I'm wondering how the current community feels about these things, considering their negative impact on people traveling in the world. Traveling in Agon was always supposed to be dangerous. With the news of a future steam release, i'm wondering how the fresh experience would be together with new players, and whether it would be more fun to see everyone traveling the world instead of early easy TPing and the safety of auction house trading. With enough people out traveling in the world, there will be more dynamic pvp fights, especially with racewars. Question is whether steam launch could bring enough people for this to work like original darkfall launch. I think it could, with the right amount of marketing. There's a hole in the market for more old-school, immersive MMORPG's proven by MO2's launch, which is literally suffering from success by having an unexpectedly large amount players ruin their servers and subsequently their steam rating. Darkfalls gameplay and pvp are its highlight, but the persistent world and it's (mmo)rpg mechanics are also an important part of why many people love(d) Darkfall.
Runebooks ruined everything you mention. Portal chamber system was about as much fast travel as the game needed, since teleporting from city to city didn't get you where you need to go, it just got you in the vicinity, and sometimes you would still need to travel a very large distance. Why people thought Runebooks enabling players to teleport right ontop of mob spawns was a good idea is beyond me.
Fast travel has always been one of darkfalls biggest problems but runebooks and billboards just made a bad problem worse. I doubt bpg gets rid of runebooks because it's such a good cash cow for them because having one is mandatory.
Like i have said alot of times before, they need to remove runebooks/billboards and add in a portal for each continent that needs to be travelled to first and cannot teleport you trough the whole world but rather only a certain place per chamber so it creates a network of portal's that you have to go trough to traverse the world.. This will provide traffic and creates hotspots at these portal chambers or the roads that lead to it. I don't think they should completely remove runes, they can just set the runes to where it can only be bound to a rune glyph and has a one time use only. Just keep the rest of the current system in place with rune glyphs as it is.
