I think that scaling the length of the timer to distance dosn't cut it, apart from the 'being eaten' argument magisticus made.
The reasons (gameplay wise) that makes me prefer actual movement through the world is that teleportation:
- removes encounters (as you skip everything on your path) which effectively makes the world feel way more lifeless than it actually is
- removes locality by folding the effective map dimensions down to a tiny fraction, making it irrelevant where you an other things are located
- removes the feeling of accomplishment when travelling
Surely it's
convenient to be able to hop over to the (literally) other side of the map to buy a loaf of bread to go with the stew that is currently cooking in the cauldron.... but I really question this ability to be
fun or the experience of such a trip being
rewarding.
I might see this differently should my only goal be to get my warrior next to the enemy to cut him down (and then teleport back into my vault with the sweet loot) - but with my playstyle I think that teleportation completely sucks immersion wise as you can live next to a busy road that sees several hundred (or even thousand) of uses per day - but you'll never ever see
anything of the ones passing by (unless an anthill spawns by chance or you purposefully block the path). That (among reducing littering with road markers) was the reason I formulated the suggestion as I did: to encourage players to route their trails along existing paths, so the likelyness of encounters is increased and the world feels more alive through them.
Performance (capacity, processing, bandwidth) is in the end a question of server architecture: in case you want a system that can support an arbitrary number of concurrent users you
need the ability to split up the world between several physical machines (with transparent handover to deliver a seemless experience to the clients) anyway. So, while I see your point about bandwidth and map loading because of travelling, I think eventually you'll need (at least I hope, because that would mean that H&H took off big time) a server farm that scales to demand anyway - automatically addressing the issue of increased load from characters being on their merry way...