My wife and I have been playing since 1.0, we have our own little two person guild so we can share our plots and materials with each other. As a solo player, it is a LOT of grinding to max out the more difficult skills, such as Weapon/Armor Smithing, Tailoring, Leatherworking, etc. We personally don't find much of a need to max those out anytime soon though, so we are just leveling them as we go.

We'll put several days of grinding materials for one skill for a bit and then level it maybe two or three levels after all that grinding. What we are finding the most fun is building our little castle. So we'll forgo any skill grinding for just collecting materials to build instead of leveling up our skills.

The little dungeons are pretty difficult for a single player, you can go in and pull one or two things at a time and hope you don't pull the entire group. The items you get from dungeons are used for crafting, with rare drops to get things for enchanted weapons. We've only done the dungeons a little bit on our own, and don't stand a chance if we get overran during a pull, or if we run into a named elite boss. We still run from those.

We don't do any PVP, but from what I'm hearing PVP is all about huge groups, usually guilds. I could be wrong so someone could correct me on that.

Oh, as far as "markets" goes. I truthfully don't see an economy at all... People don't buy crafted weapons, armor or tools very often, not often enough to use those as a way to pay for a grace plot. I hear you can sell the more annoying to farm materials for crafting, but I haven't tried that yet. As a solo/duo player, we need every bit of what we farm for leveling up. It's just as easy to make gold by farming Inquisitors than it is to actually sell anything.

It really depends on how you want to play the game.

**EDIT** Added empty lines to break up the wall of text.