I like to interact with people in the MASSIVE MULTIPLAYER sense on various levels, but grouping with players you don't know is more often than not a painful exercise in frustration.

Once I was interested in building a guild and training the new players and spreading the joy. But it just seems that now days for every teachable new player you meet there are a hundred infantile greedy little brats ready and willing to spoil the fun. I wish it wasn’t so, truly I do. So as a result I play with known friends, or duo with my other half. It’s not so much that we want to play alone, more that we are sick of all the wankers who have no idea about good MMO etiquette.

So perhaps the problem isn't 'solo vs. group' content. Perhaps the problem is that we're simply not educating new players in online etiquette?

At which point perhaps we (players and developers) should focus on how to encourage or teach people to interact better with other people online instead of just adding more and more solo content?

For some players it's the quality of PUGs. For some, questing has made grouping difficult because of the inability to properly synchronize content (it's far easier to gather a group for grinding than to fulfill multi-step quest objectives); for others, it's levels causing the problem, or travel time. For others still, it's real-life encroachments on the time available for gaming in a given session. When one has an hour or two to play, sometimes spending half of that waiting for a group to assemble is an unacceptable and unproductive use of that time. Most likely it's a combination of many of these factors that have made many players more solo-(or small/static-group)- oriented.

I also dispute the notion that "massively multiplayer" means grouping is fundamental. If that were the case, why did no games automatically group everyone logged in together in one group? A group of 6 people is not "massive," after all: why isn't all game content raid content? To me, MMOs are massive the way the real world is massive - there are plenty of people around, and I can choose to interact with them, or not, as I like.

"It amazes me that we've gone to all this trouble to develop 'Massively MULTIPLAYER' games... and yet people want to spend all their time running solo.."

Warbirds is a WW II online flight sim game that is most definitely massively multiplayer. You join a nation and fight for your side to conquer territory. Many players in the game create their own guilds called "squadrons", so that they can fight more effectively as a group. Yet at the same time, solo players can still contribute greatly because they hear the chatter on the nation channel and knows what's being targeted. So they jump in and start assisting others. So ya a squadron guild may have the people to call the shots of what's getting attacked next, but after that, you get a swarm of solo players who rush in to assist on the attack.