Locked out of future MSQ progression?

[Zojha]

Only your analogy is flawed because no one'd ever allow for that sort of thing in a league game.

You want to compare a casual dungeon run to a league game?
'k.

Please go ahead and tell me which competitive leagues have their teams pug their members while you're at it. I want a good laugh.

[BillyKaplan]

Please go ahead and tell me which competitive leagues have their teams pug their members while you're at it. I want a good laugh.

You're actually helping my example. That's exactly what happens a lot of the time when you queue into a pug in this game - you fail and you wipe and people get salty and upset and you disband after half a wipe on Ravana HM. And that's if your pug members didn't insta-abandon as soon as the option became available.
If you want relative certainty of clearing content, you come in pre-made. You say you don't want bonus. You put gear restrictions on your PF. That's your pro league.

If you get a full party, you can queue for most duties without abiding by the required party make up just like how you can play by your house rules if it's just you and friends in the backyard. You can go in full dps, without healers or tanks - this is you agreeing to play without a goalie. You're fine with it, sure, maybe the rest of your party too. But you shouldn't be surprised when you wipe because the game wasn't designed for it and suddenly there are other people's rules to follow. You're playing someone else's game, after all.

[Felis]

How about an option to allow a own Squad NPC to the fight?

Or 2 versions of the fight.
a normal version balanced around a single player doing it solo, and a harder version balanced around 2 players doing it

[Alash]

Frankly I'm glad it's locking people out of future content, as I will no longer have to play with them. Anyone incapable of completing solo-story mode content is not someone who should be able to get into future dungeons/raids/trials. I mean really, you can't beat that? Come on. Do I need to go find the video of some guy playing the game with his feet?

[alimdia]

Would you want someone who has never played baseball before subbing in for a player on your team? Because that's what that is. We're not asking to get an MLB pro on the teams but rather just making sure someone knows what first base is, how to bat, and has the capability to catch / throw baseballs. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that people be able to do the bare minimum requirements at level cap.

What is unreasonable is to always assume the reason someone wants to play with someone else (in a MMO) is because they can't clear content alone. Yeah, cases like OP exist, but they are not the only ones, denying people from being able to play with friends or their SO because someone somewhere might be "bad" is rather ridiculous.

[Zojha]

You're actually helping my example.

No, I'm just giving it the ridicule it deserves, because the actual flaw in the analogy is not what you named, but the following:
The comparison of a PvE with a PvP game.

You can play soccer, basketball or whatever with only 4 people if you like and the game still functions perfectly. You can have 4 bad people on one team and 2 good ones on the other for a handicap and that might well provide a good match with even chances. If both teams agree to playing without goalie, neither has an advantage and the game functions fine with no impediment to win chance at all, that's how the game is designed. It doesn't matter how skilled someone is either, because you can just match them against someone equally bad, even the second worst player in the world can still win against the worst - that in fact is the deeper point of leagues, to enable matchmaking between players of roughly equal skill and thus to facilitate quality matches. There is no skill based matchmaking, heck, there isn't even a skill based rating in PvE at all and any comparison with leagues is thereby void. Whether you win or lose only depends on how your team fares against the enemy team and you have full control over how powerful you want each team to be with the goal in mind being parity, as parity leads to quality matches. Handicaps exist to facilitate just that parity, because the game would otherwise be lopsided. And if you know a game would be lopsided, handicaps are thus issued or matches not even made in the first place.

In PvE, this isn't the case. You have no control over the power of the enemy team, that is set by the content designers. Quality matches are not desired nor aimed for, team parity is entirely ignored and ensuring quality matches on your own via handicaps is only allowed in one direction, namely to make yourself weaker/stronger, you can make zero adjustments to the enemy team.

This is the actual difference. And because game developers have long since realized that as an issue, PvP games nowadays come with rating based matchmaking to dynamically adjust the power of the enemy team and PvE games come with difficulty options and sliders to manually adjust the difficulty of the enemy team and thus ensure that everyone gets a quality game. Just about any modern game has them, sometimes as options when you start the game, sometime as option in the menu, sometimes as discreet options, sometimes as flowing slider, sometimes scattered over multiple options, hidden OP items at the start or whatever.

