Look, another adorable thinking panda! This one's a mage, a fiery mage. Isn't she cute? I have a sneaking suspicion I will be playing a lot of panda characters. The models are just amazing!

Anyhow, back to business. My guild is in a bit of a state of flux at the moment -- not in a bad way, but there's been a change brewing for a while. It's not a problem, really, just a bit of a difference in opinion and goals. We currently describe ourselves as casual progression raiders, as uneasy an imbalance in name as it is in practice. We've got a mixture of people, a group of players who turn up pretty much every week to raid, who gear quickly and read up on rotations and fights and the like and take it all rather seriously, and another group who are less fussed about current progress and see raiding as just one of many things you can do and equal in importance to those other things.

Of course, both of these styles are totally valid, but the former group has decided that in Mists, they want to lessen the emphasis on the casual side and go more into progression proper.

But how do you go about doing so? How do you recruit serious raiders during a pre-expansion lull in order to hit the ground running in Mists? How do you keep the friendly feel of your guild while moving into more serious raiding? How do you avoid alienating the less raiding-focused folk who've been in your guild for a long time? How do you alter the guild's mentality away from being all things to all comers? How do you deal with the casual folk who do want to raid but only every now and then, when you only really have the numbers for one raid team?

Are your guild considering a change of gear for Mists? And if so, how are you going about it?