Paying for Quick Travel

I just wrote about the game's 64-bit upgrade, but there's another feature that came with patch 7.2.1 that I've been meaning to talk about: the introduction of a credit cost for quick travel. Like I said when this change was first announced for the PTS, it sounded like a pretty good idea to me - a point on which a lot of players seem to disagree. While I get that adding an in-game cost to something that's been free for over a decade was never going to be popular with the masses, I've still been surprised by the amount of vitriol I've seen directed at Bioware over this change in particular. Who are these people who feel that paying 500-5000 credits for something in a game where a million is nothing nowadays is an affront to nature?

I've seen some arguments along the lines of "But won't someone think of the children new players!" but while it might be a bit expensive on the starter planets, genuinely new players still have a long cooldown on their quick travel ability anyway, so it's not like this is something that will come up very often. Also, at the risk of sounding like an old fogey, back when I started playing the game, we had to pay to train new skills and new ranks of existing skills every level, which was quite a drain on our credits and I remember that just being able to afford a speeder at level 25 was tough. Yet I still had fun! I think people overestimate how intimidated new players are by being asked to care about money a little bit.

Anyway, what's been surprising to me is how much I've actually enjoyed the addition of credit costs to quick travel. After the initial weirdness of seeing a cost attached to every use of the ability, I begun to appreciate that it actually made me think about travel again. And yes, I said that 500-5000 credits are nothing in this game nowadays, something that is even more true when you've been playing since launch and have billions in the bank, but there's just something about quick travel actually having some kind of trade-off attached to it that's made it more interesting to me.

Back when I still had to deal with the ability having a cooldown myself, before the legacy perks were added that allow you to reduce it to zero, there was at least always the question of "Do I want to put it on cooldown now or should I save it for travelling a greater distance a little bit later?" However, once the cooldown went away, using quick travel was basically always the optimal solution. Taxi routes would get used exactly once on new characters, to travel to a new area and unlock the quick travel point there, and then never again. I sometimes thought about the droid at the interfleet transport taxi and how lonely he must've gotten.

But now, with the cost attached to quick travel - even if its trivial! - other options are at least up for consideration again. Maybe I'd rather take a taxi and save some money. Sure, it takes a few seconds longer, but I was about to get up and grab a drink anyway... that kind of thing. On the fleet I've actually started using the interfleet transport again, because I don't want to pay 5000 credits every time I want to go to the Gav Daragon. It's kind of silly, but at the same time I like it.

I'm also paying attention to taxi prices again for the first time in forever. For example I was amused to find that on Yavin 4, taking a speeder from the base to the temple costs 2000 credits, while quick travelling the same distance costs 2007 credits. What a choice!

I'm not sure my interest in this little mini-game will last - as I said, I never used to pay attention to the cost of things like taxis or interplanetary travel because of how trivial they are, and I can imagine that once the novelty wears off, I might stop caring about this too. But it's fun for now, and even if I stop caring later, it still won't bother me to have to pay. It just makes sense both as a small anti-inflation measure as well as simply for the purpose of actually adding some meaning to the choice of whether to quick travel or use another option, as opposed to quick travel simply always being the best option at all times.