@Mojowalker:
For your RL comparison, think of dungeons as your actual job, assuming you work in a place that is a team effort – for example, my last job I was part of an assembly line. I was, in fact in that situation, forced to work with 4-5 other people.
As for the general topic, it’s come up a lot, and I’ve expressed my opinions elsewhere, and I’ll do it here again because hey, we all like to hear opinions right? Makes us better people to hear all the different sides of the stories!
I enjoy the concept of dungeons – it’s something that allow the developers to specifically get done what they want without having to worry about taxing players computers or the world instance-limit (such as the Karka event, where many got thrown to overflow and even more ended up crashing mid-event). I like the fact that they can inject their brand of cutscenes more noticeably without me having to fear an enemy spawning there to attack me immediately upon it’s ending (because most dungeons don’t have constantly respawning badguys what with being geared towards specific people). I enjoy that it’s less of a zerg rush (how many people just sit there and auto-pilot the dragon DEs?) and can be much more interesting because of that lack-of-zerg.
I also enjoy the DEs, due to the scale and Musketeers style interaction with other players. I enjoy how the story or events in general can flow and be joined in progress with no extra loading screen or soul searching or delay.
What I would rather see, however, is that the cap of people for dungeons increase (so I could fit more of my Guild Members in there at once when they are on, instead of having to break off into little sub groups of 5 and 2 or 3 and 3), and then the dungeons implement a better scaling then we see in DEs. That’s the most important part – it scales correctly. I do feel that most dungeons should still require at least 2 people (for mechanical reasons – if you have a CoF moment where you need someone to control a point while another person goes to open a door, I feel it would lose some of the tension with an immortal NPC doing it), and I fully understand that the extremist solo players would still find this game-breaking, but finding one extra person wouldn’t be nearly as hard or time consuming as a 5 man party (as current) and with proper scaling of content it wouldn’t be so difficult that they would have much complaints on it not being possible.
For the argument of it being an MMO – its a stupid argument on both sides. Yes, there are tons of players, and no it isn’t a requirement of to force them to play together. On the other hand, the title is Guild Wars, and it would be silly to think that you would never need at one point or another to be in a guild that had other people. The entire personal story is just one big build up about how the races and people have to combine forces to fight the evil dragon superpower, and I can understand why people hate the idea of doing a dungeon (or aren’t able to for outside-reasons), but I’m sure you would also hate it if you’re final story quest was a zerg tank-n-spank that was boring. Could they have made it an instanced quest, where there was just tons and tons of NPCs in there to give it that feeling of massivity? Probably, but they didn’t. Doesn’t mean they aren’t going to keep experimenting and trying new things.
One final note: the AI hero’s in the original guild wars was a late addition through an expansion – they were not always there. The henchmen used to also be near useless, and could not be taken everywhere. Trying to use them as a basis in reference to gw2 (where mechanics are much more complex) is just as annoying an argument as all the people telling you that “Its an MMO!”
This game should push people to cooperate, not to separate between single/multi players! When AN will bring this feature of ‘easymode’, many ppl will never join party, coz they can do this alone. Find party isnt hard in this game.