And MMOs simply struggle to implement that fairly basic concept.

[BillyKaplan]

In PvE, this isn't the case. You have no control over the power of the enemy team, that is set by the content designers. Quality matches are not desired nor aimed for, team parity is entirely ignored and ensuring quality matches on your own via handicaps is only allowed in one direction, namely to make yourself weaker/stronger, you can make zero adjustments to the enemy team.

You make it sound like a problem. And for certain people, I imagine that would be indeed the case. But as I said before, and that's the core difference between your view and mine - it's not wrong for the game developers to assume a certain level of skill from their playerbase and build content based on that. You can't make adjustments to the enemy team? GOOD.
The developers are bending over backwards to make content harder. Unless there's some truly problematic encounter, they're not going to nerf things or change mechanics. And with both major examples in this thread admitting themselves that they have managed to clear the content, it kind of takes the punch out of most of the arguments brought up here.

Right now, the things that make the most sense and that I personally wouldn't mind seeing is - if they do let people in, scale the difficulty (which is, again, NOT what OP is asking for), or at least don't force people to break party because back when I was playing with my then-boyfriend, yeah, that WAS a pain in the neck. But it shouldn't be allowed to cheese difficulty nor should it be nerfed.

As for PvP, I'd sooner say any such tweaks are to lessen the impact of cheating, and to a lesser extent, gear (which can be a function of in-game resources) and leave more to skill. You know, that thing you need a certain minimum of to clear content like the trial in question.

[Tizzy_Tormentor]

Dude, its like 10 minutes and there aren't that many of em, solo instances are few and far in between, I'm sure it won't kill you do some things by yourself.

I like em btw, lets you deal with interesting mechanics by yourself and gives the instance more urgency since its all on you (and your ally NPCs) you might fail them once or twice (or more of course) but you will get there eventually once you know what you doing.

[PharisHanasaki]

do you guys have a real reason why lifting the force solo is a bad idea. as in from a game play or server stand point. If not, please stop. not everyone who is good at the game enjoys forced solo.

First of all, this is based off the Final Fantasy franchise. It's based of jRPGs, jRPGs are played solo for the most part, and you have challenges to overcome solo to progress in the story.

Second and lastly... Did you miss people saying they didn't want story content to be locked to the DF? Now they're bothered becuse they can't clear this solo trial on a few attempts so please let me have someone carry me instead. I'm sure they would even pay to clear this without putting in any effort.

We have to deal with this people on other content. People who neither play good, nor is open to improving. They simply play this however they want, expecting to clear content that way or 'This is too hard'.

[NovaLevossida]

What is unreasonable is to always assume the reason someone wants to play with someone else (in a MMO) is because they can't clear content alone. Yeah, cases like OP exist, but they are not the only ones, denying people from being able to play with friends or their SO because someone somewhere might be "bad" is rather ridiculous.

I'm not opposed to the "campaign" or story being played with others. The Old Republic does it well. What I am opposed to is someone running to the official forums asking for content to be nerfed and let other players carry them because they can't do the most basic of things. And then they beat it anyway after a few more tries because they rose to the challenge.

No, but I also wouldn't deny them to play baseball at all if they're able to find a team willing to take them, which is something the game currently does. And honest to god, if nobody wants to play the role of the goalie, I wouldn't mind playing soccer without a goalie instead of asking around town or waiting for hours until someone shows up either, which the content design also doesn't allow. The game does a lot of things that seem utterly nonsensical if translated via RL analogies.

If you're going to play baseball without a "goalie" and there's a team taking on someone who doesn't even know how to play the game, it sounds like baseball isn't even being played anymore. It's an accurate analogy, so I'm sorry if asking someone to have a clue about what they're doing before wasting other people's time is outrageous. I think someone having the bare minimum skill to play the game isn't too demanding, and, to be honest, it's a low bar anyway.