Raiding is becoming less and less optional

[Barraind]

Victim of the term "raid" applying to too much content in this game.

Pretty much this.

The 24mans arent raids in any sense of having to be organized, and the actual raid-like content in the game is actually group content.

Yoshi and crew took some extreme liberties with how they named things (or kept the 1.0 version of names) in a completely arbitrary way that dont match any established precedent in the MMO genre, which is really bad when you're trying to explain things to people who know more than 0 about the MMO genre and everything ends up getting needlessly called a raid.

Funny thing about "raids" in this game is that anything outside savage/ultimate is considered casual content when those encounters are basically trials, and for all intents and purposes could be called "savage/ultimate trials"; all the while, 24 man alliance raids is actually a true raid by definition. But "raiding" is typically the term used to refer to the most difficult content the game has to offer. Ahhhh, semantics.

The thing people call "raids" are trials, all trials are "full party" content, and alliance raids are the closest thing we have to actual raids, but have almost no group-interdependency and no requirements for group fluidity, meaning they really arent raids, just content for 3 fixed-on-entry full parties.

Its all backwards!