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MMO Friday Fight Round 11: Fast Travel vs Zone Runners

Mitch Gassner Updated: Posted:
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Last Friday, we examined the battle between two MMO ideologies: corpse runs vs. no death penalties. Looking at the comments, I’m not sure which side won, so I’ll call it a tie and move on. Given the popularity of last week’s battle, we will attempt to put an end to another eternal MMO battle: fast travel vs. the zone runner. Both methods of travel have their allure, but just like every Friday Fight, there can be only one winner. Make sure you let us know in the comments below which one that winner should be.

Fast Travel

In real life, you don’t walk to the store. You drive to save time. In Star Trek, the Away Team didn’t take a shuttle to the planet’s surface. They teleported to save time. And in MMOs, we use fast travel to get where we need to be as quickly as possible.

Any time spent traveling from quest zone to quest zone is time wasted. Whether you spend eight hours a day playing or eight hours a month, you want to use that time efficiently as possible. And by efficient, I mean killing mobs to gain experience and loot. The only exception to this would be PvP zones, where running players are the mobs, and their inability to avoid you is their problem, not yours. But as soon as you are done going on a PvP rampage, it’s back to fast travel.

Zone Runner

The antithesis of fast travel is slow travel, or, as I like to call it, zone running. Zone runners revel in the thought that the journey is just as fun as the destination. It is absurd that someone would want to skip the scenery, the exploration, and all of the extra side quests by fast traveling from point to point. And let’s face it: if you stop to smell the roses, you will not run out of new content within a week. All other reasons aside, the most important reason to be a zone runner is it gives you a chance to show off all of the legendary mounts you own.

My Take

I really love zone running, but I can’t imagine playing an MMO that doesn’t have some form of fast travel. When I’m running through the main story quests, the last thing I want to do is waste a ton of time running back to NPCs for quest turn-ins. I can always go back through a zone to find all of the bonus content the devs have tucked away in some corner of the map, but it’ll be at my convenience. 


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Mitch Gassner

Part-time game reviewer, full-time gaming geek, Mitch was introduced to Pac-Man and Asteroids at Shakey's Pizza in the '70s and has been hooked on games ever since. Mitch has always had an opinion to share on anything gaming, but it wasn't until 2018 that he began his writing side hustle. Mitch currently writes about gaming and tech for MMORPG and Gamespace.com. You can find him on X @mitchgassner.