#1 - June 2, 2015, 8:44 p.m.
The single most important thing to remember when creating a game is that it must be FUN. When someone sits down to play your MMO, they are doing so to be entertained. An MMO should not feel like a job or obligation. It's very important not to fall into that trap of trying to manipulate your community, as if you're trying to run an ant farm. As a designer, it's your responsibility to create a world that's exciting, challenging, and FUN. It's not your job to play god over someone's play experience.
For some context, he was primarily referring to Everquest (this was obvious to anyone playing EQ around that time, but also as it happens, he was hired because of his achievements as an EQ player - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Kaplan_%28game_designer%29), with its non-instanced dungeons, severely overcrowded monster spawns, limited quests, and having to go everywhere on foot, among other things.
Jeffrey Kaplan again in 2007, in a speech he gave at USC (http://finegamedesign.com/worldofwarcraft.html):
Avoid ant farm syndrome. Don't play god. Don't make an ant farm. Social experiment is not the goal of the game. A lot of designers stop playing games when they start making games, because they are playing with the players. That is fun for the designer, not the player.
Not incidentally this was after TBC was released, with, as we all know, the revolutionary open ended travel system we know as flying mounts...
In 2008, Ion Hazzikostas joined blizzard as lead content designer and started working on raids and encounters.
In 2009 Kaplan stepped down from his role to work on Titan.
Fast forward to the present, here is Ion Hazzikostas in his 2015 Polygon interview (http://www.polygon.com/2015/5/22/8645293/world-of-warcraft-no-flying-tanaan-jungle-warlords-of-draenor-mmo-pc-blizzard):
At this point, we feel that outdoor gameplay in World of Warcraft is ultimately better without flying. We're not going to be reintroducing the ability to fly in Draenor, and that's kind of where we're at going forward.
How times have changed. :(
