Need to address the Eureka in the room.

[Alucard135]

MMO ≠ grouping. When people conflate MMOs with grouping, this is less an accurate reflection of what an MMO is and more a statement about someone's preferred way of playing an MMO. There's nothing wrong with this preference, of course, unless that person thinks that because they exclusively enjoy group content, then everyone else should be forced into grouping whether they enjoy it or not. Unfortunately, this is usually the case when someone is advancing some form of the "because it's an MMO" argument.

For me, the hallmark of overworld/open world content is that it can be enjoyed by an extremely diverse range of players; whereas, to my mind at least, instanced content is conducive to more narrowly-focused content that appeals to smaller subsets of the community. Now I guess whether Eureka is overworld content could be debated (though I think if it's not, then perhaps it should have been), but it certainly does not do a good job of catering to a diverse range of players—if that intention was even remotely present during its development.

When I used the word group, it was to denote interaction between players to fulfill a certain goal (be it a common goal they aim for or against each other as in PVP), hence the multiplayer term. Since the interaction is done by a massive number of players, it becomes an MMO. Can you call a game an MMO if you have millions of players that play at the same time but with very small to no interaction between them? Take dark souls for example. You have thousands of players online, but you only interact with a couple of them from time to time or even solo your way through it. Can we call it an MMO? There are tons of mobile games that have thousands of players playing at the same time. But you only interact with one or two at a time (like farmville).

Eureka was designed to be a group content. Meaning you'll need a certain number of people to do certain activities there. If Eureka was designed to also accommodate solo play, you will kill the group play side. The open world that you say is enjoyed by extremely diverse range of players is a perfect example of that. It's a barren land in some zones now (imagine Zalera....inside joke for Aether DC). You rarely see group activities going on in the open world maps unless it's a hunt or a fate like Ixion. Why? because there's really no need to have any groups in order to do any content in the open world. You can easily solo 90% of the contents there. What's the point of a massive world in an MMO if it's empty and almost everyone is just doing instanced duties.