Thread: Flying Mounts

Dont Ya'll agree that flying mounts such as eagles would make transportation 5 times as fast? They should have very fast travel speed! Please let me know who agrees.

I suggest you read previous threads on the subject. (And, no, you're not going to get a lot of agreement.)

--W. H. Heydt

Old Used Programmer

Next time you post a topic on a idea. Please check to see how many times it was suggested. I think there about 40 topic on flying mounts. 95% of the people would NOT like this idea due to Lotr Lore. Only Gandalf flown on the eagle. In the hobbit it was the main group who follow Gandalf. That was due to Gandalf help a eagle.

Originally Posted by Vahera

Dont Ya'll agree that flying mounts such as eagles would make transportation 5 times as fast? They should have very fast travel speed! Please let me know who agrees.

NOT THIS AGAIN.....
read the books Understand the lore.....

No Flying Mounts allowed.....
You want flying mounts I suggest WOW a loreless game....
I here you may get a Panda Mount Next LOL.

I suggest NOT to shoot this guy...
But indeed they don't quite fit in the LOTRO experience, sorry

NO!

we dont need flying mounts in middle earth. The eagles chose to help gandalf etc etc, they are not tame

Originally Posted by SoAndSo

NO!

we dont need flying mounts in middle earth. The eagles chose to help gandalf etc etc, they are not tame

Exactly.

To directly address the question, the answer is *possibly it would make travel faster*. But I also say NO to flying mounts.

Gandalf, a Maia, essentially equal to the great eagles, saved the life of the Lord of the Eagles. In return, Gandalf was carried by eagles on four occasions, ever. Of those rides, all were a matter of life and death, no eagles were ever summoned, and every ride was the choice of the eagle, not Gandalf or anyone with him.

As lesser creatures, what could we ever possibly do to earn unlimited rides, at will, over seemingly unlimited distances? Keep in mind that these are the same eagles that fought off dragons and nazgul, earning their favor would take slightly more than saving them from an army of ten boars.

Originally Posted by NickStern

NOT THIS AGAIN.....
read the books Understand the lore.....

No Flying Mounts allowed.....
You want flying mounts I suggest WOW a loreless game....
I here you may get a Panda Mount Next LOL.

WoW is NOT a loreless game. You've obviously never played it before, if you had you'd know Warcraft has tons of lore; not just ancient lore like Deathwing, Maelstrom, Queen Azshara and Sargeras but also recent like Arthas and Illidan. And WoW is also still creating its lore (particularly in the Lich King/Cataclysm transition), unlike LOTRO.

To bring this back on topic, flying mounts would be about as lore-breaking as introducing mana-using mages and a religious priest caste into the game. The point is moot anyway, since the game world in LOTRO isn't rendered for three-dimensional flight. In order to enable smooth flying in the game world there is a lot of work and high cost involved before that can happen.
I do however support the notion of fast travel and in my opinion the best way to accomplish that is faster horses.

Originally Posted by Zephyriat

WoW is NOT a loreless game.

WoW has a "lore" that is owned by, and changeable by the company the runs the game. Thus, it's lore is whatever is convenient to Blizzard and isn't a constraint on what can be done. By contrast, Turbine only has access to the lore behind LoTRO through a license and is constrained (by the rights holder) to stay within what is written in LoTR and may not make ad hoc changes to suit their whims.

It is within the sense that Blizzard can alter the WoW "lore" whenever they wish and in whatever way they wish that WoW is "loreless".

--W. H. Heydt

Old Used Programmer

Originally Posted by Vahera

Dont Ya'll agree that flying mounts such as eagles would make transportation 5 times as fast? They should have very fast travel speed! Please let me know who agrees.

Oh dear, it appears you have inadvertently triggered the secret forum flying mount trap, move 5 spaces back.

Originally Posted by Vahera

Dont Ya'll agree that flying mounts such as eagles would make transportation 5 times as fast? They should have very fast travel speed! Please let me know who agrees.

Oh boy, time to get the popcorn. I'm just letting you know that the search feature is your friend.

NO because it breaks the lore of LOTR.

Anyway even if for some strange reason the Devs added flying mounts what's to say they would be faster then a horse?
The Devs could just make them the same speed as the rental horses. So no it would not mean faster travel times.

AAAAAAAAAAAGGGHHH!!!!!!

NOT AGAIN!!!!!!!!

He only said something *like* eagles. Personally, I think we could have swallows carry us about (African, or course) by running a line under their dorsal guiding feathers!

I'll just leave this here, shall I.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsK6aRuSBIc

I for one agree with the Bowl of Petunias.

If it were up to me, I would hand out a forum ban for anyone that starts these trolling threads.

Originally Posted by Frisco

He only said something *like* eagles. Personally, I think we could have swallows carry us about (African, or course) by running a line under their dorsal guiding feathers!

Not European?

Calm down guys, he just asked if someone agreed.
Flying mounts would be "cool" and "awesome", but not lore friendly and I see no point in that since we got swift travels.

