Multi-group content is not the way.

Repetitive activity in MMOs is grinding. If you enjoy it, de gustibus non whatever and all that but it's still grinding.

Think about all this constant, hyperbolic, complaining about 1/2 of one issue. It's easy to denounce people who are having fun.

It's much harder to understand your feelings about people who are happy about Issue 20.

Now see I like the more intimate maneuvering of the abandoned sewer trial and such. The more players you have, the more the fight becomes a zerg.

This isn't quite a new direction for this game - multi team content has been a part of it since before i started playing with the establishment of the Hami Raid. I'm actually not sure when zone events began to occur, but you could probably make the assertation that it started then (if they came before Hami Raids either way, which one came first isn't all that important, just that it came well before now is).

i9 revamped Hami and made it not quite so awful, and i10 expanded on multi team content by adding the MSR.

On a somewhat lesser scale, multi team content has been around since the advent of GM's, which I believe were in the game at launch. You will notice that with the exclusion of Hami, and MSR, most multi team content isn't run all that often before i20. The reward structure, save for Hami Raids, and even, possibly, MSR's since it dropped V-Merits faster than anything else, did not incentivize anyone to play them. GM's took comparatively long to drop for the XP/Inf that they give, and they didn't drop anything better than a badge. If you had the badge, or don't care about badges, there was no reason to engage in that content.

Zone events were worse. If you outlevel them the don't even drop XP/inf. The reason why Hami and MSR's are some of the most popular multi team content is, I would venture to say, based soley on the fact that it rewards you in a way that is commensurate with the time you've spent on it. In the case of Hami, in fact, it was the ONLY way to get those drops until i9 when they introduced the STF.

Multi Team content isn't new, and because of that it isn't a new direction for CoH to be going in. The only difference is that they've tied multi team content into by far and away the easiest way to gain and slot further incarnate powers. Even that isn't a new direction for this game to take since the only way to get Hami O's for a long time WAS multi team content. Yes you could trade them/buy them, but the ONLY way to generate them was multiteam content. But doing so without a market was difficult, and since it was likely the only thing you were spending your influence on I can imagine Hami O's on a server's black market (NOT the auction house, an actual black market) were probably quite expensive.

The only supposed new direction that this game is taking is with tying the easiest method of incarnate progression to multi team content, but even in a less obvious way CoH has been tying the easiest method of character progression to team content since i9 since the inclusion of IO's. In doing so, however, they've also finally shown that they're willing to develop multi team content to a more full potential, which really hadn't been done since the inclusion of multi team content.

Ultimately I would argue that the new direction for the game is incarnate content and not multi team raids. Those have been there since the beginning - they're just now finally actually being developed.

I'm not really trying to argue anything here, other than I've seen a lot of people talking as if this is some kind of new direction. I don't think it is, at least not in the way you're arguing.

Pool C and D recipes came from single-group encounters.

Did an ITF (22 mins I think) and an STF (44 mins) and just melted all of the opposition. No "healers", no debuffers for both of em'. That was fun!

Honestly, we weren't even trying for a "best time" kind of run. Just plain having fun and destroying enemies in our path.