There are several approaches in my opinion which could address this issue. All have advantages and disadvantages which can be discussed.

Possibility one.
Allow players to “teleport” between active robots in different locations. There’s the balancing issue which needs to be considered. How many active robots could one have? Wouldn’t this overly facilitate “call to arms” when defending or attacking Beta etc… This option would decrease the traveling time between your Alpha carebearing cash grinding bot and your combat pvp bot on Beta, but not so much the travel time in missions. To reduce the actual travel time between a station and a mission zone we could imagine the implementation of structures (player or built or not) which act like miniature stations. Which’s sole purpose is to allow you to dock up your robot so you can teleport to it later. Let’s call these structures “garages”. These could be spread out around the map or built by players closer to mission zones.
So a typical mission would run as follows.
A Pick up mission in station (as we do now).
B Teleport to garage with combat robot that is closer to mission zone than the station.
C Do mission and return to garage
D Teleport to station to turn in the mission.
Unfortunately this system doesn’t help at all though to perform “destroy and recover” mission types. Garages if player built would have to be destructible by npcs to prevent them from being built too close to spawns.

Possibility two.
Waypoints as mentioned in this thread.
http://forums.perpetuum-online.com/topi … el-paths/”
We place waypoints as we travel along, create a pathway with the waypoints. Select the pathway way we want and click go! Off course what to do with all the plants? Honestly would it bear dire consequences if all plants were ethereal? Though this would help gold farmers as mentioned. To resolves this problem, this mechanism could be functional only in Beta, but then again who really travels afk in a full pvp zone?

Possibilty three.
Let us build highways. Burn the ground, bring down the hills, fill up the valleys and pour the tar! Traveling from a common place to another becomes as simple as putting your bot in the right direction and hitting move lock. What will happen though in the longer term is that we’ll have terraformed all the islands into plant less poll tables.

Possibility four.
Speed bonus for pvp flagging.

Travel time is also danger time.

If you reduce travel time you reduce risk and exposure.

Yes it is both frustrating and boring when you are just trying to get from point a to point b and your either harrassed by NPC or killed by PVP, but that is the game, and those people had a long boring wait for you to pass by too.

If you remove or reduce traveling than you have significantly changed the game.

Any suggestions on speed increase or teleporting have to be offset by increased exposure or risk elsewhere.

If your only able to be 'contacted' for a short time, than the area that you can be contacted in must be small. What you end up with than is lots of funnel points, like teleports, and traveling becomes stupid dangerous.

Small boosts to speed, while not as bad as teleports, would need something like a 'flare' that put you on everyone's radar for a few seconds. You relieve boredom but increase risk your risk of getting intercepted.

Improving this area probably could be the single most pareto-optimal improvement DEVs could make to Perpetuum because of the very very large number of people annoyed by this and very very frequent amount they experience this problem.

Those annoyed by travel and travelling time should post in this thread to show support.  I am not sure DEVs are sufficiently aware of just how strongly so many people are affected by this issue as I have encountered so very many who complain about this but have not posted on forums.

speed makes the world smaller.

to give us any gamemechanic that makes traveling faster, they have to increase the gameworlds dimensions a good bit.

In space, its easy - you just expand the emptyness a bit more, fill it with random asteroids or planetary systems.
On a planetary based game - you have to fill every inch with terrain, structures, tree's and stuff - that takes much more work and servermemory and is extremely hard to balance.

btw, we have ingame mechanic to reduce long travel distances by a good bit - but its nerfed down to unusable for anything because the pvp nerds think its the worst thing to be able to flee from them without engaging combat - its called mobile teleport beacon.

actually, for me - combat and mining missions - the travel time makes 2/3 of the whole mission time, but is the least paid part of it.

You’re not the only one to have noticed this aberration. The travel time for a combat/mining mission is the same and often longer than the travel time of transport missions.

With transport missions once you’re done with the long haul, you get paid. In combat/mining missions, once you’re done with the long haul, you only get to start harvesting/fighting.

In my opinion a simple solution that wouldn’t completely offset the balance of the game would be to increase the amount of minerals that need to be harvested / robots that need be killed / sites that need be scanned. Currently we have missions that send you from the center of the map to the beach to kill just 5 robots.

Dont do transport missions all the time, mix it up maybe a bit so you dont get bored after grinding the same mission routes for several hours?

I did transport missions one evening, if i do them again now i might do 2 or 3 round trips then go and do something else instead.

imho there isnt anything wrong with travel in this game apart from my inability to navigate around terrain

I would give a +1 to capping the number of times per day any mission can be run, although I do other things in the game, it seems like I'm always balancing time vs. NIC based on these missions. If they could only be done 3 times a day, then that would just eliminate that inner struggle.

Since the things I _can_ make are not selling (really nothing is, but it will eventually so the items just go into storage for later, and I can't make T3-4 items yet), transport missions are funding my raw material purchases as well as kernel research.

If I can only make x NIC per day on transports, than that will limit the amount of NIC I can put back into the market. I doubt that I am the only player doing this with the transport income, although other players may be buying mechs or modules instead of materials, so capping missions could actually kill the economy unless there is a drastic change in the market.

Bounty collections may help some combat players, but again the industrial ones running transport missions will still not benefit. Combat pilots will not be losing more bots or modules, at most the market for ammo may go up slightly. The demand for T3-4 items could increase as pilots have more NIC to upgrade, but most small industry players can't afford the kernels to learn the prototypes for t3-4 (as Alex pointed out, it takes literally 1000's of kernels, and is just something small corps can't accomplish at this time).

TL;DR - I like the idea of capping, but at this time transport mission NIC sources are the economy, and until the market recovers any change in that income flow is going to have a serious impact on the solo and small corp player.

I agree with your (and others') general point that travel is integral to game play in PO, and messing with it risks changing important game dynamics, but there are elements of travel that make zero sense, are frustrating (and contribute to players leaving) and don't contribute to game play at all.

For example:

1) Why does/do the alpha outpost terminals require a 3-4k meter run to get to?  The drones pose no challenge to (and can barely scratch) a three day old player in an arkhe 2.  They just eat time for no good purpose.  Why should it take longer to go from ICS alpha -> Galoli Belli tele -> Radholme west tele -> Radholme outpost than it takes to go overland from ICS alpha to Radholme outpost

2) Why are outpost entrance points offset inside the entry tunnels (why have entry tunnels at all)?  Why, even if you can line up to an entry tunnel and hit auto run, do you not go straight in, but get directed and then hung to one side or the other, if you don't first get blocked by aa stanchion that happens to be directly in fron of the entry tunnel.  This is just bad design.

3) Why are the causeways between the alpha terminals and alpha island teles not lined up?  Sheeesh! Can't even hit autorun for the 1k meters and look away without getting hung up on the causeway edges.

I could go on, but hopefully you get the point.  There are many aspects of travel that contribute nothing at all to game play and just add to the frustration factor by not even making it possible to use the autorun on routine trips.

If people can't tolerate taking 10-20 minutes to travel somewhere then I think the A.D.D. meds need to be increased. You could travel from most current places to most other points in that much time. What your driving and how your fit obviously plays a big part in travel time. If you don't like your heavy plated mech's speed, fit light and carry  mods in your cargo.

Hm, it already is a semi-afk thing... Its quite relaxing to read the newspapers while traveling to your next destination.

.. it takes me 40 minutes to get to work.  real life travel times suck and have no place in a game ;P