I like to lean towards faster travel, which supports having more players on a massive scale. Slow travel tends to be on the roleplaying side of things, because realism clashes with convenience much of the time. MMO > RP when it comes to MMORPGs for me.

Originally posted by Rohn

Personally, I like the system in Mortal Online, which is no fast travel anywhere.  If I want to travel somewhere, I have to get there myself.  To me, it's one of the things that makes the game so immersive.

To me that makes the game boring and un-needlessly anti-immersive.  Immersive is somewhere I want to be not dred being.  and walking for 15-30 mins to play a game is as immersive breaking as a game can be.

I prefer the Asherons Call style.  Every character had the option to learn a skill (AC was a skill based game not a class based which I enjoy the best) called Item Magic.  In the Item Magic school you had several different modes of fast travel.

1. You could Tie to a portal, almost every city and every dungeon had a portal (non-instanced) and then cast a spell to fast travel to up too 2 portal ties.
2. You could bind to a lifestone (rez spot) or Tie to a  (spell ability)  So you could cast a spell to return to a Lifestone or type /lifestone and return to a lifestone.  SO in essence you had 2 lifestones that you could fast travel too.
3. You could fast travel to the subway (dungeon with portals to every city on the map and could be at any spot on the map within 5 mins or less.
4. And lastly you could complete very difficult and time consuming quests where some had as a reward a spell to fast travel to that specific area or dungeon freeing up LS and Portal ties for more predestrian uses.

I prefer immersive forms of travel, like in WoW, to instant teleports.

I dont think anyone has done it as well as EQ1. 

You could run from anywhere in the world to anywhere else in the world with enough time and patience by using boats to get from continent to continent. They didn't have mounts until Shadows of Luclin expansion as far as I can remember. But Druids, Shamans, and Bards all had buffs that could increase your run speed drastically with bards being the most ridiculous literally allowing you to go hyperspeed.

You could play a druid or Wizard and use your ports to shorten those travel times. But it wasnt always instant because of the limited locations those ports spells allowed.

You could pay a Wizard or Druid to port you closer to where you wanted to go if you were a different class. This actually added an interesting bit of depth to the game by allowing players to create transportation businesses.

This system worked great for years until the introduction of Planes of Power when they added the Plane of Knowledge and the Portals to all the major connector zones. But I dont agree that this was the downfall of the game due to the fact that it is still probably the single hardest game to progress in industry wide. And because of this has held on to a decent base of players somewhere in the 100k - 200k range that want to play something that takes a real investment of time, and in some cases blood, sweat, and tears..

Map travel to places I've already explored.

I stopped playing WoW a while ago, but I was really excited to see that they finally added flying mount access to the entire game with Cataclysm.

I find the Hyperspace travel a fun sort of diversion in SWTOR, even though Speeder travel is painfully slow once you actually land on the planet.  Every major hub should have the potential to be a Space Port in my opinion, but you should have to unlock that area first by reaching it safely, that way you aren't having to fly to the starter point every time you want to re-explore the planet.

What I really miss are the Pirate attacks and random elite monsters that people would fish up on FFXI Airships.  You had your choice of staying safely below deck, or joining in the battle topside.

Then there is my all-time favorite way of traveling; taming your own mount and riding practically any creature in UO with the correct level of skill and maintenance.

Originally posted by Coltaine00

So which do you think are the best?

UO, AC and Shadowbane allowed me to quickly connect with friends and clanmates so I'm very partial to fast travel in games where my focus is primarily social and group gameplay. In a tactical and conquest-based games, where there is a greater plan and larger focus than just the individual battles, I prefer systems that are on the other end of the spectrum, making travel part of the gameplay itself.

i dont have a problem with the waypoint/teleport pads ... unfortunately im one of those new kids who like to get into the action fast but in my early games i had to travel to places .. sometimes i would have to make it to places where the travel itself was more dangerous than the playingfield i was going, now to think of it, it felt "immersive" i guess, the travel itself was in fact, a adventure of its own since there was mobs in the way to my destination that would kill me one shot :D

i did also, like someone else who mentioned this before, enjoy the "bus" system where you hop on something where other players are waiting as well. i had few very enjoyable conversations on my way to places and met some cool folks. i just remember how for example in diablo 1, you would walk slowly to every place, back then it was ok, but when you got your hands on d2 where you could  run fast and use waypoints it felt like a blessing and you wouldnt want to go back to same old method...

i guess im just saying im fine with pretty much anything ... but dont make it too time consuming... ;)

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Originally posted by Coltaine00
So I've had a fair amount of experience playing MMORPGs and had quite a bit of experience with the travel systems.  Some of them are down right terrible, while others seem to enhance your playing experience.
Best: UO - recall rune system.  You could mark 'runes' almost any spot in the game and recall to it at any time (with the exception of dungeons year later).  This system developed over time from having runes which you could lose when you die, to blessed runebooks which stayed with you.  It allowed you to travel instantly to help friends and meet up with other groups of players for PvP fights and raids.
Pretty Cool:  Shadowbane - It had a portal system which allowed certain classes to "summon" you to a certain location (with cooldowns), but a large portion of the travel was actually walking / running from point to point, through a lot of open PvP warzones. 
Downright horrid: SWTOR / WoW -  Rail to Rail on safe nodes.  I remember 20 minute long griffin rides in WoW which you couldn't do a single thing except go AFK.  One of the biggest reasons that I left the game as I really didn't appreciate the game "extending" your game artificially.
So which do you think are the best?

