept the mission, the [b]real[/b] mission objectives appear up in your nav bar. That's one thing I would [i]really[/i] like to see cleaned up for CoT -- we get an overtly-innocuous mission, and we [b]know[/b] it's going to be some sort of trap, because that's the way things work, but at least leave the bogus mission description up until you actually [i]enter[/i] the mission and trigger the hostile mobs so that we can [i]pretend[/i] that we don't know it's going to fall in the pot when we enter the mission.