ANet already stated that the challenging/ending PvE focus would be through the dungeons and not the open world, as to give groups something to work on doing. So making them solo-able would pretty much strike that idea down (granted they already changed a bunch of their concepts since launch).
People who only play one way can’t have access to everything. Such as if a player doesn’t want to PvP, they shouldn’t have all the PvP skins unlocked. If a player doesn’t want to group up, they shouldn’t (though still can for the few rare ones) be able to do the group-based content. There’s still the entire rest of the game out there to enjoy.
Hmm. I’m not sure whether this is more an apples-and-oranges argument, or a strawman here.
You’re quite right, someone who doesn’t PvP shouldn’t automatically get all the PvP stuff. Conversely, PvP is properly encapsulated, where PvP isn’t required to do PvE content, nor is PvE required to do PvP content. Similarly, if you take the Destiny’s Edge side story by itself, it’s almost properly encapsulated—the only PvE required is in general to level up to cause the next section to be unlocked—and that would be more of a complaint about the need to level-grind to unlock it. :-)
But with the Personal Story…it’s a case of throwing liver-wrapped asparagus in the peanut-butter at the very last moment. (I leave it as an exercise to the reader as to which applies to which content—keeping in mind there are the sorts like the pure PvPers who can’t stand either one. ;-) )
Living story…the fundamental problem is that they’re only providing content for one style at a time, and requiring you do every type to finish the event as a whole. If they’re going to be lazy and keep doing it this way every time, then at least let us know from the very start so we can go ahead and completely ignore it (what’s the point of doing any of it if you’re only going to get 4/5ths completion and no reward at all, after all?) Alternatively, they could stop being lazy and provide content of all types at each stage of the story. In other words instead of 1 collection task, 1 open world event task, 1 instance, 1 dungeon over the course of the multimonth event, they have in the first month a collection task, an open-world event task, an instance, and a dungeon. And then the next month, they have another collection task, another open-world event task, another instance, and another dungeon. Wash, rince repeat, with the final reward only requiring you to complete one of the tasks for each stage, though possibly with additional rewards for completing more than that.
That way, noone is left out, nor is anyone stuck with no option at all but to do something they loathe, no matter what that might be. (I’ve probably missed style types that need to be included, but you get the idea). Is this a lot of work? Quite probably. But frankly, if Anet can’t be bothered to put this much work into their events, they shouldn’t be running them at all, and working on permanant and/or expansion content instead.
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