I agree with you broadly. The only proviso I would make is I MUST tell my guild that I'll be away.

Just not showing up is incredibly annoying. We had a tank that would do that in a 25m guild I was in once - though he didn't do it a lot before we kicked him out. It really pissed me off because our guild times were tight for me in terms of getting back from work - I had to basically race back home through the rush hour to get back in time (my guild wasn't in quite the same timezone as me so raids were quite early in the evening). I would sometimes decline attending social events like parties because I would want to raid and, as a healer, I would feel bad that I would be stopping other people from raiding. He showed no such consideration.

That's a personal choice on my part, choosing one social activity over another. However, it would piss me off no end to have done that - or to have rushed home and made it by the skin of my teeth - and find that one or two people had just decided not to show up because they went off and got drunk / went to see a movie / watched TV instead was deeply frustrating.

We had a guild website with a forum to let people know about non-attendance and I would check it before I would leave work to make sure we were still on and I would post if I wasn't going to make it...but the people who wouldn't even bother with that just showed no respect to the lives and compromises that the other 24 people might have made to be at raid.

RL is, of course, > Game....but that doesn't mean you should just totally blow off the commitment you made to the other people in your guild when you decided to join a raiding guild. It's a game, yes - but a game with real people on the other end of it.