Public areas for the friendship impaired would be great. Especially when a lot of people may not have either enough friends on at any given time or not enough who want to raid at all.
Update: If an area were created, then the matchmaking would be up to the players. Since you can only have friends with you for the raid, it would be on your shoulders to interview new people. You wouldn't want to send a friend invite, let alone embark on an extremely challenging mission with people who might be the turd in the punch bowl.
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Excellent idea, this would fix the match making argument.