Alliance Raid Now iLvl Locked, Why??

[Jojoya]

No, you're correct, my bad.

That said, I'm not convinced forcing everyone to unlock every raid would work. I know me personally, I'd simply stop doing the raid roulette. I have no interest in some of the raids, and never want to do them (Eden for one). If that means that I'm locked out of the roulette, that sucks, but I'll take that over having to do content I don't want to.

Forcing everyone to unlock every raid could even lead to a large number of players quitting the game. It's a situation where players start fearing the slippery slope has arrived. If they're going to make X content mandatory when it wasn't in the past, what will be next? Will everyone be forced to do EX trials? PvP? Variant dungeons?

Have too many pieces of mandatory content in what's regarded as a theme park MMO and players are driven away. It already holds back growth in the player population. Some interested in the game don't play because the MSQ is mandatory but they don't care about story, they just want to kill raid bosses. They're not going to pay extra money to avoid the mandatory requirements. If the MSQ wasn't mandatory, the game would have seen far more growth during the WoW exodus (though it's debatable how much would have been retained long term).

I still think making CT mandatory was a bad move, though unavoidable with the direction they decided to take G'raha Tia's story. I don't hate him as a character but I still haven't seen any compelling reason to necessitate him being a Scion instead of leaving him as he was on the First. But they did it with CT and now some players want them to do it with the rest of the Alliance raids for their convenience. What will SE do?

iLvl should be simply tied to MSQ progress (that also implies that you’ve reached the corresponding lvl on at least one job).

The problem with that is the player is then locked out of doing the roulette on other jobs they are leveling that are lower than their MSQ progress. Can't wear 175 gear on a level 53 job even when the player has completed the 3.3 MSQ.