Maybe it's time to paraphrase: "No vision survives contact with the players."
I'm going to sound reactionary here but I just woke up so I don't care. For every one person who would like a slower pace, a bit more challenge, and a little more meaning in their MMOs, there are now 10 who want an MMO to be just like a console game: play it like mad, relentlessly, till it's mastered or sucked dry,
and then move on. There is no loyalty to the game, to its world, or to its community. The game is pure short-term entertainment, something like a very long movie which will be (and can be, these days) replaced as soon as one gets bored or something better comes along.
With travel as with raiding, the quicker the better. The idea isn't to enjoy your time in the game, but to have fun knowing that you're
consuming game content.
I guess this is my Locust Theory of Online Gamers. It may apply even more to hardcore raiding groups than anyone else, since they actually do go around in sizeable contingents.
This is another one of those arguments where an apparently minor change can spark an enormous debate. It's that slippery slope thing again. Sure, a couple of teleporters here or there don't seem so bad, and they *do* make things a great deal more convenient, which is a good thing at times.
They also, however, seem to dilute a "vision" that many of us have followed for years, though I'm sure we'll be told we just didn't understand the vision correctly. It seems to be a capitulation of "oh crap, must get customers, ANY customers" over what we believed would be "we're small but we're great, and we don't need 8 million customers". Many of us, certainly myself, believed this might be a game for "the other half" -- the one that doesn't play WoW, that doesn't want 6'-tall shoulder-pads and cartoony graphics, that doesn't particularly want to rush to level cap in order to spend 30 hours a week raiding or waiting to raid. The half that no longer wants a fast-food gaming experience.
Course we're not a half, we're a very tiny minority. Teleportation may not be such a big deal, or it may be the tip of the blizzardesque iceberg. I don't know right now, but I
am starting to feel a little betrayed, and I'm not particularly inclined to trawl half a dozen sites in the hopes that I can find a quote to reassure me. At the end of the day, it's what you do, not what you say.
Sorry for waxing philosophical and somewhat on a tangent.