WoW raiding scene angst

Tomas Rofkahr, a fellow blogger, recently commented here about "the angst that seems to go along with the whole raiding scene". He says "Nothing seems to ruin guilds faster or pit normally reasonable people against one another than having to fight for raid slots and loot. Throw in a model that requires people to fit a required raid 'mold' and not play the character they want and you get ... well - work." That remark struck me, because I'm feeling that "angst" in relation to my raiding guild. Will my priest still be needed when we start raiding again? Am I too slow to level up and equip/attune myself? Will I be able to get into raids now that the raid-size has shrunk from 40 to 25?

And that's just the fear of a holy spec priest. After all, I'm still the best healing class/spec around. Must be even harder for other classes which are more numerous, but less useful for raiding. And woe betide those that chose a talent tree which isn't optimal for raiding, like shadow priests. Many guilds have grown since the Burning Crusade came out, due to people reactivating their accounts. So raiding guilds now have even more people vying for less raiding slots than before. And once you got that sorted out, you still need to rediscuss the whole loot distribution question. Do you keep your old DKP system, do you modify it, do you reset it to zero, do you introduce a completely new system? Makes you wonder if all that hassle is really worth it, especially in view of what happened to your old epic raid loot, now replaced by Burning Crusade greens and blues.

But on the other hand I don't think that raiders are a different species of MMO players with a particularly twisted mind set. The "required raid mold" is not something that players invented, but rather something that they discovered as a consequence of the "laws" of the virtual world. If 25 random players of random classes with random specs and random gear could successfully complete a raid, people would probably do that. The "we need x protection spec warriors as tanks and y holy spec priests as healers, plus z of this or that other class for this or that other function" rules are not arbitrary, but have been derived at by trial and error. That "mold" is what works best, and the raiding dungeons are designed to be of a difficulty level that only that what works best is able to beat them.

People simply want to play. The angst is all about the dreadful possibility of not being able to play, because you've seen all the solo content, and nobody invites you to participate in the group / raid content. Even the fight about loot is not about the loot itself, but about access to the even harder raid dungeons that require that sort of loot. The reason why the casual players can't understand the angst is that they still have so much of solo WoW unplayed before them, and they just don't need a raiding guild to access new content.