Trust should go up to trails

[linayar]

You miss out on a lot by avoiding group content in WoW. You miss out on story content, big chunks of faction reputation that would otherwise take a long time to farm, the ability to get to a certain level of faction standing because it requires dungeon completion and even being able to unlock certain races. And those races are not hidden. The first thing you see when you make a character is a lot of races that you cannot access.

So yea while you can get to max lvl in WoW without entering a single dungeon by avoiding group content you are depriving yourself of a lot, especially in end-game if you continue to avoid group content because most content at that point is aimed at groups. Going back to the whole "mmos encourage teamplay" thing.



This is because people still do them to get minions and mounts. Doing that has been a thing in WoW for over a decade. Before the lvl squish people could solo them easily but since then it's often impossible. Finding groups for that content isn't easy and even if you do if that ultra rare mount drops you end up competing with others for the loot. Before the lvl squish you could do it on your own without worrying about someone else taking the super rare loot. The lvl squish removed a popular activity players had been already doing solo for over a decade. This is why they complain.

EDIT: and when I say super rare I meant SUPER rare. You can do some raids weekly for several years and never see a mount drop.

Of course you can miss a lot by not grouping, but it depends on the player whether that's important for them. The game itself doesn't encourage teamplay either way. And the fact that it's a thing to go back and solo old content means you don't have to miss out on much unless you want to experience the difficulty at release or you want that group experience.

I see a lot of players, myself included, that enjoy the environment of a living space, and the opportunity for team play, in a massive large sprawling world, while also taking advantage of many classical sRPG features and situations.



I think a lot of hardercore MULTIPLAYER OR DIE people have extreme difficulty seeing that as something one might do, but it is indeed a thing lol. Also that balance does happen to also work well for those who are not particularly skilled (balance it so a really good player can do it, also means a few not so great, for whatever reason, players could do it).

On another note I also don't, on a purpose driven level, think it's important to enforce the same approach for every player. If you can get hard core players, medium core, casual, big group, and small, all get to enjoy the content, or at least 'most' of most of those groups.. That's honestly a huge win to me. I see no real great purpose to locking off stuff because 'that's the way it was'. Only for ultimate where literally the purpose of it is simply to "be the best in a group" do I pause and think "eh, maybe leave it alone and let it die if no one can do it". Particularly for myself I enjoy the group play, but sometimes given time constraints being able to do stuff solo is an absolute godsend (even if it's delayed far down the mountain).

In general I think FFXIV does this very well, and I've seen Yoshida describe it as a sort of mountain curve. (I sometimes refer to it as a rolling mountain). It's why I was hoping they find a good solution if their new level curve is going to indeed make unsync not as strong (like just making sure blue mage can still do it). WoW has (had-ish) this in some elements due to their insane powercreep, but I think FFXIV actually has attempted to facilitate the rolling mountain in more thoughtful and purposeful ways.

I think the key is that MMORPG is a multiplayer game, which means there should be content that rewards playing with other people, whether cooperatively or competitively. But how far to take that multiplayer aspect can be different from one game to another, and whether or not that leads to increased socializing is also another matter. I do think having required multiplayer content (or at least content that simulates multiplayer content like TRUST) during leveling and endgame (like FFXIV) is preferable for me.