At first I thought an alternate me had written this letter, or maybe I'd written the letter in my sleep and didn't let myself in on the plot. Anyway...

... I'm going to refrain from parrotting the previous commenters. What I do have to add, however, is another layer to the dilemma: We actually got a second 10-man team running during late Wrath. They were struggling with Sindy and I even hopped in with my healer to help them out on a couple of nights. That team promptly fell apart during Cata's launch and, despite my best recruitment efforts, we couldn't get people to fill in. If we did get recruits, they demanded raid spots and loot and, much like the letter-sender's situation, complained if the raid didn't get off the ground, then either leave or force us to kick them out. They wanted all of the goods without any of the work, and that just doesn't fly in our guild simply because every person in the guild has a RL commitment of some sort that inhibits their capacity to make WoW into a second job, or at least be online to herd cats 24/7.

The final straw was when the leaders of the second team suffered from burn-out, and another two core members had to leave the game due to health issues. And that was that. The remaining people gave up because, well, it meant they had to put in effort where they used to just be along for the ride. Our first team is (miraculously) still going fine after taking along what members of the second team we could when three of the members of our original ICC10 team decided to quit WoW.

But now, despite all that, we're accused of being a "clique" where there's the "raiders" of the first raid team and "other," with people-- well, more like just one person-- complaining that he sees "the same people running together all the time." This of course ignores the fact that my husband and I frequently try to get a dungeon run together on non-raid nights and ask for people to join us (of which the complainant is online, mind you), only to be met with silence; and the times we finally get something going it's, well, when a couple of the other regular folks log on and actually respond to us.

How does everyone else deal with this sort of thing? Are we, in fact, a clique, even if we aren't trying to exclude people from dungeons, etc? Is there a way to dispel the presumption that there's a "clique" just because there's only one fully-functional raid team?