How is whether or not you have fun with any given mechanic not relevant to a discussion about a Video Game. Video Games are primarily supposed to be for fun. Whether or not something is fun is a legitimate reason to like or dislike something. I’m not going to pretend like I am disabled just because that seems to be the only argument people even minorly acknowledge as being good enough. Nor am I going to pretend it’s only about my mount collection, even though that is a part of it. If a mechanic is not fun for me and a different mechanic IS fun for me, that directly impacts how much overall fun I have with the game.
And here’s the thing. Different people have different preferences. That means different people find different things to be fun based off a combination of factors. People love dragon riding for the literal exact reasons that I hate it. They love that it has “weight” and that it’s “realistic” and that it’s fast and interactive. I hate all of those things. When those things are used to justify dragon riding as being fun, it is not a valid argument to me. People can have different opinions on what fun is. There is nothing inherently superior in the mechanics of legacy flight or dragon riding. They are just mechanics, and people can have their own opinion on which is more fun.
This baffles me. Safe AFK space is absolutely a reason and a valid one. I don’t play on a PvP server or with Warmode. I know it’s considered gauche these days for games to have a normal pause button and that has merit when doing competitive content. Why does it matter if one individual person questing in the open world without warmode can hover safely in the air and go feed the baby or let the dog outside? It has been in the game since TBC as an effective pause button. Maybe I’m ignorant and people have always lamented this, but I don’t get how it’s any of their business. Is it because it’s considered unfair? I honestly don’t understand why this is such a big sticking point.
As for trivializing quest objectives? I honestly barely even understand what this means. Do you mean how people can do parkour legion WQs on their mounts and bypass the challenge? Those quests were not fun for me and I would have never done them at all if I couldn’t just fly over them. It is not a question of doing it the right way or the wrong way; it’s between whether or not it’s worth it to do it at all. And the metric by which I decide whether or not to do it: 1) Is it fun for me? 2) Is the reward something I want enough to begrudgingly do something that is not fun? Again, fun is literally an integral part of the consideration.
What’s funny to me is that for the puzzle WQs in ZM, it was literally built into the game that you could bypass them with Pocopoc. I never did, because I found the puzzles to be fun. The interesting part is that I am not even the slightest bit angry that people who dislike the puzzles had the option to skip them. I don’t think that they should be forced to do a minigame they don’t want to. It did not cheapen my experience, because I inherently liked doing the puzzles. My enjoyment of the puzzles was PART of my reward! In essence, I was being doubly rewarded by both having fun with the mechanic and also getting an in-game reward.
Funnily enough I wasn’t even intending this as a personal attack, though I can see how you could read it as one. You mention later that the gold isn’t necessarily a factor for you so that’s one question answered. Let me try and rephrase the other part: I have fun in a way that seems alien to you because you presumably have different priorities and preferences about gameplay. I don’t expect you to play the way I do or change your preferences to conform to mine. We can both have different playstyles simultaneously without one or the other being “correct.”
What’s interesting to me about this point is that it’s another argument that centers around “fun” as a core factor. And yeah, it’s a bummer when people cheat. My opinion is that it’s harsh to completely take something away just because some people are cheaters. If it’s not about the gold then it’s just about making sure cheaters don’t cheat. The weird part is that it’s always going to be a moving goalpost. You pointed out that bots have moved to rousing farm world quests. Is the answer then to cut those quests from the game and replace it with something that cuts out bots, regardless of if it’s fun? Like, we could do captchas in order to loot enemies and I’m sure bots would suffer for it, but that honestly seems like more of a punishment to everyone.