Why do people want solo play in an MMORPG?

[Starlord]

The tone of the OP says to me that people like me are not welcome. "Just go play offline and leave the MMO to the elite. We need a challenge and want to play with huge groups but only if you know what you are doing. We wont have these things if you insist on whining for the ability to play solo, even to a point. Solo players ruined this genre." This may be over exaggerating the actual OP but the sentiment is one i see expressed a lot when this topic is brought up.

No, I would like to have a balance of group and solo play. ( even I want to solo from time to time). I just don't want the same thing happening, where in 1.0 all I ever did majority of the time was solo ( till Primals and Dungeons came along) but even that doing that 50 times over got really old really fast. The content was hella fun, but repeating the same things throughout the year did get boring. ( and I actually did stop for 2 weeks at 1 point because of the repetitiveness.)

[ZakarnRosewood]

No, I would like to have a balance of group and solo play. ( even I want to solo from time to time). I just don't want the same thing happening, where in 1.0 all I ever did majority of the time was solo ( till Primals and Dungeons came along) but even that doing that 50 times over got really old really fast. The content was hella fun, but repeating the same things throughout the year did get boring. ( and I actually did stop for 2 weeks at 1 point because of the repetitiveness.)

I really think people should stop referring to 1.0 as a meter stick. It was a flop from the start, SE acknowledged that and even restructured their teams then rebuilt the game. The leveling curve was ridiculous in 1.0, so was some of the lame dialogue, and poor quest objectives. But they still managed to take that broken POS and make it playable by the end. I said it in another post but they did all this while rebuilding, they really could/should have just closed it down to focus on the rebuild instead of wasting resources on a version of the game that will be completely scrapped.

I too want a balance, and i think we will get it. In most RPG's quests, for the most part, guide you though the mechanics of a game as much as they guide you through the story. Take "Ni No Kuni" the quests and such gradually (maybe a little slow) walk you through all the features of playing. I can imagine ARR doing something like this. Taking us solo up to a point, showing us then how to change jobs, how to cross skill, guide us to a dungeon, explain how to gather groups, a quest to show us how FATE works, etc and so on until we are near end game where most quests require a group or at least a light party to complete.

Not all quests have to be solo quests, correct? That one thought right there should ease the worries of many who are opposed to the quests...