The problem with The Feared and endgame invitations

Those of you at endgame have probably thought about running endgame invitations such as The Feared for a fun alternative to just grinding maps. There's a problem though: If you are playing solo you are throwing all of your time and money in the sewer.

The Feared:
Run Chayula, Cortex, Uber Atziri, and Uber Elder (or Red Elder + Shaper)

Seems good. Run 4 bosses and then get a really cool bonus round that can drop multiple implicit synthesis items, double corrupted uniques, another chance at Bottled Faith or Watcher's Eye. And you basically get an ex or more from the Maven splinters! What's the catch?

The catch is that Cortex is a bottleneck that steals all of your currency if you're running it solo. Typically a Cortex hovers around the expected value corresponding to the value of Bottled Faith times the chance to get it. With the changes this league a Cortex is now 1.5ex MORE expensive than the rewards you can expect to get from it. You lose net 1.5ex every time you put a Cortex in your map device on average.

Now if you want to run The Feared and don't want to throw all your currency in the gutter you are FORCED to join a kill rotation or multibox. Why? Because everyone in the Cortex fight gets credit for witnessing the boss. Your 1.5ex loss every run is split 6 ways. Then you can all kill The Feared separately or as a group as you please.

In a perfect world you would think that The Feared invitations would skyrocket to 75c and the difference between solo and group would find a healthy balance. The sink for invitations would become bigger than the source and running solo wouldn't be so bad. This won't happen, because of Chayula exp runs and people just running Elders and Uber Elders for Watcher's Eyes. So anyone who wants to run The Feared solo will ALWAYS be screwed.

No, sir, I don't like it. This makes the fight with the coolest rewards in the entire expansion (Maven drops suck) unplayable. Fix it for the next league please.

Why shouldn't the maven witness zana map bosses? It seems like a simple enough solution.

A lot to digest - but to simplify: Maven witnesses group boss fights for everyone equally, so it can put playing solo at a disadvantage in terms of cost basis. This is actually new/rare/unique for PoE outside of achievement recognition which also works by group.

I agree with the other poster that Maven witnessing Zana maps would be a good compromise.

Good point. Not sure if its a problem in reality though.
People who heavily abuse group play tend to do alot more profitable stuff than the feared invitation.

I did the feared only once for the points because I got absolute nothing out of it. Only shaper/elder influeced items I got.

And it was rare.. it wasnt a normal or blue invitation.. never running something so difficult for such shit rewards.

Nearly everything in PoE is based on an economy of scale, so solo players getting dicked here is totally not a surprise because solo players get dicked everywhere else, too.

And for zana missions to have maven witness, it would not be something you could choose to disable, it would either be on all the time, or inherit the toggle status of maven for the parent map.

The design philosophy for a multiplayer arpg should not consider group play "abusing the group mechanic", it should foster group play as much as possible, since this is what drives a lot of players to continue after acts; and optimize performance for multiplayer mapping.

Meanwhile stop balancing the economy around the most efficient farming guilds in such a way as to punish solo players for choosing to not play in a currency flipper farming guild. There's no reason why ssf players should have 0.1% harvest spawn rates or 0.01% non-zana hardcopy cortex drop frequency.

the buttons dumb, we should be able to hold up our fist and shout THUNDER until the thundercats logo summons Maven to witness us.

We should also be able to kill the Envoy in maps because he won't stfu, talks all map every map on an endless loop no wonder Zana is asking if were sane.

Not at all suprised this is how things work in the world, people who work together get better results, the cave men who was a loner didn't survive. Not as hardcore in POE but you get the point.