Of course, this isn’t just one person’s responsibility. If you join a social guild, but then a faction decides they want to progress or the GM starts inviting lots of progression-minded people through poor screening, than you can end up unhappy through no fault of your own. Same in the other direction (“progression guild” leader allowing any and all friends and family to get invites, forcing the raid to drag spouses and children through raids who have no interest in learning to play).

I’ve been in all these situations: been the casual player feeling betrayed by the pragmatic choices of a hardcore guild he thought was a guild of friends, and later the progression-minded person fitting in badly with a casual guild, and even the guild recruiter and raid leader struggling to strike a balance that makes both the hardcore and the social in the guild happy. In the end, I made a small guild with just my friends who happen to be awesome raiders. That way I fulfill both impulses at once. The downside is that not all of my friends in-game get to be in the guild. That’s the trade off I’m willing to live with because I prioritize progression, but I also spend time with them outside of raids and in shared chat channels because I don’t want to be heartless about it, either.

One interesting phenomenon is the birth of the wipeless hardcore player.

WoW end game progression is about wiping. Generally the more you wipe the further you get.

However to people who started raiding in the late TBC or with Naxx the raids were so easy that some people could just gallop through them. Even first attempts could be one-shots. So their notion of a good raid team is one that never wipes and a bad raid team is one that wipes. I think a lot of those hopping to progressed guilds will find that they move from a guild that romps through Naxx and early U collecting purples to a guild that spends long hours wiping on a very hard boss. I also think many of them will not enjoy it, the hardcore game experience they seek is actually kinda, well, hardcore.

It’s just how the game is, I think. If your personal goal is progression than it’s very very likely that at some point you’ll have to decide if your current group/guild/raid is able to provide it or not.

But equally, it’s silly to label someone as Bad just because they haven’t yet cleared the current raid instance of choice. It may be that they’re a decent player who decided that they’d live with slower progression because they wanted to hang with friends.