[knome]

It seems like a good fix for games with magic systems would be to allow players of appropriate wizarding classes to build portals on available land that go from one place to another. Your towns can stretch infinitely in player controlled non-euclidean spaces. The wizards might charge and compete with one another for tokens that allow passage through various portals. Players could trade and buy tokens to eventually do the equivalent of walking from Gerlach Nevada, through an alley in New York, across a road in LA, take a ferry from San Francisco up to Sausalito and pop into Gerlach Wisconsin, or whatever the appropriate local variant might be. Portals might require regular maintenance, the carrying of materials between sides without use of a portal to keep them running. Degradated portals could appear visibly damaged and do fun things like teleport people to the wrong location, or even locations otherwise unavailable to the main map, making an industry of building and ruining portals, with long distances costing the most but opening availabilityto the largest number of liminal spaces.

[crote]

That's just repeating the problem - or even making it worse.

Land is still finite, so there will be competition for portal locations. Connectivity is valuable, so land with easy access to a lot of portals will raise in value: who wants to walk through 20 portals when you could also reach your destination in 1 or 2? This means there is a very strong incentive for the formation of a portal monopoly or cartel.

Anyone in control of a central portal hub is able to make a lot of money by opening a new portal from that hub to a far-off location. That far-off location was previously worthless, but the presence of a portal suddenly makes it extremely valuable. And being able to charge people for portal passage makes it even worse: Not only can you profit from land speculation, you're now basically charging rent on the land you sold too!

The only way to really work around this is to have essentially infinite land, accessible from a single central portal. But as the linked article mentions, that's quite immersion-breaking.

[aspenmayer]

This train of thought reminds me a lot of Peter F. Hamilton’s Commonwealth Saga, in which wormhole technology is discovered by a duo not unlike Jobs and Wozniak, and commercialized, and arguably monopolized. As a result, this leads to considerable differences in opinion about the proper usage of wormhole technology in the setting between the two founders and in the wider society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Saga

[Aerbil313]

In Stoneworks Minecraft server, because the game world is to big (still finite though), people often use Nether for travel. Nether is the alternate "hell" that is mapped onto the Overworld and 1 block in there is equivalent to 7 blocks in Overworld. You can get in and out of there with Nether portals. But while attacks on civilian players are forbidden in Overworld, Nether is fair game. That makes it a tradeoff between speed and safety.

Proves once again Minecraft is the greatest game ever created.