The casuals were gone a long time ago. You are crossing into the realm of addicted Destiny players, such as myself. All of my "casual" gamer friends had stopped joining my games and partying with me by lvl 28 or under...many for which still have at least one blue armor piece and an exotic, combined with a legendary here and there. Now, most of my friends can be found playing Halo, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Assassin's Creed, Dragon Age, or back to playing Diablo...you name it...and neither seem to exhibit the slightest interest and nor are they concerned about coming back. I do have one friend/ co-worker that states he will check back when the expansion comes out, but I know those are just empty words , as he'll have suffered from what everyone else does; you come back to check out the content update, find there is an overwhelming amount to catch up on and just how outdated you are, then you drop in another game and play that instead. It will happen to me, too. It happens to all of us, but some of us break sooner than others. I'm finally finding it hard to continue on with weekly raids, hoping for that Mythoclast to drop that I have helped so many others attain, thrice-over...whether, I solo-cheesed Atheon for groups while they hid, telling them when to wipe, or we beat it legit. I'm convinced it will drop, but it may be another 12 weeks...who knows. In fact, I finally did decided to get in on a group just before reset last night, but they had too many level 29's and so, we couldn't do the Atheon bit, nobody wanted to grab the relic. If I didn't get selected for teleport, nobody would grab it and they would die of succumbing to the Oracle...or get taken out before that happens, and so, there goes two weeks of no Raid boss reward for hard mode...the week prior, I didn't even give raiding a thought and it all leaves me feeling even less like wanting to do it this week. Bungie's reason for not including matchmaking are just reasons...this is no slap in the face to Bungie, but it is clear why there isn't MM for raids/ weeklies. They are doing it to make it a less abused portion of their game, by not making it as accessible. Also, to help increase rarity for certain items, some of which are exotics that only drop in the raids and will likely never be sold by Xur. They know that if they set you up with a team, you'll eventually be on your way to success and everyone will have a Clast and full raid gear. I've played many MMO's and even SWTOR has matchmaking raids...and even if it didn't, you have the ability to send global chat shout-outs and you can have a team even faster than matchmaking; "LFG for raid" one might post, and soon the responses come in; "level 55 healer! I'm in..." and "I can tank!" etc. Done! Matchmaking raids are only tough in the beginning, same as SWTOR...because people don't know what to do and there's always the new guy that doesn't know their role or the positioning they should be in, but they soon learn(like, very quickly), or they get the boot, or you can re-matchmake. It's not the end of the world. You eventually get in with great groups and meet new people to add to your list and before you know it, you're entering your groups into matchmaking, as opposed to just you...it's socializing and networking to it's finest degree, but once everyone knows what to do, you will clear matchmaking raid, after matchmaking raid. It becomes a literal muscle memory situation, and you're banking loot in under 40 minutes, back-to-back and that's what they don't want you to do in this game. It's also why there is a weekly reward cap.