Originally posted by Mharr:

The problem is that jumping worlds means abandoning a whole lot of building hours.

No, you're not getting it. Your characters are not tied to worlds. You can have a dozen worlds created and only one character, then visit them all with that one character. You have one as your main world with all your build, you can log into different worlds, do your gathering/exploration, logout with your loot then login to your main world to drop off your loot and etc. Multi-world game, not limited to 1 per character.