"You need 8 heroes or villains on your team"

In principle, I'm all for eliminating minimum team sizes on task forces so long as there is fair warning and an enforcement of literal minimums (if there's a mission with four simultaneous blinkies, the minimum has to be four).

However, as a practical matter there are a lot of players who believe that if the devs allow it they condone it, and if they condone it they should make it accessible. Meaning: if you allow two people to start Numina, people will complain two people can't finish it successfully. They'll say there should be a switch to downscale everything including the AVs to just the right level of difficulty to make their duo able to finish it: that it should be tuned for them, because they represent the "normal" players and not the "power gamers."

I like challenges. I would attempt to solo every task force that was logistically soloable if I could. This is a feature I would make a lot of use of: its been a long time since I've soloed a task force. But not at the expense of having to listen to people complain about the slippery slope surrounding task force difficulty or unlimited content accessibility.

I'm pretty sure I made a suggestion how this could be made to work. And it came with badges, too!

If you need to remove the bages for the option to do TF's with 1 person or 2 or whatever, then fine with me.

I just want to do the content at my own pace.

As was already pointed out in this thread or the other (can't remember), there's not really an overwhelming amount of complaints from people not being able to take on a Barracuda SF with 4 members on a team without a MM or a defender ; yet I guarantee you doing so is much harder than soloing most TFs, including soloing the ITF.

For that matter, even taking on a LRSF or a STF with a full team is harder than soloing a Posi TF if everyone on the team is inexperienced.

The comparison with AVs in story arcs doesn't work for me. Story arcs were pretty much the core content of the game at that point, and soloists who couldn't take on one AV had no option save for asking for help, outleveling the big bad, streetsweep or leave one mission slot, out of three, locked forever.

Task Forces are optional team content, and there's plenty of other means of progression today ; more importantly, much more efficient means of progression. Want experience? Go in AE. Want purples? Solo farm your favorite demon/BM/Boomtown map. Want merits? Do tips, or run on a team for faster completion. Want incarnate shards? Run on a team, faster drops and completion for the end component. Want incarnate threads? Run trials.

Let's talk about the trials. We can start a Lambda with 8 players or a BAF with 12 players, but how often do you actually see people forming minimum size leagues? It certainly happens, I see it daily and I do it personally, but most teams will aim for the maximum size or nothing.

As far as I can tell, most people don't really care about what devs condone or not, or about doing stuff with the minimum size, they want the shinies and they want as many folks with them as possible to maximize chances of getting said shinies without too much trouble. I'm willing to bet if tomorrow, the game was patched and TFs suddenly didn't require more than one person to start, we wouldn't hear much... Because most would still be in Pocket D or RWZ asking for a BAF.

Those of us who are interested in low/no requirements TFs would be in it for the challenge or to be able to experience that content at our own pace and would know what we'd be getting into, and while no thing is absolute and that there inevitably would be at least one person complaining as there is always, I can't see the amount of backlash that might result from such a change being anything more than a blip on the radar.

Not that I don't like the idea, but... wouldn't this make things a bit harder for those people playing characters that can only do a TF as part of a team to find a good team to join?

It would, but the question is "how much harder". I'm guessing it'd be unsignificant, certainly nothing compared to how much harder it got since I20 compared to before.

I obviously don't have solid statistics to back up my point of view, but from anecdotal evidence I'm willing to bet the vast majority of pickup groups (SG and friends teams are irrelevant in that context because these teams are already closed off to strangers) run task forces at maximum team size. If people run at 8 on a task force where the minimum is 4, changing that minimum to 2 or 1 doesn't seem likely to result in a massive shift in the way people team, at least the way I see it.

It could be argued that some people, once finding out they are forced to team, don't care if it's 4, 6, 8 or 24 players, whereas if they had the option of soloing, they wouldn't team. I don't know. I doubt that a large enough number of players would do that and make teams significantly harder to find, but I don't know.

If there's one guy out of ten that decides to stop teaming and solo TFs exclusively, you're still left with 9/10 as much people to team with as before. Hardly a difference that you would notice even if you looked for it, I think.

If anything, I'm surprised the objections to this suggestion aren't of the opposite sort ; namely that there might not be enough players interested in lower member size task forces to warrant developer resources spent on this.