Good, it pleases me to hear this, I hope the experience humbles you a bit.
Didn’t echo trigger on solo content if you kept dying before anyway? And if so how would this change anything? People just want to complain about anything it seems.
If you actually read the patch notes, these difficulty settings are much more powerful than the traditional echo we're used to, so this comparison doesn't hold up at all.
All I can say is, I hope none of the people defending this move are among those who bail immediately when Titania or Innocence pops because the DPS check fails so often in DF.... Right now, trials are the only thing you're forced to run with a group of real players in SHB, and you see how well they're already going.
I don’t think this is as big of a problem that you and others are making it out to be. I don’t believe there’s a huge wave of bad players being gated behind solo content and that this patch will burst the floodgates and we’ll be inundated and party content will be unable to be completed. I think this can go into that list along with the 5.0 healer changes as “things that killed the game but never materialized as bad as the doom sayers said it would”.
That was my first post in this thread, and I didn't say anything about it being a "big problem" let alone that it would be a thing "that killed the game," so how about you reign in the strawman for a minute?
I stated facts. Titania and Innocence in DF have a lower clear rate than some people find acceptable, to the point where they'd rather eat a 30 minute penalty than spend that time wiping to repeated DPS check failures. This is something that really does happen, it's observable, you can't debate this.
And I hope no one advocating for (essentially) the removal of solo DPS checks is among those who dread groups who can't clear things due to DPS checks.
If you bail on Titania, if you bailed on Shinryu when it was new content, if you lower your ilvl so you don't get Orbonne... you should not be supporting this change.
OP, I'm going to explain to you why this happened. Metrics and analytics, plain and simple. I don't think S-E has specifically commented on this, but developers on many other MMOs have said something to the effect of, "Players typically don't rise to the challenge. They give up and play something else." This is why the change happened. Yeah, it stinks for those of us (myself included) who want to weed out the bad players who already infest end game, but they likely saw far too many casual players hit a wall (in questing) and outright quit. This small, little change? That keeps those players, which makes better business sense for S-E.
As a player, I dislike the change as much as you do, but this is ALL about money and retaining players.