From the Guild Wars 2 mDesign Manifesto (https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/guild-wars-2-design-manifesto/)
"With traditional MMOs you can choose to solo or you can find a good guild or party to play with. With GW2 there’s a third option too: you can just naturally play with all the people around you. I personally spend a big chunk of my time in traditional MMOs soloing, but when I play GW2 I always find myself naturally working with everyone around me to accomplish world objectives, and before long we find ourselves saying, “Hey, there’s a bunch of us here; let’s see if we can take down the swamp boss together,” without ever having bothered to form a party.
Of course GW2 has great support for parties, but they just don’t feel as necessary as they do in other MMOs, because your interests are always aligned with all other nearby players anyway. When someone kills a monster, not just that player’s party but everyone who was seriously involved in the fight gets 100% of the XP and loot for the kill. When an event is happening in the world – when the bandits are terrorizing a village – everyone in the area has the same motivation, and when the event ends, everyone gets rewarded."
There is nothing wrong with dificulty - open world was nerfed a few times, after the open beta regular mobs became easier and stopped running from AoE as fast, mobs in HoT were nerfed, etc, so that coul be reverted.
Any meta event that require voice, sub groups with specific roles like healing, etc., isn't in the same park as open world, which actually rewards builds that can solo champion and legendary mobs.
No one runs support builds in open world - it is stupid to do so. DE requiring support builds makes it a pseudo-raid. Nothing wrong with that and with the decoupling of the turtle from the event most of the problems with the event are irrelevant.
The game wasn't designed to allow solo players to tag along - it was designed for solo players with small chunks of time. Solo players were one of the main targets if not the main target of the game. Certainly it wasn't raiders as raids did not exist.
