An interesting solution to travel time that is beginning to become favourable is that of offline movement.  Basically when you log in the game gives you the option of where your character should appear.  If you\'ve been logged off for 5 hours then you can appear anywhere within a 5 hour radius (which in PS would be pretty much anywhere).  This can also be used for crafting.  You could choose to spend 2 of the 5 hours you\'ve been logged off creating hammers, 1 hour travelling to a neighbouring town and 2 hours selling the hammers to passing npcs.  The server takes your options and applies them to the world (so you appear in the next town and all them hammers appear in the inventories of npcs in that town).  There\'s some suggestions that things should actually take twice or three times as long in offline play than they do in online play.. this gives an advantage to players who are online.  Alternatively, we might prefer to go the other way, and encourage players to do all the \"boring\" stuff offline and only come online when they want to do something fun (therefore increasing the enjoyment for other players).

It could be possible to provide a web interface to the game where players who are offline can spend their banked time or set up an action queue for their offline activity.  So if you\'re one of those unfortunately people who has to work from 9 to 5 and can\'t log into the game at work, you could conceivably sneak some time in on the web interface to make sure your character is doing something useful.

It\'s interesting to note that CB will have lockable objects which are pickable but it will not have pickpocketing.  The original idea was that chests would only be openable by picking.  I thought that was pretty strange, so I implemented keys.  Now players could conceivably buy a lockable chest and put all their stuff in it.  Someone could pick the lock on that chest and take all their stuff.  It\'s strange that we consider this ok but we don\'t consider pickpocketing ok.  It\'s kinda like we\'re saying that the player\'s inventory is sacred but anything in the world is up for grabs.  It\'s possible that all chests we sell in the game will have pick skill values set at 110%.  Then no player could ever pick the lock of a chest.  Of course, what\'s to stop someone from taking the whole chest?  We could have it so that no player can pick up an object that is \"owned\" by another player.  So if you throw your sword on the ground no-one can pick it up unless you specifical religuish ownership with some command.  As we recently made it so objects tossed on the ground disappear after about 3 hours we might as well just give players the ability to destroy objects straight from their inventory and remove the ability to drop objects.  Of course, by that point we\'ve no use for chests cause no-one can pick up anyone else\'s stuff anyway and the chests will disappear shortly after they are dropped anyway.

All in all, we don\'t have much of a policy on ownership.  Players own things, but if they drop them they disappear after 3 hours and we really don\'t know if we want to allow other players to pick up dropped items or not.  If someone locks something up in a chest they\'re definitely saying that they don\'t want others to have it, but are we going to honor every request of a player or not?  It\'s all up in the air.