Quote Originally Posted by Akujin View Post
I'm fairly certain WoW's success has very, very little to do with the way people could or couldnt teleport around. I didnt play for very long, it was either that or XI and I chose XI as I was already far more invested in it. But from what I understand their success was more about pvp and how dungeons were designed, not so much exploring the world in itself. Maybe I'm wrong, but after awhile people dont want to have to hoof it everywhere, they want to hit content they care about and do so with as little downtime in between getting there and getting started as possible.
People appreciated the scale, you could tell because when Blizzard added flying mounts people where sad how it cheapened the scale of the world. Even though flying mounts are not even instant and took time. (Part of the scale issue however was literally being able to make things look small :P, not to trying to misrepresent)

Of course not everyone is in it for the rpg as much as they are in it for the dungeon crawler (derivative"ish" of rpg but has its own distinction worth separating). So not everyone appreciates it.