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I like slow travelling with slower mounts made for combat instead of fast movement, but teleporting between towns you already been in.

The last is so it is easier to meet up with your friends, it was hopeless inthe old MMOs where you could travel for hours just to get to the town your buddie is in.

Flying mounts are the worst thing in mmos, particularly since flying usually is a lot safer. It do work in sci-fi MMOs like Shadowrun though.

Originally posted by Cthulhu23

Originally posted by Vaultar

I'll trade the feeling of world becoming smaller (which is completely irrelevant to me as I never get that feeling knowing that I can simply chose to explore anywhere thoroughly if I feel like it) for instantly coming back to where I left off and continuing my journey to unexplorable lands or joining a nearby DE anyday.

In the long-run, coming back to interesting parts in the shortest time possible is all that matters for me and that is exactly how the ArenaNet devs want you to think about waypoints and teleportation portals.

Waypoints and telportation portals are simply lazy.  No other way to say it.  If ArenaNet truly wanted to encourage exploration, do away with those things altogether, and add a faster form of land travel like mounts.  For a developer that claims to be innovative, they took the path of least resistance in terms of travel systems.  Big immersion-breaker.

Originally posted by Cthulhu23

Originally posted by Vaultar

I'll trade the feeling of world becoming smaller (which is completely irrelevant to me as I never get that feeling knowing that I can simply chose to explore anywhere thoroughly if I feel like it) for instantly coming back to where I left off and continuing my journey to unexplorable lands or joining a nearby DE anyday.

In the long-run, coming back to interesting parts in the shortest time possible is all that matters for me and that is exactly how the ArenaNet devs want you to think about waypoints and teleportation portals.

Waypoints and telportation portals are simply lazy.  No other way to say it.  If ArenaNet truly wanted to encourage exploration, do away with those things altogether, and add a faster form of land travel like mounts.  For a developer that claims to be innovative, they took the path of least resistance in terms of travel systems.  Big immersion-breaker.

Forcing players to travel slowly is just a time sink that a B2P game doesnt need. Most single player RPGs (Skyrim, KoA, FF etc) let players use waypoints / teleportation to get around simply because they do not need to waste your time.

ANet are encouraging exploration for the sake of exploration by having hidden puzzles and dungeons scattered around. What is innovative about putting in mounts? Pretty much all games have them and very few use them well by having mounted combat. In fact most games make it look terrible by either having magically appearing / disappearing mounts or terrible mounted combat animations. So from my perspective, mounts are a big immersion-breaker in most MMOs.

Waypoints / teleportation is far more practical. I don't want to wait 30 minutes for players to run over to where the rest of the group is waiting. I also don't see the need to watch my character fly or ride slowly to the area I wanted to get to, I have already seen the journey once by activating the waypoint, we can assume my character can get there safely again.

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Originally posted by Quizzical
If there's not a reason why travel needs to be hard, then just give me Guild Wars map travel and be done with it.  If there is a reason why travel needs to be hard, then you do something appropriate to the game.

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Travel systems...

I actually like instant travel in a game where it makes sense from a lore point of view, i.e. in many sci-fi games. I usually dislike it though in a low fantasy setting, after all the hobbits didn't teleport to Mordor to drop the ring, didn't they? The whole story wouldn't exist then.

High fantasy settings are somewhat in-between but I'd prefer not to have these portals scattered around the landscape but rather teleporting would be a player skill (EQ comes to mind).

Originally posted by Coltaine00

Best: UO - recall rune system.  You could mark 'runes' almost any spot in the game and recall to it at any time (with the exception of dungeons year later).  This system developed over time from having runes which you could lose when you die, to blessed runebooks which stayed with you.  It allowed you to travel instantly to help friends and meet up with other groups of players for PvP fights and raids.

 

Can these runes be traded? Are they permanent or limited use?

I can really see this in a sandbox game, where people sell teleportation runes for all popular locations.

Any type of travel that is not instant and does not make you invulnerable to attack.

Putting dangerous areas in the game becomes moot if you can just bypass them unharmed.

Teleport anytime and anywhere. Rar, UO.