I assume this post a troll but I will reply anyway. The only way I could see fast travel truely being balanced and working is if they required massive amount of skill and resources and atleast two people to generate a limited time portal. In eve online we used titan ships to bridge entire subcapital fleets directly into combat in distant solar systems.
In mortal terms it would require the use of special static structure to be built that is highly vulnrable to being attacked and cost a lot of expensive resources, so setting them up without an active army guarding it would be a huge mistake. We will call this object, the teleportation tower. Once this teleportation tower is built, a mage with the right reageants can start summoning a portal in a distant location. This portal should have a big graphical effect and be able to be seen from a long ways away, It would take atleast 5 minutes for the mage to complete the summoning ritual, during which time he is completely vulnrable to being killed and cannot move or do anything. He would have to be fully protected by others. The mage summoning the portal would also need some resources that are hard to come by and not easily stockpiled. As soon as the mage completes the summoning ritual at the intended destination, the mage at the origination point would also need to cast a spell that uses rare and hard to get resources to bridge the two points and form the portal.
Once the portal is summoned it rapidly begins draining the mana of the mages on both ends, as it takes all their mental energy to maintain. 20-30 seconds of portal time and the link is severed and the portal closes. During the time the portal is active an army is sent through on a one way trip to the destination location.
I basically converted eve titan and jump bridges to Mortal mechanics, with some changes, but tbh, before they even think about adding something like this, they need to consider the problems eve has dealt with over the years in regard to portals/ titan bridges.
- If I can project force to a distant location, how as a developer can they prevent players from stockpiling too many of these rare resources, thus negating the cost of it?
- How far should a portal reach in mortal? 1 mile? 2 mile? the whole map?. In eve people eventually built networks of titan jump bridges to project force anywhere in the game within a few minutes. They had to severly nerf the jump drive range and spool up timers in a later expansion because it was simply too easy to cross the entire map in very little time. Any portals they add in mortal would have to have a limited range of operation as well as a lengthy setup time.
- How long should a portal take to complete and what are its implications for large scale pvp? Assuming a target is in range, if mortal was like eve, you can instant cast a portal and have an infinite amount of foot fighters come in around the caster and begin fighting. In eve this was called hot dropping, and was the bane of less organized pvp groups. It also caused alot of issues with people just fishing for targets while the majority of the guild sat on the titan(teleportation tower) waiting for the chance to go in and suprise buttsecks the enemy. If portals are ever added to mortal, they 100% need setup times.
- Who can build these hypothetical teleportation towers? Keep owners? anyone with the mats? The problem in eve was that if you didnt have titans, you were at a significant combat and logistical distadvantge compared to non titan owning alliances. Do we want such a large and useful powerfuly ability only relegated to the top groups in mortal, possibly making it harder for newer groups to siege and get established? Food for thought.
Personally, I hope they dont add it to the game, because distance and location should matter.. but if I was going to do portals and force projection in mortal, this is how I would do it. #armchairdev
