I left back in January, followed by most of my friends for a couple reasons, but raid difficulty was the primary one. It left my guild of friends with nowhere to go.
We had been together all through BC and WotLK. Loved adventuring through Kara (still my favorite raid), working together with other guilds in an alliance to do SSC/TK, Black Temple, etc. Then Wrath hit and was fun initially. We got to see Naxx which many of us never got a chance to back in vanilla. Ulduar was amazing. Then things started to turn for the worse. The Tournament release was just awful. (We should have had a full blown Azjul-Nerub style raid, IMO) ICC was a step back in the right direction with some faults. Downing the Lich King with my friends for the first time was something that I'll never forget. We worked our asses off for it even with the partial buff.
Then Cata released. The initial "ooh, this is new" feeling was gone in two weeks. The initial raids were all spread out and were much too hard for us. We tried for weeks to get something accomplished but we just couldn't. Eventually people just started to not show up and that was pretty much it. It left us with the choice of do we abandon our friends we've been playing with for years to group up with random people in a new guild to try to get something killed or do I just give up on the game, itself? I, and most chose the latter, a few the former.
Bah, first post and I rambled a bit. Long time lurker here. Love the site and reading the comments section.
I wonder if he reads them, or if it's just for show.