TL;DR: Make open world content tuned for solo players again, or make raid-sized events into queue-able casual instances again to guarantee that solo players and players in underpopulated zones can have a proper gameplay experience and receive proper rewards. Stop worrying about forcing the remaining players to interact with each other, and start worrying about how to get more overall players interacting with your actual game.
[Background]
—During Shadowlands, the design philosophy revolved around eliminating and downgrading the primary power rewards from open world content because it was solo-able, and was assumed to detract from group instanced content participation and rewards. The major expansion feature of Torghast did not award gear despite requiring certain power levels to succeed, meaning that developers had created the assets for an entire endgame pillar that could already scale to solo players—but game designers refused to allow the content to function as an endgame pillar under the principle that solo players should not be allowed an avenue of progression. Another major expansion feature, the Great Vault, also had no options for earning rewards through open world or solo-able content. As a result, Shadowlands lost subscribers at an unprecedented speed when solo players reached max level and had no endgame to stay for. The final season did not even offer power updates for open world or exclusively solo players.
—The developers of Dragonflight have finally started to acknowledge that a large player demographic prefers to engage in open world content as a primary or secondary route of endgame progression, and have begun to provide open world content on a steady basis. However, open world content in Dragonflight has been a significant step backward for solo players in terms of design, compared to even Shadowlands. Developers have implemented a new rule that groups are practically required for any type of open world activity that awards item levels above Raid Finder difficulty. The design directive appears to be to make open world content a more casual form of raids and dungeons, which still denies solo players progression or meaningful gameplay as if they did not exist or they were detrimental to game design. As a result, truly solo players have far less world content compared to the past three expansions, when most open world questing content was expressly designed for solo players.
[Issues]
10.00:
Primal Storms and base expansion content such as super rares, elite subzones, and certain Grand Hunt bosses are not possible or practical for solo players.
10.05:
Storm’s Fury is physically impossible to solo due to elite and boss tuning, as well as lost progress on portals.
10.07:
Most zone rewards are tied behind elite and rare farming that requires groups. Daily and weekly quests that can be soloed are provided, but do not provide all types of power rewards.
10.1:
Suffusion Camp elites and rares, Researchers Under Fire event objectives, Elite World Quests, and new zone rares are not practical or possible to solo. Progress is lost if your character dies and the objective despawns or resets, or credit is not awarded in your absence.
—Ironically, the new Heroic dungeon weekly quest and Timewalking events are likely to be the most rewarding content for PvE solo players, even though these dungeons are technically solo queued rather than being actual solo content.
—Casual PvP players are also at a disadvantage when doing the overtuned world content because their gear is capped at 392 (Honor), 408 (unrated Conquest), or 411 (Bloody Token) item level, now that PvP gear no longer scales up in warmode.
—Group content PvE players already began Season 2 in 415-424 item level gear, and will only progress another 26 item levels from there. Gear from open world content will generally be capped at 424 due to upgrade currency limitations, and will not provide any special bonuses that allow solo players to take on the more rewarding world content.
[Conclusion]
—Almost every type of player has received some form of concession or improvement in Dragonflight, but developers have obviously decided that solo gameplay must be not allowed to happen beyond minigames. This is all despite the fact that solo players are the norm in the gaming industry overall, and solo gameplay has become preferred by a large player demographic, even in WoW and other MMOs. It’s not reasonable to expect to sell more copies of an expansion when the underlying design theme is to buckle down on content that the majority of gamers, including a significant portion of WoW players, cannot physically complete!
—Dragonflight is beating Shadowlands and BfA in terms of gushing reviews from certain content creators, but we have not seen a Legion-style renaissance because there is no endgame content or feature that appeals to solo-minded players, such as class order halls, artifact weapons, world quests, or other features that are 100% accessible to solo players. We are merely getting group content hand-tailored to the survivors that would have stayed anyway. Why would you go back to or start playing WoW if there doesn’t seem to be any content that you can even participate in?
[Suggestions]
—Make the 10.2 Time Rifts or any future content either tuned realistically for solo players, scalable to raid power levels only when a large number of players are in the vicinity, or possible to complete through queued instances (such as warfronts or island expeditions).
—End the war on solo players who play on quiet realms or during quiet times of the day, and let us go back to having an unofficial endgame pillar in the form of solo-friendly open world quests or solo-queued casual events.
—Don’t just take my word for it. Do your own market research on why former players left WoW, why former players won’t come back, and why prospective players won’t give WoW a try. Your high-profile content creators and higher end players don’t have all the answers. Dragonflight has made them happier but it hasn’t made the game grow.
The foundation upon which this game was built was solo-able questing and the progression that it offered through gear upgrades, level increases, and talent point acquisition, as other MMOs put hard barriers in place to keep solo players from even reaching max level. (WoW’s raids were added later to keep max-level players subscribed.) The MMO industry and gaming industry as a whole are starting to acknowledge the importance of solo gameplay even in multi-player games, so why is WoW the game that insists on excluding the solo player from proper challenges and rewards?
