This is where I am at right now.

I am happy to say that Wrath made me realise that having fun and raiding casually is way more enjoyable and less likely to end up in burnout than raiding in a more hard core manner among people that only care about the numbers they put out compared to others and how they can move lime 1ms faster than you out of the defile.

Hoping Cataclysm will stay a guild friendly expansion throughout as I'll be staying with the friends and fun rather than purples and progression.

This is such a good point. If you are a high-quality player, and you know you are good, (never die in fire, never wipe the raid, top the meters/keep your assignments alive), it can be an exercise in frustration to raid with a bunch of nice people who mess up a lot. Conversely, you can play with 24 other people who rarely make mistakes, and they are a bunch of dillholes, and that's not really that fun either.

I think that's a great goal to aspire to, in terms of trying to help your guild get a little bit more serious. There are a bunch of people like that in my guild (who are a bunch of really awesome people I enjoy raiding and playing wow with). We end up carrying some people, as we are not a realm #1 type guild, but those of us in my guild that are high-end players prefer the more mature atmosphere (with slightly less progression) as opposed to the top guilds on my server that generally are a bunch of immature jerks.

To the OP, being an elitist jerk isn't a bad thing sometimes. Naming names and pointing fingers can actually work to your advantage - a virtual kick in the rear will get some people to focus harder and perform better. Being a taskmaster and railing on people every week won't work, but if someone isn't playing up to their potential, it can be a temporary boost to their skill score. But if people consistently die or do things to wipe the raid, then that's just who they are. You are then put in the unfortunate position of accepting sub-par gameplay from your teammates, or finding another group of people to raid with. That's a tough spot for anyone to be in, but it is a position that many players likely find themselves in, with how dynamic the game and guilds can be.

One thing I find that helps when raiding with a mostly social guild is to keep it fun yet rewarding. My guild had a hard time spending their raid time wiping on one boss, so, many times we would revisit older content and steamroll through that. Then, pick up where we left off on progression content.

The other thing, we don't really call people out, but we'll say something like "man did you see the way that rogue moved during flame wreath and jumped 100 feet, then wiped the raid? That was awesome! Now, remember, don't move during flame wreath!"

Raiding is definitely a guild killer. And I mean raiding in general. Raiding too much and not raiding enough have both been the death knell for guilds around the world.

My guild was almost killed early in Wrath because of raiding. We had just enough people to run 10-mans, but it meant everyone had to show up in order for the guild to raid. It proved to be too much pressure, so we went back to being non-raiding for the good of the guild. Everyone who wanted to raid was encouraged to keep their eyes out for other guilds that needed pugs, though, and so far only one person has left for greener pastures (though that was also because he lives in a different time zone, so he was almost never on when everyone else was).

Fast forward a couple years, and I'm running regular ICC raids as a permanent pug for another guild. It was definitely a casual raid group, though we were doing pretty well (we cleared the first four bosses in the group's first week, when several members had not even been in ICC before). As we got deeper into the raid, however, there was some dissatisfaction over our progress. People (myself included) had real life issues crop up from time to time. After our fast progress in the beginning, it took us a couple weeks to get Festergut and Rotface, then a couple more to get Dreamwalker. We almost had Sindragosa down, too, but then half the raid group transferred servers, completely gutting the guild. In an interesting coincidence, it happened the week after I got my fourth tier 10 piece.

I have never seen any other aspect of the game kill guilds as efficiently as raiding does.

Evylxx: "Hoping Cataclysm will stay a guild friendly expansion throughout as I'll be staying with the friends and fun rather than purples and progression."

This. So very this. One of the nice things I see in the future comes from GC's comment on the con's QA about helping us to step-down by not inciting obsessive burn-out-inducing 10s AND 25s four nights a week.

If the hardcore folks want to be rewarded with epeen, achievements are the perfect way to do it. Give them status, not content. Content should be for everybody.