I don’t feel its necessary. People like to go wherever is busiest. Eventually everyone will gather to sell items, trade, recruit in the city which is the most convenient to everyone’s needs. (Prontera was a central warp city to most other cities, and was pretty close to the centre of the map). No one said “Right that’s It, I’m outta here, Einbroch came, lets all move to Rachel or Einbroch”. Eventually a city will become the staple “To go” place for your various general needs, and the other cities will just be used to more situational/specific needs. If they decide to build the map around the Tree, and the Tree becomes a city, I’ll bet eventually it will become the staple to go to city/hub anyway.
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yeah I think lore hunting like with dark souls is how you make the story not boring. it’s not thrown at you constantly with dozens of quests…that just feels like you’re in a classroom half the time. coming across random items and learning the history of them is what makes it interesting imo.
cus half the time (if not more often) players are just skipping all the dialogue and going through to what you actually need to do to complete the quests anyways…
but me personally I like to at least read the main quests to figure out why I’m actually going to these places and doing whatever it is. 
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Yeah I’m the same way. RO’s kind of “hidden,” completely optional quests were the best. It was kind of fun how most people passed them over and had no idea about lore of certain places. Kind of like IRL.
I think we started playing RO the same year, haha. So, all I really know about early RO (from others’ stories) is that the flee mechanics were different and you could tank as many monsters as you wanted cause it never got reduced. But I think most early activities were centered around Prontera, Morroc, and Payon (Geffen and Alberta, too?). And obviously they build outwards radially, with most of the difficult monsters at that time being inside the dungeons.
Good old Thanatos and Turtle General xD. I was like… 9 at the time, and I started on the test server Sakray because I didn’t know the difference between the servers. Plus I even split my status across my first every character (a mage) evenly across it all, like 30-40 in each status xD. So please for give me if I have forgotten a lot of the nuance stuff from back then.
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I’m guilty of skipping dialogue after a while. I’ve played many MMO’s, and the only quests I actually remember, are the quests on RO because of their great story telling, and the choice YOU the player makes to take those quests. It’s not by force, but a decision. The friendship quest and Kiel quest dungeon quests are some of the best written quests I’ve played through, and they range wildly from short to long in the time it takes to complete them.
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Well, yeah, cause if you messed up the RO quests they could bug or just plain lock you out, possibly forever. Ahahahaha. So you better pay attention!
I can’t like this because of a daily cap, but if I could, I would…I’ve been caught day dreaming on “The Sign” quest and not having a ****ing idea of where to go and what to do xD
Lol I did exactly the same thing with my swordie! I remember balancing out his INT points thinking “My character isn’t going to be stupid” xD.
I think practically everyone did this at first, and those Sadistic GM’s didn’t add a reset skill/stat feature until 6 YEARS LATER…
Oh man…I did the Sign like right when it came out and there was only one forum post on it. And I was anxious the entire time cause it was like IF YOU DON’T DO THIS AT THIS TIME YOU WILL BE LOCKED OUT FOR 1 DAY OR THE QUEST COULD BUG AND BE UNFINISHABLE GL. Not to mention raging over the dancing part.
I wouldn’t mind there being very few quests if they were actually memorable. I’ve done all the quests in runescape and that’s probably the most fun I’ve ever had doing quests in a game before. Some of them took me ~6 hours to complete, but I had (most of the time) fun doing each one. I think they’re usually 30 minutes to 2 hours each on average. They’re not mandatory, but most of the longer/tougher ones give you some sort of unlockable, whether it being shortcuts to places or just useful items. That’s what makes doing them so enjoyable for me. I’d love to do those kinds of quests in ToS, if there’s even any like that.
But yeah it’s mostly hey kill x amount of monsters we need to find out why they’re invading!! they get so tiring 
We will see, the father of RO was fired for being so adamant that RO should’ve had more quests. We are about to find out if he was a genius and on to gold. Or maybe we will find out why he isn’t working on RO now xD I hope it’s the former…
I really like the cities and i also like the town theme already much.
If you want to see some images:
Klaipeda
More: http://www.tosbase.com/news/133/Klaipeda-Images/
Fedimian
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So pretty.
To the topic, I feel like this kind of map system will work out. You can still choose to take a path towards harder monsters. The line/web format of this whole map should just be redone and give it more the appearance of a shapely continent/country instead. In RO you always took top/down/left/right paths, sort of like any other diablo or top-down view game.
An Idea I have to fix this is to utilize the diagonal connecting parts and stretch out the distances between these spots. That way they can sort of morph the mesh of a grid and create a nice world map but not have to completely re-imagine what they have done so far.
Before we continue on the discussion of town, and game linearity as @ZetaGhost pointed out that it felt like there was a lot of hand holding.
Keep in mind the game is hugely changing from CBT 2-3. Here are one of the planned changes:
“We want to have about 3 areas for every level range where you can hunt
effectively, so many hunting routes will be greatly changed. Originally
we were going to have players rely on parties to get through level
intervals that lacked solo zones, but now we want solo play to be
relevant throughout the game.”
Here is the direct Korean for anyone that understands it and wants to confirm the translation for themselves:
같은 레벨대에 3군대정도 추가되는등 사냥터루트가 대폭 변경예정 원래는 힘든구간은 파티등으로 해서 극복하는 걸 원했지만 현실은 그냥 솔플
Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/treeofsavior/comments/387kc2/full_ftg_interview/ translated by /u/emailboxu, a.k.a @emailboxu on these forums.
This is from the Focus Group Interview. Looking at the ToSBase database, you’ll also notice that there are different monster types for all level ranges (which is also how I figured that Turn Undead on paladin is viable now, because there are undead monsters all the way to the CBT level cap)
Now 3 towns are great. It means 1 of a couple things.
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Each town is unique since they progress far apart in the map. The first town will have all the job masters, and probably be the most populated.
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I believe they also said each town has it’s own unique companion.
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They didn’t really say much else about each town, so the other 2 towns may have completely different things in them besides the generic merchants that every town in nearly every other mmo has, because they are so few, and so progressively apart.
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Oh field-based world, the nostalgia is strong in this one 
Having many starting cities was probably the one of the best features of RO. The starting towns created a lot of diversity and made the game very non-linear. Each town had its low, mid and high level areas making it exceptionally fun to explore, and allowing a lot of class / level interactions.
I do hope that ToS adds increasingly more town as it develops… a linear game would be the biggest disappointment for me.
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So in shorter terms, there will be leveling zones at higher difficulties for all ranges so that solo players can still grind effectively?
Would that imply a difference in item drop rate? Or crafting/gathering items in general?
I still think, though, that rewards for party play should be the highest. As well as raid difficulty at those full capacity runs.
I imagine in the late game. Mob/aoe levelling in large parties and mvping will be the most efficient route to max provided you don’t die or end up leeching anyone. However it seems solo grinding is viable, but that is almost certainly class and gear dependant.
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