Doug, for me the new map system is almost identical to Lightwalk in speed.
For my wife and I (who admitidly are each only 60% of the way to a Gold Titan Hunting medal, but we have only been at it a few months) the new system crawls compared to FS Lightwalk. It is maybe 1/3rd as fast. Perhaps that's because it is on one server in the UK instead of several in Florida, but I doubt it.
With FS Lightwalk we spend over three-plus hours hunting Tsukiyaomo.
If the new system makes that 9 hours, who will bother ?
And for what? An animated central icon? What am I, a two year old, to care about that ? It is a clear case of the designer being to in love with the coolness of his idea to realize that no one else values it. I bet if they ran a poll asking whether people wanted the little animated robot or a faster interface, it would run 90+% to the latter.
I like much about the new interface, although the combat pop-up has to be smaller: it works for me but not everyone has two 21+" monitors with one in portrait orientation. But movement has to be faster or the part of the game I most enjoy will be dead to me.
Part of it will be the server, but not all. I think the false comparison people are making is that all a titan hunter is concerned with is point-to-point speed - which is fine in that context. It's not applicable for actions which need the page to load, like levelling, where the new interface is vastly better for me.
If the new map means players can't 'teleport' themselves around the map any more then I think that's a good thing by the way - and again, I stress that not everyone can use lightwalk so it's an unfair addition to the game in the first place.
The new map is faster than the old, unmodified one that *all* players are able to play on - by a long way - therefore it will be an improvement for the game as a whole even if the top 2% of speed merchants will need to slow down a little. Unfortunately most of the top 2% are probably titan hunters, so I agree we need to do everything possible to keep the game as fast as possible for their sake.