Zone change warning while keyboard walking?

[Slippar]

Glitch, can we please have a zone change warning for keyboard walking? This might be extremely helpful for those that want to avoid, say, walking into Halcyon River Mouth while on epic tasks, when using the keyboard. Otherwise, using the keyboard to walk can be quite a risk to anybody that doesn't have the exact boundaries to every single zone memorized.

Suggesting first key press in the direction of a new zone pops up a floating message in the nature of "You see the Halcyon River Mouth ahead." but doesn't move you. Then an additional key press in same direction will move you.

Not mad about losing time like that, but I do think this would be quite a helpful addition, so we aren't pretty much required to use the mouse despite keyboard functionality.

[Roeth]

Disagree. For those doing townwalking, it would slow it down by 10-20%. You know roughly where the dangerous zones are, pay attention and mousewalk in those areas

[adino]

Maybe a warning only if you are entering an area above your level.

[Slippar]

10-20% slowdown sounds like a tremendously generous estimate. I'd love to know how you came by those numbers. My estimate, assuming townwalking is doing laps evenly between T4 and T5, either clockwise or counter (3 steps east or west, 19 north or south, then repeated), is that you cross zones a maximum of five times. Assuming that a single trip takes three minutes even, your estimate would be 18-36 seconds slowdown. With normal universal cooldown, if it were applied to the warnings, I don't believe it would slow things down by more than five seconds per round trip, plus whatever minor amount for player error (how long it takes you to press the button).

I would also gladly add a suggestion that the warnings be made to toggle on/off, for those that don't feel they need them. But please do keep in mind that there are a lot of players who don't know the entire game by heart before saying nobody needs a particular thing because you feel it would inconvenience yourself.

[chloe]

by the time you hit high enough mobs that they can one hit you, you should certainly know roughly where the high lvl zones are. as far as i can tell this would only help caps really, as most low lvls do not often stray into high zones by accident.

i dont see the need for glitch to work on something because a capped toon wasnt paying significant attention to what they were doing, so i dont support it. take it as a lesson well learn t not to rely on keyboard walking near a high lvl area.

[beetdabrat]

Could check if the zone will change in the direction you're headed and just have a floating message come up that doesn't activate the cool down.

Beet Da Brat

[Roeth]

Originally Posted by Slippar

10-20% slowdown sounds like a tremendously generous estimate. I'd love to know how you came by those numbers. My estimate, assuming townwalking is doing laps evenly between T4 and T5, either clockwise or counter (3 steps east or west, 19 north or south, then repeated), is that you cross zones a maximum of five times. Assuming that a single trip takes three minutes even, your estimate would be 18-36 seconds slowdown. With normal universal cooldown, if it were applied to the warnings, I don't believe it would slow things down by more than five seconds per round trip, plus whatever minor amount for player error (how long it takes you to press the button).

I would also gladly add a suggestion that the warnings be made to toggle on/off, for those that don't feel they need them. But please do keep in mind that there are a lot of players who don't know the entire game by heart before saying nobody needs a particular thing because you feel it would inconvenience yourself.

My estimate comes from the assumption that, if you have DA and reasonably high adv skills (85+ in the avoidance skills) then you stand a good chance of not hitting any mobs at all on a run. Going on one of those trips, the 22 steps get an extra 5 pauses, each equal in time to a step.

22+5 = 27. Which is actually a 22.7% increase.

Still sound unreasonable ?

[adino]

I like the idea. Especially if it can be toggled. When using a mouse the zone is shown. This upgrade should encompass the standard mouse features and...... enhance them.

[beetdabrat]

Originally Posted by Roeth

My estimate comes from the assumption that, if you have DA and reasonably high adv skills (85+ in the avoidance skills) then you stand a good chance of not hitting any mobs at all on a run. Going on one of those trips, the 22 steps get an extra 5 pauses, each equal in time to a step.

22+5 = 27. Which is actually a 22.7% increase.

Still sound unreasonable ?

Considering how long it takes to gain adventure skills now, 22.7% is a lot. Could have a message pop up before the zone change that doesn't pause the toon. Get more message spam but no slowdown XD

Beet Da Brat

[Slippar]

Ok, I have been working on the math and doing personal trials, and 22.7% still seems to be quite inflated. I wonder if Roeth doesn't work for one of the various world governments?

The first thing I notice is 5 pauses being applied to 22 steps, when it would actually be applied to 44 steps (round trip T4>T5>t4). Also, no matter what I've been able to do, I have been unable to take a step in less than two seconds. I've made many attempts, and no matter what, I have been unable to get 5 steps to take less than 10 seconds, 10 steps less than 20 seconds, and so forth. Therefore, 5 pauses would actually be applied to 88, assuming every trip had an absolutely perfect 0% encounter rate, resulting in a figure of 5.681~% increase. Personally, with Accel, DA and with appropriate skills in 90+ range, I would call three encounters per round trip fairly typical. At an immediate kill rate, each encounter takes almost exactly 5 seconds, presuming resourcing is skipped. So, adding that into the previous, though not as an absolute, a "typical" round trip should take 103 seconds, and result in 4.85% slowdown with pauses.

Alternatively, allowing for alerts that don't trigger a cooldown, the loss would simply be whatever it takes somebody to press the button a second time. I'll assume that we are all gamers here to some degree, and are capable of fairly rapid button presses. In this case, someone prepared to step across a zone boundary would be easily likely press the button a second time within 1/4 of a second. So factoring in the previous 103 seconds (88 seconds walking + 15 seconds for encounters), in this case the loss would be 1.21%

Either way, I honestly think the losses would be negligible, compared to the advantage offered.

And to the suggestion that this would be an excessive amount of unnecessary work for Glitch, I don't believe that either, as the coding largley exists already, to give the same information when mouse-overing on the map arrow icons. Yes it would need to be modified to a degree, but with almost no experience in coding, even I have a fair idea how to modify the code to make it keyboard friendly.

Also, saying it would only benefit caps, I believe is completely wrong as well. I could very much see low level players who are just barely able to handle Grasslands wanting to know where the very graphically indistinct boundary to the Plains is, or exactly where Scorchedlands lets out into Fern Grove. Short version, I think it would actually help low and mid level "Not-OP" players much more than caps, but would help anyone who wanted to use it. I don't see any disadvantage to giving keyboard users the same information that mouse users get.

[Hooker]

looks like im skipping math class today

[Tharkas]

Most everyone who plays has a fair grasp of zone boundaries when they are walking. You wouldn't walk from the sidewalk onto a busy highway and then complain there was no sign to tell you that you had left the sidewalk and moved onto the highway would you?

[Slippar]

Final offering for this, then I quit. Not going to argue when the only thing a certain class of players wants is for information to be unequally available.

Last suggestion: When anybody moves by any means, the zone tags for the surrounding four spaces display, as they would with a mouse-over, then fade out after about three seconds. No cooldown, no pauses, minimal adjustment to coding.

[Zeffrin]

How about just have an option you can toggle on/off to display the name of the zone on each of the arrow directions.