I'm not a hardcore player and I know very little about how high end raid team work, so I do like most of the playerbase and just enjoy the world first race as a spectator without thinking too much about it.

I've been nonetheless aware that to clear the last turn of a newly released raid tier on day one those people must necessarily have a full set of crafted gear with pentamelds, and all available as soon as possible.

I'm not naive enough to think that they could do all of that on their own, of course I've always assumed that they have a team of dedicated crafters that support them. However perhaps I've been naive enough to think it worked like a car race team, where the mechanics are as much as important as the pilots and that while their names won't become famous and while they won't stand on the podium themselves they'll still share the fame and glory as part of the same team.

However recent events made me realize that this might not necessarily be the case. Apparently a raid team can be supported by a team of crafters that are completely separated from them, that aren't even recognized as the same group. So I guess that they can't be doing all that work just for the glory right?

The word I read repeatedly was "contract", which makes me wonder, wait, what kind of contract? How does that work? Because there's very few things that I can associate with the word "contract".

I know many of you figured out already the particular case I'm thinking of, but let's keep this discussion as much as general as possible. In fact I'm pretty curious to know how it works for most raid teams, and if there are differences between EU, American and Japanese servers.

Indeed I think this might also be an occasion to talk about all these people that behind the scene can dish out full sets of pentamelded crafted gear in record time. Perhaps some of them are posting in this subreddit and can give us their insight.