I don't think it's to show off the landscape; that's a cool side effect, but I think the reason for having to watch your flight path is to keep you playing the game.

I agree with Bravepower's first post. After you optimize everything, you still have to play the game at some point. MMO makers want you to spend as much time as possible playing the game. So just because something is possible technically doesn't mean they want to make it possible from a design standpoint. Can they get people to wait 10 minutes while they fly without quitting the game? Yes? Then put that in. Can they cause a 5 minute animation and pause between each attack without frustrating players? No. But if they could, then they would put that in too.

This is an interesting forum to talk about this on, because engineers specifically have a hard time with this, since they live in a world of "We can make that happen automatically! Make it fast and more efficient!" :-)

But you don't want to make the game more efficient, because at some point you actually have to sit and enjoy the game. A game that plays itself is no game at all.

Here's my little idea of lessening travel time at least. Model it more on the real world - you can live your entire life in one city, and find plenty to do, and never get bored. It's possible to do. But a lot of people find more enjoyment out of traveling and seeing more of what the world has to offer. If there was no requirement to travel, but there are rewards for those who do, then it would be a timesink for more hardcore players that casuals don't have to deal with. Most games already have several starter zones, why not have progress in the game bounce around less, and instead slowly expand into new territory. The travel times are still there, even an equal amount of travel time, but since the individual trips are shorter, it is less noticable.

It is difficult to support both 4-8hour a day players, and 1 hour a day players. I think 1 hour a day players would just like to get in, and have some fun, with no downtime. But people who play more often really need downtime. If they don't find downtime in the game, they are going to have to make it for themselves (i.e. not play), in which case, they are no longer playing 4 hours a day but 1. And they will probably move on because it's not enough.

I don't think this means that an mmo that better supports 1 hour per day couldn't work, but it would be a different sort of game. The hardcore players are part of what sustains most mmos and keeps them going, although I believe that it is actually the casuals that the company actually makes money from. Anyway, one thing that sets persistent world games apart is their persistent world. If players are spending less time on it, than the world is more likely to have a low population. In my experience, low populations really damage a game. The longer people stay in world, the more it feels like an actual world, the more you can count on things working right, such as finding groups, or having balanced sides in pvp etc; things just don't work right if people are not sustaining time.

It's in those downtimes, those travel times, those crafting times, that players can organize and form groups, and figure out how to play together, or plan what the next place they should go is. I've rarely made friends in an mmo during an actual mission - it's generally before or after the mission when we are waiting for something to happen. So at least with the current model, downtime is a key component to making the game work.

This makes me think that if 10-30 minutes of downtime each hour, on average, is required for a model to work, it might point to something broken in that model. I don't know what though. The less persistent you make it, the less it feels like an mmo. I don't think taking an existing mmo model and trying to eliminate downtime is going to be successful. Starting from scratch with a focus of really catering to more casual players, and not having too much downtime, might have a chance, but if you expect players to play for more than a month, downtime has to be somewhere - and if it is in "not playing" then you have to solve the population problem.

I feel like I am missing some things and we are only scratching the surface. Games in general are really only the tip of the iceberg of what's possible; the divide between casual and hardcore players is significant, and we expect all types of players to be able to exist in the same game? Very few other media is so confused about its audience as to try to cater to "high" and "low" tastes, and when they do try it is usually a spectacular failure.