I think they should get rid of some of the more tedious aspects of the game. Stuff like how long those airplane rides takes and how fast characters run. And the length of downtime when you die.

The agonizingly slow pace of running without enhancements really annoyed me. What would have been so bad about making all the characters run faster? Would getting from one location to the next in 1 minute rather than 5, really make the game less fun/challenging/etc?

It's just little things like this that bug me. Just seems unnecessarily tedious.
First let me say that I completely agree with you, but let me also play devil's advocate a bit. I think slow travel is one of the things that makes Vana'diel seem so absolutely huge. I think completely trivializing travel could be a serious problem and make the world feel far smaller. For the sake of familiar comparison, WoW's world is pretty darn big, but you don't feel that way. You can be any place in the game in literally 5-10 minutes tops and most in far less.

Where it really sucks in FFXI is things like boat/airship rides. Taking the boat to Aht Urghan or Nashmau is absolutely horrible. Doing the simple Dancer flag quest was unbearable and took me a couple of hours simply because of slow travel.

I don't want to lose the novelty of the travel and actually being able to see familiar land masses as you pass by, but I also don't want to be bored to tears by a 10-20 minute ride when it's completely old hat. I'd be happy if they kept things like the ships for people that like them, but allow for alternatives. What if you could simply pay an extra 500 gil instead of 200 and be instantly teleported to the same destination the boat would've taken you.

Seems like a win-win to me.


As for walking, yes, walking is unbearably slow, however, I think zoning makes this far worse. When you need to travel between parts of a city the zoning thing adds insult to to injury quite badly. I really wouldn't mind them bumping up the speed of movement across the board. I do think if they remove zoning as an issue the running won't seem so bad.


So while we're on the topic, they need to obviously make callable chocobos that are less of a chore to get and maintain. A simple advanced chocobo license type thing would be perfect. Having a chocobo whistle with limited charges is quite silly imo.