Nope, not true.
1. True raiding, with your guild mates, is the ultimate social gaming activity in my eyes – you play together day after day, you set times in the future to play together, you talk about the raid and plan it, there are raid leaders, roles for people (you 4 mages are the sheepers) – in short, it’s a *very* social activity. The chat is full of raiding directives, jokes, casual talk, etc. If we use Teamspeak, the talk is usually more subdued but the cheering when a new boss is down is definitely shared by all. Buff foods, oils and potions are shared and passed around, mages cry out “get your water *before* the fight plz!” and locks “trade me for HS”… and so on.

2. Gear, at least in a good guild, is meant to advance first the guild, then your character. I’ve passed on gear slightly better then my own so that lesser equipped mages could gain a more significant update. A raid leader can and does decided that a certain class can’t roll for an item because it would do more good for another class. The Guild Enchanter gets first dibs on Enchanting recipe drops. And pre-BC, a group of people presented our MT with a 1000g gift, “Foror’s Compendium of Dragonslaying”, at the time, the quest item for the best tanking sword in the game.

Perhaps you’re confusing a PuG (pick-up-group) raid with a true raid. PuG raids are sad, slightly disorganized events where a bunch of people (usually alts) get together for the hope of getting better gear from instances they can’t 5-man. Your description fits these type of events, but those are not true raids, but instead pale imitations.

Well…I think they are. I think for most people (certainly for myself), the appeal is largely playing your character, one that you can identify with to some degree and in some sense. I enjoy playing with friends, but I would not want them playing my characters…they’re mine. I wouldn’t mind switching around that dwarf priest between my buddies, but I would never be as interested in that dwarf priest as I am in the night elf druid I took and built by myself, for myself.

…

As I wrote this comment, I was thinking through this question myself, and I think you went to something deeper — and so did I. To wit, you said: “These games are, at the end of the day, about playing with people, not characters, and anything that gets in the way of that seems like a shame.” I think that is exactly backwards. At the end of the day, it’s not about people. At the end of the day, an MMORPG is, foremost, an RPG — not an MMO. At least, the popular ones are. Such as…say…WoW?

I should note that I have little experience with MMORPG’s. I’ve played WoW and I’ve played WoW. Anyway, I think WoW is a singleplayer game — one with a Massively Multiplayer aspect to it. And I think this is the primary reason it is so popular. The multiplayer is there, you can do it, you can do it in a way that is not possible in a non-MMO RPG, but — most people, most of the time, are playing the RPG, not the MMO. Raiding isn’t about social gaming — I’ve never been on a raid, myself, but from what I understand, it’s not exactly a place to make friends. It’s a place to get equipment, or more essentially — it’s a place to make your character, you, better. PvP is fighting another person — but not, essentially, because they are another person, but because no computer has the mind of another person. Only against a live human can you prove yourself to be that damn good. Often — usually? — the PvP opponent is not someone you want to socialize with at all — it’s someone you want to beat into the ground, because you can.

In other words, PvP is a singleplayer experience…against other people.

Of course, there are those games that are social first, game second. The games of Pogo, where “old people” go to chat and maybe solve a puzzle while they’re doing it. There is a place for this, but it is not a place atop the MMOG mountain, alongside WoW. The perfect MMOG is social to the exact and only extent that the majority of players really want it to be. And that is: not essentially social, at all.

I’ve gone a little off-topic here, but like I said, I think your quote about “playing with people, not characters” touched on something broader, and that’s what you made me think about.