Forged Alliance

http://www.mmo-champion.com/news-2/cata ... lue-posts/

Here's what caught my eye:

Premonition wrote: To further complicate things, it's no secret we lost a lot of long term members in the Icecrown progression cycle, which massively hamstrung us. So when it came down to Lich King, we ended up having to rely on a very strict set of players, and if they couldn't be on or if their internet was bad, we couldn't raid. It got to the point, actually, where we got one hour of raiding when we started raid, then had to call raid for several hours while a certain paladin's internet stopped chain d/c'ing him, and that was how we raided for the past week (a couple hours in the AM).

Seems the problem (attendance) is more widespread than I thought if its affecting even the top top guilds.

Those of us who have been been playing this game way too long have seen this happen many times. Usually it's about this time in the development cycle of a coming expansion. ICC came out months ago and it's not new to anyone anymore. Sure there might be some fights people haven't seen but largely it's been done. So people begin to loose interest and find other ways to spend their time. This causes a slow decline in attendance, then other, more sensitive, people see this and immediately jump ship trying to find greener pastures. This leads to some other, slightly more experienced players leaving or taking a break from the game. Raids slow down and luckily now we can still have some solid 10m groups going. Attendance will eventually plateau until the expansion. Once the expansion hits everyone who quit the game for whatever reason will suddenly find those reasons cleared up and everyone will be on the rush for 85 and scrambling to get in to the new end game raid. We'll forge in there ASAP with 1-2 10m groups and start 25m a few weeks later.

That or the guild will disband. I've experienced both. More than likely though it'll go down like I described above. It's happened every expansion so far.