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That'd be the people sticking storeowners in incredibly dangerous areas, and then taking advantage that nearby aggro NPCs won't kill them, right? In comparison, shifting gate targets over to law NPCs is good RP.
If they aren't on-top of aggro NPCs (which isn't likely, as that inherently is danger for said summoner who, if using this tactic, is too [REDACTED] to survive an attempt to summon onto aggro NPCs, then it's your fault for gating to someone, and
then actively going around, pretty much looking for someone to kill you. Inherently, you aren't killing newbies, as newbies can't really gate. It's not like rifts, in that sense, which it was a problem with. No, shifting gate target's over to law NPCs is leagues beyond this as a problem.
Your scenario: You gate to someone, move around, find an aggro NPC and kill yourself on it out of your own curiousity for exploring somewhere you don't know. You get resurrected, get friends, and get your stuff, as the NPC is there.
Scenario in question for abuse: You gate to someone, and the moment you go through you are overwhelmed by an amount of law NPCs the system never intended for you to encounter at one go, and imprisoned for potentially 5 hours+ of gametime, and then at the end are completely looted and killed.
There's a slight difference. One is abuse, the other is much more the gater's fault. If you can't discern the difference in impact, please at the least don't diminish the worse of the two. People had their energy drain skills disabled for abuse, before it was decided to be turned completely useless - precedent is set for a step between this and completely ruining something.
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There's no more problem using fly to get to places than there ever was. You just have a combat disadvantage if you continue to fly in combat. It's a feature, not a bug.
You call it a feature, I call it a bug. These terms seem to be malleable to the user's intent, nowadays. If you're going to make fly the primary way to do your adventuring/travelling, make it feasible to survive with again.
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I'm really not seeing why this is more than a trivial inconvenience, especially compared to the game's other timesinks. Is there an example you'd like to share?
I'm the kind of person who killed your wonderous spire gate-anchors and flew there myself (of course, this was well before the absolutely borked attempt at 'weather' being applied to the ocean). I take pride in knowing how to get somewhere manually, and honestly I can usually do it faster than a caster can if you include resting time and such.
If I'm a caster and my levelling requires mana instead of HP, mana goes down way, way faster than HP does during levelling. While I also have a second regeneration boost, unlike HP, it still takes twice the time to regenerate mana outside of an inn than inside of an inn. Or, atleast about twice the time. Say I get gate at Expert. This is a general idea. It takes me, with easy access to an inn, ~20 hours for me to gain the next 19 levels to get to GM. Without access to the inn, those 20 hours become 40. I'm sorry, but if you artificially insert 20 more hours into your levelling and tell me it doesn't want to make you go find something more entertaining to do, or force yourself to think of what it'll be like when you're finally levelled, you're finally free, just to get through it... I'm going to call you a bald-faced liar.
Another case. Try to manage a large group from start to finish through your favorite no-transport area, and die. Everyone just die. See how trivial your feeling on gate anchors is then. Perhaps no one does this anymore, but I remember the days of actually having to explore the areas everyone takes for granted as public access now... (yeah, imagine the outer planes when you know absolutely nothing. No precut directions, no idea what golems are ready to kill you around the next corner, no clue your precious rape golem petrifies you instantly... If you don't know what portal leads where, or you don't expect to walk into a pair of rape golems...you die a lot) ...you would stumble upon a once-clever death trap, and die. And you would thank raptor jesus you could at least gate to the entrance of the area, because if you had to gather enough staves and such (some vendors were quests all in themselves), on TOP of having to gear up simply to even have a chance of getting your gear back, you'd consider doing it another day. Hell, even with the easy transportation issues, there'd be times where it'd be three days out before we had a corpse recovery group good enough together.
With the thinning of the oldie curve (shoot, though, I see more around now than I did when I last played), I imagine the long, long lost days of true mud exploration might be back again. Don't rob people of convenience now.
This game has always had a problem differentiating the difference of "challenging" with "mindlessly time consuming."
Now, I understand there's a certain repetition you accept when playing a mud with more than one character. But, any extra minutes you waste seeing something you've seen a hundred times because some toolshed thought it'd be a good idea to make you walk, or if your group wipes and you have even MORE work to do... is every step closer you are to finding a less annoying way to spend your time.
I hate being an extremist, and I hate using extremist examples that don't happen an above average amount, but it works sometimes. Are ya willing to pooch the slightly less than average margin to sate the slightly above average margin?