I read just about every topic on the subject. And I don’t understand exactly what the arguments against are.
Often the critics are a bit out of touch.
- It is an MMO, not a single player game
Indeed. Like OSR, TESO, SWOTOR, FF14 Path of Exile, Warframe… All these games that allow you to have hundreds of hours on them while playing by yourself. Of course, if we take FF14 as an example, there are raids that are mandatory and must be played with 24 players and are similar to LFR. But, strictly solo players are very very rare anyway (I myself play LFR in Wow). In addition, all these games have fun content for solo players which is a bit like their own end game.
When I read this, I get the impression that for these people : MMO = Wow. It was understandable when WoW was the undisputed master of the MMO genre, but that’s over.
- You’re a bad player, you don’t need gear
Attacks on the OP are a regular occurrence. But I would like to say that you don’t want to play with a bad player, and this bad player wants to play alone. So, in fact, everyone wins.
- Wow, never been a solo player focus.
This one is interesting. Already, there is plenty of factual evidence to contradict this argument. But already, one could say that a gamedesign from 2004 is not necessarily good news for the game. In 2023, the internet has changed, gamers have changed and tastes in gaming have changed. Especially if you consider that WoW has been losing players for a decade and is now playing alongside a lot of other MMOs, but it’s also competing with a lot of multiplayer games.
Then, I don’t see how this is an argument against adding activities or making a strictly single player game mode. I think most of these threads about solo players just want to improve the game. So how is this an argument that it won’t improve the game? It just proves that the state of the game is totally fine with you. Well look… okay. So, the conversation actually isn’t about you.
- You can play differently (for example, repeat the same activity 50,000 times).
So yeah, this one is funny too. I think we’re all aware of all the possible ways to play solo. The bottom line is that it’s either a band-aid on a wooden leg, or it’s not very fun, or we’d rather have an official way of playing, like the group content players have.
This is the principle of feedback. I see a lot of restaurant analogies to prove that solo players should shut up. Well, look… It’s like you’re telling us that there’s steak in this restaurant and we should be happy, when in fact we’re saying that the steak is disgusting.
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Make friends.
Ok.
And I can go on. All these arguments are just to say that the conversation should not take place. But they’re not really relevant arguments about the solo player proposals. There are a lot of moral arguments (wtf?), a lot of generality about what an MMO should be, but in the end, nothing concrete about why it really bothers you and your style of play.
So I’m going to try to turn it around.
Why are you against activities and progression paths for solo players? What makes you think it’s going to worsen your experience on Wow if tomorrow Blizzard gives, I don’t know, a progression path in old content, or ilvl 700 gears that we can only use in the open world?
Ideas for gear improvements, activities that would have strictly no impact on group content, the forum is full of them. I had proposed, for example, to use the legacy content as an end game with a challenge for solo players and a whole new way to progress through the futur WoW lifetime. Heck, even the trading post is mostly solo content.
