> Basically being forced to play solo to progress the battle pass
I mean, you can just ignore the battle pass and play what you want. That's what my friends and I do. But TBH, we usually just play MCC because it's got way more content, more options to select what to play, and is far less buggy.
Yes, that's the crux of the issue isn't it? The business model of the game is completely orthogonal to the ways people want to play the game.
What's the point of having a progression system if nobody is incentivized to actually progress? If your entire business model requires that people buy the battle pass, but they don't buy the battle pass because they just want to play with friends because the battle pass contents funnels them into solo play the game won't survive as a F2P title.
I mean, you can just ignore the battle pass and play what you want. That's what my friends and I do. But TBH, we usually just play MCC because it's got way more content, more options to select what to play, and is far less buggy.