Originally Posted by Vahera

Dont Ya'll agree that flying mounts such as eagles would make transportation 5 times as fast?

Actually, it couldn't happen. There is a limit to how fast a character can run without experiencing all sorts of bad stuff, of which lag is only the first, if it passes landblock boundaries too fast.

In AC1 there was both a Run skill and a Swiftness stat. If one pumped both as high as possible (and many did), one ran around like a Keystone Kop. There was never -- still isn't, last I heard -- any kind of mounts in AC1, because there would be no point to having mounts that didn't run faster than Isparians, which would be too fast for the server.

In AC2 we had two-legged "horse pants" that looked like bipedal dinosaurs, rather cute really. But they were fiercely independent creatures and would carry you for only about fifteen minutes before throwing you off and running away.

Now we have rather nice-looking four-legged "horse pants," which carry us somewhat faster than we can run, even with a run buff on. But there are severe limits to how fast a horse can run; I assume that the top-level 168% is as high as it's going to get.

So the only kind of really fast horses we get are the rent-a-horses that do swift travel, which basically takes you five meters or so away from your starting point and teleports you to five meters or so of your destination. Once you have gone there by the slow route and picked up the stable tie. It's the equivalent of saying "The journey that took our party many days, with many adventures, on the outward leg passed uneventually on the return, so that there's no point in talking about it."

Oh, and welcome to the forums. Don't feel too badly about having your idea shot down: people here have seen it suggested many many times before and have gotten rather tired of it. Time to think of something new!

LOL, if you wanted to troll it was really well done

I'll just reply with with "no eagle can get from 21st Hall to Caras Galadhon as fast as my swift goat travel port, or from Bree to Rivendell via my swift Horse travel either."

We have lots of ways to move quickly, some kind of Middle earth flight-sim via eagle-back not required, in fact it would look awful, if the game could even handle it, lore aside.

*Summons african swallow and takes form of: coconut*

Originally Posted by Vahera

Dont Ya'll agree that flying mounts such as eagles would make transportation 5 times as fast? They should have very fast travel speed! Please let me know who agrees.

Originally Posted by whheydt

I suggest you read previous threads on the subject. (And, no, you're not going to get a lot of agreement.)

--W. H. Heydt

Old Used Programmer

Maybe you should read the first post before derping an answer out there to redirect traffic. The poster really was only saying that flying mounts would make transportation faster. Regardless of how foolish flying mount suggestions are, its hard not to agree that they would make transportation faster. Would it be 5 times faster? Idk, maybe, who knows?

Originally Posted by Odin_of_Freyr

Maybe you should read the first post before derping an answer out there to redirect traffic. The poster really was only saying that flying mounts would make transportation faster. Regardless of how foolish flying mount suggestions are, its hard not to agree that they would make transportation faster. Would it be 5 times faster? Idk, maybe, who knows?

For the record, even IF they we possible lore -wise (which they are not) and even if the game could support it (which it cannot), they could still be +62% or +68%. As was said by another person, anything that makes your character run or move too fast could cause extra lagging / glitching. Remember that quest where -spoiler alert!- you're a prisoner in Isengard and your character moves lightning fast? Imagine having thousands of toons moving in hypothetical flying super fast mounts. Imagine the LAG!

And as another person also said, no flying mount would beat a 'swift travel', which is essentially a port.

So no, it wouldn't necessarily make transportation any faster.

Originally Posted by Odin_of_Freyr

Would it be 5 times faster? Idk, maybe, who knows?

Not in this game. The way it's architected, the stable mounts are about as fast as they can manage. A Turbine developer explained it to me some years back: the way they allow for large seamless landscapes is to divide it up into a large invisible grid of "landblocks" (where each landblock is 160x160m). Landblocks with players in them are loaded into server memory, and have various AIs and resources spawned and managed. Landblocks without any players are unloaded from server memory, making room for more to be loaded when needed.

In addition, each landblock can be loaded into any server in a cluster of servers that comprise a single world... there are on the order of 20 servers required to run each world. When a landblock is loaded, it goes onto the server with the lightest load, so over time... it balances out pretty well.

What does that have to do with movement speed? Lots, it turns out. It takes a non-trivial amount of time to load up a landblock and spawn everything for it, yet it needs to be seamless. If we can move too fast, they cannot get them loaded in time, and the side-effects of that can be rubber-banding, spawns occurring all around us after we've moved into a new landblock, bypassing guard AIs without having to fight them, etc.

If you get one of those mount speed accelerators, you can already see that they're pushing the limits on what they can do... you'll see stuff appear out of nowhere, drop to the ground from the sky ahead of you, etc. Going 5X as fast would make all this far worse.

Even if flying mounts weren't a major lore problem in this game, the speed limitations would make them feel awful. Can you imagine being 100 feet above the ground and only going at the speed of a stable mount? You'd feel like you were crawling through the skies of Middle-earth, not soaring.

Khafar

Feel the wrath of the suggestion forum! MUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!