How should MMO developers balance travel with immersion?

Getting around in MMO games is always a popular topic of discussion and disagreement, whether we’re talking about the arrival of flying mounts in The Burning Crusade or the arrival of Dragonriding Skyriding mounts in Dragonflight. No one likes to waste time in an MMO, and travel usually ends up being the largest time sink for the majority of a game’s players. It’s not just getting around in the local area that raises issues with players — Have Group Will Travel was around for less than two years and people still lament its removal twelve years ago. HGWT’s greatest sin for those who disliked it was its destruction of immersion; it wasn’t like a warlock summons which kept the game illusion going, it was an outright circumvention of all rules for traveling the world.

Of course the scale of most MMOs makes travel without some sort of shortcut mechanic impossible — Aetheryte Crystals in Final Fantasy 14, Waypoints in Guild Wars 2, and of course various portals and hearthstones in World of Warcraft all exist because no one wants to spend thirty minutes traveling between quest objectives, especially in 2024. MMOs also have the problem of frequently being unable to put the genie back in the bottle (HGWT being a rare exception); there was little chance WoW players were going to accept leaving Dragonriding behind in the Dragon Isles. This was especially clear in Shadowlands, where the Maw’s harsh restrictions in travel made perfect immersive sense and were still almost universally despised. A lesson was hopefully learned there: you can make combat hard, or you can make travel hard, but you can’t do both and not expect players to hate the experience.

It’s also hard to be immersive when games provide so many different activities available through tools. I was playing through the FF14 Endwalker main scenario quests and while for the most part I could remain completely immersed, the fact that the game anticipated I would use a groupfinding tool to complete objectives meant there were times I spent waiting ten to twenty minutes for a queue to pop so I could continue the story. During the wait time I could remain where I was or I could head back to another location and work on some other task; the former was immersive (if boring), but the latter was convenient (if narratively disjointed). If I couldn’t travel back at all though — if I was stuck at the threshold of major combat until a group had been assembled no matter how long it took — I would’ve felt like the development team didn’t respect my time, immersion be damned.

What do you think? Should development teams err on the side of immersion or convenience? Which do you personally prefer? And is it just me or was the Flight Master’s Whistle a perfectly immersive tool that the WoW team never should’ve given up on?