It's not unreasonable to expect a form of entertainment to be consistently entertaining.
That's the disconnect. To most of us, MMOGs are just games. A form of entertainment.
To a vocal few, they're an alternate world they can lose themselves in.
The two viewpoints can never reconcile because neither side can empathise with the others position.
That is why you have variation and niche markets. Problem is that, right now, 99% of MMORPGs released are WoW clones. I.e. casual, easy, linear and themeparks with little challenge and instant gratification.
We make assumptions about the opposing sides preferences and tolerances because we don't empathise with them. You've (incorrectly) made the correllation between a gamer not wanting to sit around waiting and a gamer wanting dumbed-down easy hack-and-slash because they don't know any better. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Allow me to clarify. I like challenge. I play games on the highest difficulty settings because I enjoy beating tough challenges. The "win" is sweeter when the battle is harder, and complexity plays a large part in that. If all I'm doing is mashing a few buttons repeatedly, the outcome is decided by statistics and dice-rolls and I don't consider that to be a challenge.
To reiterate: I don't want dumbed down. I don't want simple. I don't want easy.
I also don't want boring. A 10 minute journey isn't boring the first time; I'm looking at things and places that I haven't seen before. It's a new experience so I'm happy to do it because it's interesting. Repeating it is boring and I want the option to skip it if I don't want to do it.
My preference is inclusionary. Being able to skip a journey doesn't prevent others from not doing so. If you like to manually travel then you can still do so in a game that supports instant travel. The reverse is not true.
When I say dumbed down content I'm not saying that today's MMOs don't have challenge. There are dungeons and bosses that truly are a challenge, but only because of number crunching- the complexity doesn't change all that much. These games are still accessible to the lowest common denominator when it comes down to the playerbase.
I'm more in this thread because of how instances kill immersion and leave what should be worlds as superficial games. As far as the travel issue goes, I prefer non-instant travel, but don't really think it should take as long as EQ's boat from Freeport to Faydwer did.
What is there to back up? These are facts. Look at any game with a large world and a dwindling population -- Vanguard is one sad example. (Damn, I loved that game...). WAR is another -- the entire game was built on the idea of group PVP, then they had no features to make it easy to actually get a group together and scattered players over far too many zones. Both suffered the same death spiral. Need a group... can't get a group.... quit game... harder for anyone else to find group. Likewise, you will usually see a de-powering of formerly group only content in lower end zones, as new players become fewer and fewer -- when I first played EQ2 in 2004, damn near everything required a group, when I tried it again in 2007, only dungeon content did. The "overland" group content had been removed, because there were no longer enough players in newbie zones to make a group possible, and the developers didn't want anyone drawn into the game getting bored and quitting. (Even the "group quest" on newbie island, the "kill the pirate in the cave" quest, had been nerfed to single player.)
So these facts (that are actually just your opinion) look to be because of flawed gameplay design. I can only comment on WAR of the three you mentioned because I haven't played the others, but I agree that they had the players spread out was a big reason imo of why that game failed.
As to your second point, the "instant gratification" player (i.e, the one who wants to play the game, not wait to play the game) is the vast majority of the paying customer base. Again, we see massive cognitive dissonance. Small instances, especially those built from pre-fab components, can be put together by a small team. A huge, open, world requires more people, not to mention a longer testing cycle. More people==more expense, more expense==more audience appeal needed to recoup the investment. So what you want is a game which will appeal to a dwindling niche (masochists with a lot of free time), yet which requires the kind of investment only mass appeal can repay.
I have to disagree here as well, you believe that the instant gratification player is the majority of the playerbase, and I only see that in WoW. Other threads have already expressed and explored the "dissonance" you speak of- it's because the games try to accomodate too many diverse playstyles instead of focusing on their key demographic and doing that well.
You are all entitled to want whatever you want of course. But the amount of emotional energy invested in wanting what you are unlikely to ever have seems wasteful to me. Honestly, I think the majority of MMORPG hating that goes on here is based on the unwillingness of people to admit that THEY'VE changed, that they're actually getting older, bitterer, and disillusioned (it's called "life", buckos!) and seeking to recapture a thrill they felt years ago that they never will -- not because "New games totally SUCK!" but because they're beyond the point in their life where they're capable of experiencing that thrill. Now, THAT was speculation, but it does seem to fit the observed facts.
So you're saying that players who expect the same level of gameplay and immersion in today's games that were available in games ten years ago shows that the player has changed? That doesn't really make much sense. As to your speculation, yes I am incapable of being thrilled by shallow, instant-gratification gear-centric treadmills.
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That is why you have variation and niche markets. Problem is that, right now, 99% of MMORPGs released are WoW clones. I.e. casual, easy, linear and themeparks with little challenge and instant gratification.
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When I say dumbed down content I'm not saying that today's MMOs don't have challenge. There are dungeons and bosses that truly are a challenge, but only because of number crunching- the complexity doesn't change all that much. These games are still accessible to the lowest common denominator when it comes down to the playerbase.
I'm more in this thread because of how instances kill immersion and leave what should be worlds as superficial games. As far as the travel issue goes, I prefer non-instant travel, but don't really think it should take as long as EQ's boat from Freeport to Faydwer did.