Bare with me on this. A minor, maybe major tradeskill could be a cartographer aka map maker.
While I'm not advicating GPS or even what we know of maps in MMO's, I think maps are logical items that would be in any fantasy setting.
I am suggesting these are items, crafted by a player with parchment and pen. As they go throughout an area, they have to perform an action that would record the layout of the area around them (similar to traveling about and "lifting the fog of war). The higher their skill, the more detailed the map is. However the map regardless of it's quality, cannot track your movement. You will have to look around you and identify terrain features and with the assistance of a compass find your barrings and set your pace. Lost in the woods but smart enough to buy a player made map? You notice a castle to the far Northwest, on the map you see this castle. You look around again and you see a waterfall to the East. You find your location on the map roughly and notice a safe roadway lies to your south leading to a village. The higher quality maps would be more detailed with perhaps gridlines and points of interest (without any spoilers). In some regions your need a higher skill to successfully record the landscape or simply you know you can't survive if you went exploring to make maps of the region. Low quality would most likely have a limit use due to poor parchment quality and blurry color coded shapes or lumps to depict terrain features.
I don't want a map to gps me about but I would still like a map, cause hell.. if you were there in real life, wouldn't you?
Let's face it, there will soon enough be folks stitching together overhead views to make a 3D annotated Google Earth map of Terminus. The devs could get ahead and 'control' that by producing maps themselves and having a decent mapping interface that meant going to Wikis would be relatively less convenient.
In that way the devs can maintain some control - make the interface preferable but don't mark spoilers etc. Allow personal marking of maps but don't allow trading of the personal POIs, just the map.
The Cartographer idea would work with this. The devs are bound to have made maps of the zones they are designing. I suppose making multiple 'quality' versions might be an effort but would be good.
There is actually quite a large thread regarding the cartographer skill in the general forums. I'm at work and too lazy to link it, but many people go awfully in depth in the idea. But I believe the topic is something like "Mini Map ideas" or some such.
I, for one, think it's a great idea, although our thoughts behind it might be different. I advocate a more minimalist approach to maps, where they take up inventory slots, where the cheap ones bought from crafters have minimal details and where the more detailed ones are ridiculously expensive. A system where it just isn't feasible to have every map of every region in your inventory at all times due to capacity limits.
And yes, not one single tiny thing that even HINTS at a GPS function for maps.
-Tralyan
We already have a Cartography thread plus many Map threads with Cartography included in the discussion, please use the search function prior to creating a new thread. By typing "Cartography into the search bar you will find this thread:
https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/2241/a-cartography-skill
I will go ahead and close this now.