I'm just going to talk quickly with my first WoW experience, it was during the burning crusade. I entered the game late, near the launch of The Wrath of the Liche King. When I hit level 70 there were a few very hardcore groups on T6 raids, a few on T5 and a lot still farming through Karazhan. As someone already behind the game it was very difficult to find a raid group. Also since there was no dual spec at the time you had to dedicate your player to either PvP or PVE. unable for weeks to even join in a single raid I PvP for a few months then stopped playing. The playerbase was stratified because of their gear so much so that those who were behind found it very hard to enter the raid portion of the game.There was also a large problem (which was even worse in FFXI [take Sea for example]) where blizzard was developing new content at a regular basis that many players simply did not have a chance to experience. Their solution to this was to release easy/hardmode raids and tokens for raid entry level gear so that all players would be able to participate in the current tier of raid (at least the normal mode version of the encounter) SE is trying to do the same. But their methodology is to have 1 and only 1 "Hardcore" raid at a time while making all over content accessible to the player base. With their job system I think this will complement gearing alts nicely.