Can I progress in storyline without doing dungeons?

[subteraneanbird]

It is the top end, hardcore, playerbase that make or break a MMO. Without those people MMO's don't have the sub retention to survive.
If someone has 40 hours per week to spend playing the game they should progress at four times the speed of someone that spends ten hours a week. They need to provide content that satisfies the 40 hr per week playerbase or they will go to a MMO that will fill that need.
If you have less time to play you are progressing just as fast as everyone else based on time played.

This is why games lime Dark Souls are so popular with the hardcore crowd. There is no "easymode" difficulty slider to make it more accessible. Everyone works equally hard to advance through the content and reach the credits.

In what world are you living in? Because it's certainly not ours.

Not only do the top elite hardcore players always make up an incredibly tiny proportion of the playerbase, they are also often the most fickle purchasers. Likely to unsub for months at a time when they have cleared the content available to them. How is a small group that isn't even subbed 100% of the time the one that keeps a game alive?

No, the people who keep MMO's running are the casual base. The people who keep their subs up and take their time (more months to do the work means more months you have to pay for which equals $$$$$) to finish even the most menial of quests, but keep at it because they play for 5 hours a week and have fun are the best contributors.

Your point about Dark Souls is nonsensical. The business model and end goal of a single player game and an MMO are vastly different. From a profit standpoint, it doesn't matter if you melt your Dark Souls disc the moment after you buy it. The reason why Dark Souls is popular is that it offers a good mix of challenge, interesting and fun gameplay, aesthetics, lore, etc. If Dark Souls were the same difficulty but only because it was harder to control then people would hate it. Or if it looked like hot nasty garbage, or it was written so horribly it wasn't understandable. The game is an entire package, not just hardcore catering.

As an MMO, you want different things. You want people to keep coming back for their monthly tithe. The best way to do that is to be broad but shallow. Lots of content, plenty of it easy or even trivial to do. Lots of time to invest. Despite having almost nothing going for them, trashy Zynga games make TONS of cash because they get people to come back every week for a few hours. And maybe buy a lil powerup or do a sponsered offer to make it ahead.

[Gnova]

Not only do the top elite hardcore players always make up an incredibly tiny proportion of the playerbase, they are also often the most fickle purchasers.

People always seem to equate hardcore gamer with progression raid guild player.
What keeps a MMO alive is providing content at endgame, whether it is challenging group or raid content.
That is why content upgrades and expansions almost always are endgame heavy.
The playerbase that flits around in mid levels without ever really spending time with max level content is NOT the target PTP MMO audience.

If there was no max level content I would have been done the game after my free month and moved onto the next game.
I've leveled a character to 50 on two separate servers, finished the main storyline twice, completed all the pre 50 dungeons, and done a lot of crafting. If there was no challenging endgame what would be the point of continuing to pay a sub?

[Gnova]

Your point about Dark Souls is nonsensical.

The Darksouls comment were because people in this thread are asking for features to make this game play like a single player RPG with a difficulty slider. Then it may as well be a BTP game since there is no reason to continue playing the game once you have hit level 50 if you don't want to play in groups.

If Demons Souls would have had a "easy" option then Darksouls would never had been made and it would have been forgotten about years ago. Players liked the combat and the lore yeah, but they really liked the feeling of completing a challenging game with no option to make it easy.