Oh, Mana dear, how often and how long I've remarked, ranted, and written disquisitions on this very topic. Not because I necessarily believe people *should* be taking their time, my Magistrix friend who giggles.....no, it's not that.
The reason people run through the content is because scripted quests don't belong in online games. Rather, they're not online game content - they're content of games you play online.
When the game launched I'd brought along a large group of friends from Ultima Online along to try it. Paul Sage was, at that time, the Creative Director for ESO. He, and his then wife Amy, had been on the original UO design team. I knew Paul. Certainly this would be the game he'd always wanted to make...oh dear....
"What are all these QUESTS doing here?" one of them asked.
Most weren't asking....they were pissed. "I want to slap the asshole trying to force these quests down my throat," he said. "I want to slap the bastard 'till he's dead. Then I want to slap his corpse. Then I want to drop my pants and fuck this jerk in his dead goddamned ass!"
Uh....they didn't hang around long
Not a one of them had played World of Warcraft. And, if they hadn't played that, they certainly weren't going to stand for this. No NPC gets to tell YOU where to go and what to do. That's not what an NPC is for. Two of them tried to build characters in Cyrodiil but they were soon over-matched by players who had power-leveled past them in the safe zones.
Soon I was the only one left.
Long way of saying that to enjoy the content you have to want the content.
Paul Sage understood that his mission was not to create an online game at all. Rather it was to create an interactive single player game that people could play with other people at the same time - people who VERY MUCH WANTED the content.
But he too left when he couldn't get a single digital community feature implemented - in this case, the Justice System was the last straw. Digital community features allow the game to be influenced by the players, even shaped by the players as a community. They are features in a digital world that enable the development of communities that mirror those in the physical one.
Instead they ended up with this....
Basically they ended up with Aleppo in Daggerfall.
But I don't believe THIS community truly wants digital community features. And with this later day game crowd they could well backfire.
Me, I grew to enjoy come of the scripted content. I'm posting a series now on another site of my favorite NPCs from some of my favorite canned quests. I feel they began to really get it right with Wrothgar too.
Yet I never hurried....not even through the quests that weren't really quests, or through the ones I didn't really care for. Me...I either do it or don't do it. I may complain about it, but if I do something I do it