Skysagi

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(...) If you go back and forth between maps or backtrack through the room a lot and every transition is costing you 3-5 seconds, that's what I call bad design. (...)

Oh yes, there I completely agree with you. Now that indeed would be a bad design. I have played some games, where you were moving between maps and each transition had a loading- not a fake, because that was a game on PS1, so it had to load data from the disc. That, after some time could be a little bit annoying, because you were going back and forth between these maps or sometimes even accidentally go back, making you wait 3 times in total.

Putting a fake loading like this and making player constantly wait for no reason would indeed be a disaster, no matter how cool the loading would look like. Putting it rarely with a good design however, could even have a legit purpose. For example, showing the artwork of the place you're going to along with some tips or something - maybe the loading would be fake, but it would have a little bit of informative purpose. 'Fake Loading Screens' aren't bad by themselves, the devs are the ones, who can make it really bad.

Hmmm... I know I said I should shut up, but I do have a bit more to say. If I get too offensive or out of hand, tell me okay? I will stop.

With the PS1, for a counter example most good PS1 RPGs with static 2D backgrounds had really minimal loading between areas and didn't bother with a loading screen. It's rare for PS1 rpgs to take more then a second or two at most to load a map when walking. A static screen was hardly a problem to load in because they were small enough that load times were acceptable. You rarely had images that were more then a few screens wide or tall and had small transitions often. It didn't hurt that they were much lower res images in the first place, but then again they were loaded from a slow CD not a fast hard drive so over all those two things probobly cancel each out out for the most part.

I know it's not quite a fair comparison in some ways due to the forced perspective and grid-like nature of RPG Maker maps vs how PS1 games with static 2D backgrounds can have them be at any kind of angle (though Legend of Mana and SaGa Frontier 2 come to mind, their screens don't seem to have much perspective to them) and have free movement. Not to mention the production value differences involved. These things do allow PS1 static backdrops to be dynamic in a way that most RPG Maker backdrops simply are not, which in turn makes switching screens a lot more interesting. So without that flexibility I can see how it's tempting to design RPG Maker maps with static backgrounds in the same way as a tile-based map.

But they aren't. Tile-based maps are perfect for large flat maps. Static backgrounds are horrible at them. Animated backgrounds, if you are crazy enough to use them, are even worse. You can't just expect to go crazy on loading huge images and expect things to work smoothly. Even if you do sort out the loading time issue, that's a one way trip to thrash central. You are much much better off using custom tile sets, lighting scripts, sprites, displaying more then one tilemap at once, any little trick you can to avoid huge background images.

Also, if a screen had a legit purpose it wouldn't be a fake loading screen in the first place. The question is, are you displaying some artwork for the sake of displaying some artwork, or are you actually trying to mislead the player? That's the important bit. You can display some artwork and such without slapping a big 'Loading...' text on it and trying to fool people into thinking that loading is going on. You can as you said show artwork for the area you are entering, show chapter titles, a calendar animation, even have some fancy transitions without it being a fake loading screen.

Heck, I am guilty of using some needlessly fancy transitions. Rather then fade in and out when switching the map or scene, I have this psudo-paintbrush fade effect (done by using Graphics.transition with a randomly picked image out of a collection of special brushstroke-like fader images), though I don't think it's any slower then normal fades. It uses a black screen in between maps, but I could easily make it use some random artwork image. I also have a fancy PS1-style framebuffer battle swirl replacing battle transitions which probobly cuts it pretty close to being needlessly stylistic, and given those transitions on the PS1 were often used to cover up loading I can understand why someone would label me a hypocrite even though it was never my intention for it to pose as a loading screen.

See that's what annoys me about fake loading screens. It's not that they take up your time, or at least not just that. It's that they blatantly lie to your face about why they are there. They try and cover up their real design goal and frame it as a technical limitation. A designer using splash screens or playing a little animation unnecessarily during some transition event may or may not have a flawed design philosophy, One who tells me they need to do it because loading when that is blatantly not true is either lying to my face or doesn't know what they are doing. Either way it doesn't lead to much trust in their game design skills.

For example, Digimon World 1 on PS1 didn't load the maps that fast and you were going between areas pretty often, sometimes unnecessarily way too often...  

Yeah, I get what you mean. Either way, for me, there are way much worse crimes to commit in games, that I pay more attention to (such as unbearable bugs), than a harmless fake loading screen.  By harmless, I mean the non-invasive ones, that are somewhat designed well, not annoying loading screens all over the place.