Sometimes "elephant paths" do not please people. As I explained here, this terms refers to paths that is formed in space by people making their own paths and shortcuts. Look at what happened in the "Parc des bastions" in Geneva:

Why do I blog this? from the user point of view, an elephant is interesting because it shows some explicit traces of people's intentions in space. Therefore, when you see these fences that tries to prevent people from having a shortcut, this makes me wondering whether what will happen. And since fences are only put on one side of the elephant path, there will be some interesting traces because people from the other side will still keep using it and change their trajectory only at the end of the path.

Now, if we think about virtual worlds, there are of course research works about walkthrough and shortcuts in video games (see Axel Stockburger's paper about discursive walkthrough which is somewhat related to that). But is there any instance of counter-elephant paths measures in MMORPG?