FF14 Becoming More "Solo Friendly" is bad, Maybe

I think the game being more solo friendly is great.

My experience trying guild wars 2 lately only reaffirmed the idea that all MMO main story content should be soloable. My worst experience both in ffxiv and guild wars 2 has been during story content with other players, because those players have done it 100 times and want to speed run for rewards (MSQ rou in ff and reward tracks in GW2) I was trying to do a normal run of this dungeon in GW2, I NEED a group I cannot solo it and most people want to run past mobs to the bosses and it ends up with me getting killed and just abandoned most of the time. Being forced to play with people who have a TOTALLY different agenda than I do just lessens the experience for us both. They want rewards and I wanted to sit and watch cutscenes, kill mobs for exp and do the dungeons normally. I started advertising my groups as normal full runs and shock horror they take an age to fill until some kind soul would take pity on me and join.
GW2 is fantastic game imo, there are quite a few things I dislike, same as ff. But the exploring and story has been so enjoyable and not having those experiences with speed runners would have made it SO much better. There are 3 paths to take in these dungeons and I am not sure I will ever get to fully experience each path, it's a shame. The troubles with dungeons also made me pause in even playing the game, I didn't want to carry on missing the story in those dungeons. I could easily see those moments being a quit moment for many other players.
I will say overall the GW2 peeps have been lovely, I got adopted for the day by a kind stranger who helped me get some more pets for my ranger :)

OHHH not to mention if you have NPC you can do these duties with it doesn't matter if you are up at 4am trying to do content when the server is dead. Holy crap I would have loved to be able to solo things in MSQ sometimes when every other bugger was asleep and queue would never pop.

Yoshida oversold this point. What devs are doing is just making MSQ future prof. IMO all interesting content still requires other players. To me this change just turn MSQ content even more "safe", since all mechanics need to be something AI can handle.

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Originally Posted by Vav2021

When it comes down to it, you can't have an MMO without multiplayer. Otherwise, it will just be a solo game with multiplayer features being a highlight. I'd say "Let them manufacture a single player version of FFXIV, and see how well it sells" but I am doubtful they'd be willing to invest in an experiment like that. it'd likely fail.

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It is a solo game with multiplayer features though already.

FCs suck bad for simply not talking to eachother (quit mine last night for this reason). Same goes for groups, they barely say hello. People in the world wont talk, people in cities wont either, maybe a quick emote.

This is my first MMO and maybe this is what MMOs are. But the whole "it's not a solo game now, don't make it one!" is a total joke. If and when I move on from here, it wont be because of the game, it'll be because of the lack of any social contact.

MMO trying to cater to solo players? I'm sure that'll be good for it's long term growth lmao. Gives me "preparing XI to enter maintainence mode" vibes...