Please merge home points and survival guides

[OmnysValefor]

Would you consider either merging home points and survival guides or allowing access to destinations of both types from both? The easier transportation gets, the more the game just becomes zoning.

I never minded the journey to zones, but now the distance is so short, we spend as much time looking at the loading screens as we jump from homepoint to homepoint to survival guide, or homepoint to homepoint to waypoint.

I'd take it a step further and even "merge" waypoints Unity warp into this. Much of the game is now running short distances between teleportation methods. For instance, when spamming ambuscade, the zone-hopping is the slowest part in great groups.

Additionally, would you add a an option to the Home Point menu to take you to the previous home point. To do this, the game would only have to track the last two home points touched. If you're touching the most recent on the list, then "Return to previous home point" takes you to the second most-previous. A lot of times I set a favorite, it is for short-term use.

When you select one of these objects (waypoint, home point, survival guide), you'd have a menu that said

> Teleport to previous homepoint.
> Teleport to another hompoint, and select from the list.
> Teleport to a survival guide, and select from the list.
> Teleport to a waypoint
> Teleport to a proto-waypoint.
> Unity Warp

Further, would you consider putting a home point in Mog Garden? You can either make 'Area you entered from' take you back to Western Adoulin or take you to the zone entrance of the place you warped/hp-teleported from.

By consolidating the amount of zoning we have to do, you would alleviate a lot of the Downloading Data that needs to be done each time we zone.

[Shyles]

I think something like this would make the menus needlessly more complicated than they already are.

There are already several HP sub-menus that we have to flip through 3 lines of text at a time, and this would just add more. Also I don't think I would accomplish much more than simply setting your homepoint somewhere that has convenient access to the teleports you currently need, such as Ru'Lude Gardens if you are doing original content, or Western Adoulin #2 if you're doing Adoulin content. Most of the teleports are well placed for their content.

For example, what would combining Survival Guides and Waypoints serve when there are no quests or missions that warrant it? I can't think of any reason I would ever need to rush back and forth between Quicksand Caves and Yorcia Wield, for example.

[Jakuk]

I think something like this would make the menus needlessly more complicated than they already are.

There are already several HP sub-menus that we have to flip through 3 lines of text at a time, and this would just add more. Also I don't think I would accomplish much more than simply setting your homepoint somewhere that has convenient access to the teleports you currently need, such as Ru'Lude Gardens if you are doing original content, or Western Adoulin #2 if you're doing Adoulin content. Most of the teleports are well placed for their content.

For example, what would combining Survival Guides and Waypoints serve when there are no quests or missions that warrant it? I can't think of any reason I would ever need to rush back and forth between Quicksand Caves and Yorcia Wield, for example.

Hardly going to add much.

Instead of:

Travel to another home point.
Set this as your home point.
Other settings.
On second thought, never mind.

You could have:

Travel to another home point.
Travel to a survival guide.
Set this as your home point.
Other settings.
On second thought, never mind.

Doesn't add any more menus to scroll through, just an additional option which will not impact transportation otherwise.

--

That said don't think this is needed, maybe just add more books in known areas used mostly as a HP. Like one is W. Adoulin, Mhuara etc.... Basically I think there should be one in all cities.

[Zeldar]

I agree with Jakuk...just add all of the options to Adoulin and Mhaura. I think Adoulin is due for a lot of things, since it is now the central hub it seems. We need all the teleportation options, guilds....PLEASE all guilds, synergy npcs, and did I mention guilds? The room is there, properly labeled as Labormans Way I believe, with a galka NPC that even says its where all the guilds reside.

[OmnysValefor]

...

That said don't think this is needed, maybe just add more books in known areas used mostly as a HP. Like one is W. Adoulin, Mhuara etc.... Basically I think there should be one in all cities.

This is fair, but it seems redundant to even have a lot of these. Programmatically, home points and survival guides should be very nearly the same. It's kind of silly to have both.

Waypoints and Unity are a bit of a stretch, sure, but zoning all the time is tiresome and is a needless use of bandwidth.

[Zeldar]

I think if you look at the purpose they serve, the placement and distinction between the two makes sense. Survival guides were meant to get you around in the field, while homepoints were meant to get you around civilized areas like towns and cities. They did extend the homepoints to BCNM entries for our convenience.

[OmnysValefor]

Getting somewhere in FFXI used to be about the journey (literal: airship, teleport, chocobo, running--hopefully with mazurka). It no longer is.

Rather than touring the city, it's now like we get off the subway to catch a bus and get off the bus to catch a taxi. Everything is about zoning especially since 2 of the biggest forms of content require a lot of zoning (Ambuscade, HTBF). They could do a lot for the game by just reducing these two.

I don't think it's so important to look at the distinctions they used to have, so much as the commonalities between them now.