Travel Guide confusion

[kreelor]

Western Plaguelands, Step 35, "Talk to Selyria Groenveld"

The guide ignores the fact that there's already a FM close to the targeted location. I have my Travel System set on 'take easiest route.' In any event, it would have been far faster to use the FM than running all that distance, since it's 1/2 the distance to where the target is.

Travel Guide missing a step.jpg

[cabby]

So when you right click on the waypoint arrow does it show as being set to Fastest use every trick or Prefer comfortable for the option?

[kreelor]

You suggested that I use this a week or so ago.

I wrote:

I have my Travel System set on 'take easiest route.'

I don't remember the "exact" name of it, but there's only one which fits this description of mine. Sorry.

EDITED: I tried it all different ways, but none of them changed the situation.

[cabby]

Ok, just wanted to double check. So when the step first appeared you were all the way down in Chillwind and it didn't try to tell you to fly to the farm? Did you get that flight path at the farm or do you only have the Chillwind and Anderhol flights?

I'm thinking from the picture that you were at Chillwind and being sent to the farm for the first time. You expected it should have told you to fly to Anderhol then travel by foot the 2nd half of the trip. Please correct me if I'm wrong in my thinking here.

Now I'm just guessing, but I think the travel system didn't direct you to fly to Anderhol because it probably thought it would be faster without the flight. I know this isn't the case. The travel system looks at a straight line travel when comparing the different routes. So if you draw a straight line from Chillwind to the farm that's what the travel system considers to be the ground route. Now the flight route takes you pretty far out of the way compared to that straight line ground route so that's probably why the flight wasn't suggested.

Now I know what you're thinking, why doesn't the travel system know you can't do a straight line route like that. The answer is because it always calculates the ground route as a straight line because it's near impossible for us to have that much detail in the system. We'd have to create 3d maps of the world that would only be referenced by the travel system just to know about cliffs, lakes, etc. I don't know if that's even possible to do in the scope of a WoW addon and even if it was it would be a massive increase in the guide file sizes and memory usage in game.

[kreelor]

Ok, just wanted to double check. So when the step first appeared you were all the way down in Chillwind and it didn't try to tell you to fly to the farm? Did you get that flight path at the farm or do you only have the Chillwind and Anderhol flights?

At the time, I had only the two FM's; one in Chillwind Camp and the other in Andorhal. Forget the 'farm,' since it was an easy walk to get that FM, once I had gotten to the "green" target.

I'm thinking from the picture that you were at Chillwind and being sent to the farm for the first time. You expected it should have told you to fly to Anderhol then travel by foot the 2nd half of the trip. Please correct me if I'm wrong in my thinking here.

Yes. Flying 1/2 the distance (from Chillwind Camp to the FM in Andorhal) would then enable me to run the rest of the remaining distance. Once there, I could easily get the new FM near the farm. That's much faster than running the entire distance on foot or ground riding mount. Plus, my guild has a Perk which makes using FM's twice as fast as normal. That's a great bonus in speed for me to use FM's. But, even without that perk, it makes more sense to me to fly to a point 1/2 the distance, so that I wouldn't then have to run the entire distance. That's especially true, since running in a straight line is illogical because I'd then have to 'fight' my way to get there, which would take even more time! Does that make sense to you?

[cabby]

Yep, makes sense. Just keep in mind that the travel system doesn't know you'd have to fight, it just looks at distance and the base time it takes to get from point A to point B.

[kreelor]

cabby, I wondering just how rigid the code or suggestions are in the Travel System. For instance, here's an example which may not be too absurd to encounter in the game.

Suppose a player has to travel from point A to point B in the game.
However, between those 2 points exists either an enormous cataclysm (like the Grand Canyon in America) or else another obstacle like the Pacific Ocean? Maybe like traveling from San Francisco to Tokyo. Granted, one could always choose between swimming the ocean (in a straight line) to Tokyo, walking on land around the ocean via the Bearing Straits (Alaska/Russia), or flying in a jet from SF to Hawaii, then swimming the rest of the distance to Tokyo. Absurd, but logical. As things are, Travel Routing always suggests swimming across the Pacific Ocean in a straight line from SF to Tokyo!

Does the Travel System (or even the Zygor Team) have any way to determine such absurd scenario's in the game and then present/offer alternative travel methods, or not? (Note: This wouldn't apply to my original issue, but is only an extreme example to ask this question).

[cabby]

The closest I could equate this into WoW would be similar to traveling from EK to Kalimdor (your pacific ocean example). In game we're able to know it's on a different continent because the game doesn't provide any direct route between the two. You just can't swim or fly there in game, it's impossible. Because of that particular limitation then the travel system has to route you via a boat or portal. The travel system also see's the distance involved (something like 15,000 yards or miles) and that tremendous distance also makes the travel system look at alternative routes.

For a canyon type of thing the one that comes to mind would be the zone line between Four Winds and Krasarang Wilds. That's one major drop between the two zones. The travel system kinda looks at the world as a flat 2D map. Pretend you're looking at a map of South America that has no topographical indications. You wouldn't be able to know if there was a valley or a mountain or a jungle. It's a lot like that for the travel system. The travel system knows how long different flights will take and calculates out point to point time based on straight lines. So it will look at time to fly from point A to point B, then add in the time to travel by foot from point B to point C (in a straight line) and then compare that total time against traveling from point A to point C in a straight line. Whichever time it calculates as being the quickest time is the route that gets suggested. It also tries to take into account things like the 10 second cast on the hearthstone, portal travels, etc.

[kreelor]

cabby, your detailed, well-written explanation is one of the very best I've ever seen on this forum (or even other forums)! You are a great asset to the Zygor team and most especially to us users. I'm aware that you didn't "have to" answer me, or answer me with such obvious thought and written, understandable detail... but, you did! Thank you for the time, expertise, and thought you put into this reply to me. I'm certain that other users will find your reply quite meaningful, as well.