Quote Originally Posted by Naunet View Post
You know exactly what I mean;
Yes, and a truely seamless map experience requires abandoning the concepts of zones, and instead take a page from sectorized cellular networks. One server controls either one really large, sparsely populated area, or it sectorizes and your game client is always in contact with the three overlapping sectors. No loading time because the load is always spread over three servers and manages smaller and smaller areas as places get congested and other servers spin up to spawn off them. Should something crash, that sector goes offline and the neighboring sectors "escort" remember where your character is, so you can continue to move through the sector, but anything interactive in the offline sector is frozen until it comes back up.

There are ways of creating seamless experiences, and it largely comes down to making the maps loaded dynamically as you move through them. Where you start noticing the lack of seamlessness is on a mount that can traverse the map quickly. In a sectorized system you'd get handed off between each sector as you near it's coverage area, thus you could go as fast as possible through the area and not hit a "loading" wall. Flying mounts are especially bad about breaking seamlessness because they typically fly 2-3x faster than a land mount, and the land mount is typically twice as fast as walking.

I was actually a little disappointed that they sped up the land mounts, there was nothing wrong with their original speed. What they should have done was give all mounts their own "sprint" command, along with a "horn" command (eg make the mount growl, roar, laugh, chirp, etc), and made it so that mounts sprint ends if the mount takes damage instead of being able to literately outrun everything.