Also because with some MMO's *cough*WoW*cough* the groups that run raids expect you to have done said raid before they will take you. Catch 22 anyone?

They would rather sit there for 3 hours in town shouting for people that have completed the raid before and are still there after I've done an hour or two of questing or battlegrounds. Instead of taking the time to grab a few new people that are ready and willing and teach them the ropes, so next time the pool of people that have experience in the raid can grow. Resulting in them spending less time in town shouting for 'perfect' people.

Which brings me to the other two reasons, a lot of MMO players lack common sense and are idiots as shown in the first two sections. Being able to solo content is what makes games like Spiral Knights so refreshing to me now. I can sit down, play for a few hours and even do high level dungeons by myself or with a few friends, without having to wait or play for a great deal of hours.

I used to love raiding when I first started WoW, then quickly realized how shallow the boss mechanics actually were. They pretty much just recycle the same mechanics with new names/animations. Also, the fights NEVER change except who gets what buff so u always know that at 70% boss will do x buff on a random player and so on. It would be better in my opinion to have something like that but instead of just doing x he has the power to do x/y/z spell at that time to make it at least somewhat dynamic, otherwise your more or less playing the same single player campaign over and over and over. Finally, the majority of WoW players watch tankspot vids and have a fuckload of add ons which make the fights easy as balls *cough* DBM *cough* and most of the time guilds require the players to have said addon installed which takes the awareness away from the game when all u have to pay attention to is text saying "DO THIS NOW". If i want a challenge ill play a different genre altogether as most of the mmo's I've played are all similar gameplay wise. Hopefully GW2 will change that.

Raiding is the reason why the MMO market is in a rut. It's time for a new mechanic already.

I've played WoW on and off since it's release and have all classes to at least 80. Probably put in at least 4000 hours over the years since it was released yet I've not once done a single raid and never will. The reasons simple:

Time consuming: Most raid guilds require you to play for four hours consecutively at least three days a week.. that's sounds more like a part time job than a game.

Clash of personalities: It can be quite difficult finding the right raid group filled with the right sort of people you enjoy raiding with.

Gear progression: It's boring wasting three nights a week trying to obtain armour that will become obsolete eventually and then you're forced to rinse and repeat.

Grind: Doing the same instance over and over again holds very little appeal to me. I barely managed to do a SM library run six times before not wanting to see the insides of that place ever again.