Remove the Party Experience Bonus!

[Rataxes]

I think there are all kinds of different types of preferences for play styles. Building the game to favor one over the other does not make sense from a game marketing POV. There is sufficient opportunity in public games to be a PKer, and eschew partying if you like. And, for those who have friends who play, and like to work together there is something for them as well.

I agree fully with this. It does make sense to try and make your game appeal to as many preferances as possible, and it is possible for people who don't particularly care for the parties of average bnet slugs that make up most Cow- and Bloodrun games to play solo and avoid such parties. But there was room for more than one playing style in Classic as well.

People are arguing that partying is good (which is an entirely subjective statement), and that partying was suppressed in classic, therefore, classic was not good. But who's to say whose preferred playing style is the best one? I think I've shown that there were several very clear advantages with the "egocentric" playing style that D2C favoured. The fact is that solo play is currently just as, if not more suppressed than party play was back in Classic. Now if it came down to a choice between them, I'll admit that it would be more sensible to favour the party-orientated playing style since, as you say, there are now more "constructive RPG cooperative" players than there are "dog-eat-dog" players. Though I very much doubt the same was true in Classic.