As for my guild? We’ll clear normal mode weekly, still push into post Keeper Ulduar. Personally, I can focus on questing, battlegrounds, reputations, all while being able to see the newest(and coolest!) content in game.

The big problem is not the elitism but the need for organisation. It’ll be similar to running 25 man raids if you take it seriously, you’ll need a schedule, you’ll need careful class balance, etc etc etc

And since the appeal of bgs for a lot of people is that you can drop into one for 15-20 mins when you have some spare time, the rated versions won’t really substitute for that imo.

Why? They encourage segregation of the players by skill. If you want to do challenging content, you are actively discouraged from grouping with weaker players. The harder the content it, the less slack your group can tolerate. Players have to jump from guilds that aren’t performing if they want to try the harder content.

If you don’t like to guild jump, you will quickly find yourself in a guild drained of many of the better players, the ones who were carrying it. I’m sure we’ve all been in guilds that mysteriously started to suck. This is a good part of the reason why.

Blizzard is adding rated BGs, which will carry the elite segregation disease into BGs, where it had previously been absent (which is one reason why so many people prefered them.)

AND I’m able to upgrade gear without it being an oft-disappointing random drop, or farming the same instance over and over. BG’s are different every time.

Hearbreaker and the Iron Council were great fun. I am not however finding the difference between Coliseum that much to be enjoyable. And doing it once 10 normal, 10 Heroic, 25 normal, 25 heroic? Come on, really. I felt part of the reason we all got so sick of Naxx was running it twice a Raid lock out. Now we get to run one 4 times a week? Ah well we’re in holiday season at least.

I do enjoy WoW, but its not like I can force Blizz to release new content sooner -or suddenly make hardmodes into new encounters. They tend to be different in some ways, but also too many hardmodes are simply a demand for higher dps where standing in the fire will actually kill you.

If it was up to me Blizz would keep releasing bosses to ToC on a weekly basis, making it up to be a place with potentially 15-20 bosses (possibly with some trash inbetween). ToC have fun fights that are just easy enough for semi-casual guilds to get a challenge, without getting stopped in progression for longer periods of time.

So this new free time (not spent on alts or making money for raiding, grinding rep etc cause its all done to death) I think I will spend looking at other MMOs. They rarely keep me interested for much longer then a month, but there is something special about installing a new game, getting to know new classes and seeing a new virtual world for the first time.

But, more importantly: Nothing gets me psyched about WoW again as trying other MMOs and finding all the things I miss in WoW

On a more serious note, most guilds I know clears ToC and goes back to Ulduar hard modes with ToC gear, as with advent of new loot they become actually doable for less hardcore groups.