Rohan from Blessing of Kings posted a series of three articles on "welfare epics", starting with this general one, then refining it into a less biased version, before finally hitting the ultimate reason of why raiders can't understand PvP rewards: PvP rewards improve in quantity, not quality, when you put more effort into the activity. Brilliant observation, because it very much explains how raiders can think of the PvP rewards in terms of "welfare epics", even if PvP players have good explanations on how there isn't any welfare involved, and you can't really "dance naked in the arena for a few weeks and get epics".

It was Lead Designer Jeff Kaplan (Tigole) who called PvP rewards "welfare epics" at BlizzCon. I hope his boss slapped him for that, because that was really, really bad marketing. If you have a multi-faceted product, you don't let the guy who designed one facet of it diss one of the other facets in public. The impression of "WoW is all about raiding" is harmful to the profitability of the game, because raiding doesn't appeal to everybody. A "do whatever MMO activity you like best and get equally rewarded for equal effort" image is a much, much better sell. The posts on Blessing of Kings help to understand how difficult it is to understand what exactly constitutes "equal effort", but for once the reality of WoW is better than the public image.