I use to raid with one of the top 5 guilds on my server. But yanno what? It's just not as fun as doing 5 man heroics and Kara/Zul'Aman. You can JOKE and laugh and wipe and there's no RL yelling at you, threatening others, taking other people on raids, gearing up some people over others... I don't even look on wowjutsu anymore. And yanno what? I might have a t6 character in retirement, but I am LOVING my new Kara/badge gear characters and I love the people in my casual guild. I'm having a better time now than I ever did in Hyjal and BT.

That's why I'm so excited about Wrath. We can 10 man everything! It'll be awesome!

yea, beyond world firsts i really could careless

Nope - A vast MAJORITY of us don't.

^ Speak for yourself

I used to follow the raid progression very close before Burning Crusade, back when my guild was in top3 of our server.
Main reason: the competition. Stuff like "OMG we've beat guild X on this boss, yay!", or "C'mon we can make top X Europe!!"

In BC, the hardcore part of my old guild formed a new one. It also kept my interest for raiding progress high, as my old friends were directly involved.. "you can do it guys!!".

After they disbanded.. I stopped giving a damn on what the overall progress was, and focused on PvP.

Frankly speaking, it's so hard to get a good 25-man raid built and by the time you do, you lose people to other guilds when they've geared up enough to jump ship and ride the coattails of a bigger guild with more stuff on farm. Then you have to take a step backward to train/gear new players to fill those holes and the old-timers get pissed because the forward progress has slowed, and they don't want to do the same old crap. So they stop coming.

The raid game sucks, but it's not because of the game...it's because of the people.