Job Personalization: Can I Have It?

[CGMidlander]

You want concrete? Fine.
You can kill any monster with the right cross-Class skills and gear solo but it would be easier with a friend or 2. A randomly stranger could help you out (and maybe get an additional drop for himself; i.e. it has no impact on the reward you get) without feel obligated to perform to a specific standard - remember he/she will just be doing you a favor.

You're basically describing dull and incredibly easy content already in the game, like treasure maps and B rank hunts.
(Low damage and HP, so can be done solo. No mechanics, because what can be done with a single player is, frankly, not much.)

Anything combat related that can be done solo in this game is not difficult. It can't be, due to how vastly different the solo capabilities of each class are.

So you are suddenly the definitive authority on what MMORPGs must be?

I made no such claim.

I said that the the kinds of design decisions a game developer may be able to make for a single player game may not necessarily work for an MMO.

Except FFXIV is an MMORPG; not a single player game. The kinds of mechanics and balancing that goes into single player games is totally different, because the world centers around one player.

Single player games don't have to worry about (but are not limited to) the following:
-Interactions with other players
-Persistent environments (e.g. You can't have a major city like Limsa destroyed, but in a single player game you might have points where large facets of the game world can change)
-Loading of multiple, sometimes hundreds, of other players
(Performance optimization and simplification of graphics is a greater concern than in single player games as a result of this)
-Cheating/exploits (Some single player games like GTA even have cheats built in. But in FFXIV, we can't restart crafts from where we left off if we DC, due to cheating concerns.)
-Server considerations (e.g. Player information stored on the server)
-Game balance (A great deal of single player games have game-breaking items/skills that you can use to trivialize fights and/or just be overall godly)

The crux of the matter is "obligation". Can I give away all the money in my wallet to some dude on the street and make his day better? Sure. But no one will fault me if I don't.

Current MMO group content involves a lot of "obligation", you must do this, you must do that, ...

Imagine group content where you don't have to do anything you don't want to - the only one who will suffer the negative consequences will be you; if you choose to. It will be nice if you did but no skin off anyone else's back if you don't.

My logic was thus:

If a player has the ability to positively impact the group's activity by doing something (e.g. finishing a task faster), then they have the ability to negatively impact it by not doing it. (e.g. causing a task to take longer than it could have taken)

Why would a group take a person who does nothing, when they can take someone who will do something? The person who does nothing is worth less because they do less.

Nothing you've said so far counters my argument.

Your analogy makes no sense either, since, a "group activity" implies that you are working with other people to achieve a common goal.
A person on the streets is not someone you're grouped up with for a common goal.