This is a response to the 9/18/09 article "Old Republic dev discusses massively multiplayer loners":

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6228707.html?tag=latestheadlines;title;4

This article actually articulated the problem with all those failed MMO's out there, the idea that solo play is ironic and borderline deviant. My wife and I have alot of experience in MMO's, from AC1 Beta through a dozen titles to several lvl 80s in WOW. No matter how many friends you make or what organization you join, in the beginning and in the end your going to be alone; and when alone isn't fun you move on to another game.
When we fired up the Beta to AC1, we both were thrilled. For that time it offered alot of new stuff that we'd never seen in a game. There weren't any open world GTA types. We'd played everything from platformers and RTS to JRPs, action and fighting games. This was unique in that it offered a massive world to explore with all different dungeons and enemies that we could tackle however and whenever we wanted. You weren't stuck on a path, you could get out of almost any problem with minimal penalty and if something was too hard or not fun, you just went somewhere else. The MMO part meant that it felt like a real world, there were people milling about in towns selling thier stuff and telling stories of the things they'd seen and done, suggesting places to go and stuff to search for. We read the lore, soaked up the atmosphere and headed off. Sometimes we met up with people that asked for help, sometimes we hunted and fished in the same areas and competed for the respawns; all stuff that made it feel much more alive and real then any AI or game world we'd ever played. Somewhere along the line though, some developer wrote a rule that said those things don't matter, this is a multiplayer party game and if you don't make friends and schedule your life around the impracticallity of getting 20-30-50 adults with lives and schedules together at the same time to complete the next task then you can't play our game. Not only that, but the developers decieded that instead of spending their resources on advancing the game world, quests and story; they were going to do everything they could to force the players to team up to the point of making thier paying customers feel ostracized, in a VIDEO-GAME.
The irony isn't that some people may want to play a game solo that includes millions of people, it's that these game designers don't believe in thier product enough that they can't see value beyond one narrow way of playing.