What You Can Expect From The Guild...

The Perfect Circle is a casual guild, emphasising friendship over progression.  This core principle determines our recruiting policy and our attitude to raiding.

Raiding

The Perfect Circle may be a guild of friends but we also want to take down bosses and progress through World of Warcraft.  We're not a hardcore guild, which means we can't force everyone to progress together in locked step like hardcore guilds do.  We will always have people who have logged more hours than others, and will be ready to progress sooner.  This means the guild officers are always performing a balancing act, and you as guild members should be aware of that balancing act and how it affects you:

The upper bound: The guild officers must decide when to start including the next hard instance in the raiding schedule, and how often.  We aim to start including new instances when we have enough well geared people to fill a raid.  If you are fully geared before this is true, then congratulations you're faster than average. As a social guild however, the point is that we allow our members a reasonable time to gear up.

The middle ground: The official raiding schedule will always contain a balance of progression raids and 'easy' raids focused on gearing up.  The officers are constantly adapting the raiding schedule to fit the spread of gear across the currently active guild members.

The lower bound: The guild officers must also decide when remove 'easy' raids from the schedule.  We aim to remove 'easy' instances from the raid schedule when almost everyone has the gear they need from them.  At any given time the guild only has between 30 and 35 active raiding members.  This means we need pretty much everyone to be geared from an instance before we can regularly fill 25 man progression raids.

What should I do?

First, know where you stand.  Sites like WoW Heroes make it easy to check how good your gear is, whether you have it correctly enchanted and how it compares to others in the guild.  Then:

Awesome sauce: If you're well above the guild average in terms of gear, well done.  You're in a great position to push the guild forward and progress to new bosses.  You may not be able to improve your gear much from the current raiding schedule, but help on raids is still needed to help gear up the rest of the guild.  Clearly noone wants to stop you from enjoying the game, but be aware that not attending a raid means there is a good chance it won't happen - this will ultimately lead to stagnation as guildies are unable to improve their gear.

Rear guard: If you're below the guild average on gear its no problem!  A central aim of this guild is that you can take the time to enjoy the game the way you want to.  We only ask of you two things:

1. Think twice before levelling your alt or declining the guild raids.  We want you to play at your own pace, but if you've stopped working on your main character and you don't make the effort to attend raids, your guildmates will assume you just want to be carried through raids to get easy epix.
2. Prepare for raids.  If you're not as well geared as your guildmates, the worst thing you can do is show up to raids without food, pots or flasks and without gemming or enchanting your gear.  If the better geared guild members are helping you gear up, it is disrespectful to not do the easy things to help out.

Falling behind: Of course there are many reasons that can cause you to fall way behind the guild average.  If you've taken a break from the game for a few months, for example, or you've switched your main to an ungeared alt.  When this happens, your main may need gear from places that the guild is no longer actively raiding.  At this point, for the sake of the guild, it is your responsibility to gear your character.  Either by PUGs, organising unofficial raids or badges, you must work to catch up with the guild. 

Recruitment

As we expand and do more, more people would like to join us. We have tried wherever possible to accommodate in game and real life friends into the Guild. And we will continue to do this in the future. It is important that anyone who joins us will be happy here and that the integrity of the Guild is maintained.

The guidelines we intend to continue using are as follows:

1) Any player wishing to join us must, want the same goals in the game as we do. Friendship, Fun, Support, Progress at the Guilds pace, Real Life/Game Balance. We also expect our Guildies support each other and to make the guild an enjoyable place to be. TPC is not a hardcore raiding Guild, we will raid, we will make progress, but raiding cannot be your only focus.

2) We will try wherever possible to accommodate real life and in game friends of Guildies. However some classes are very full. So we cannot guarantee a place for everyone. The character that you apply with is your main and it is this character that we will base your application on.

It is important that these people share our philosophy and will be happy with what the Guild has to offer them. If you want a hardcore serious raiding Guild then TPC is not for you, for us the game is of course an addiction but Real life comes first.

3) Unless in exceptional circumstances players that chose to leave the Guild will not be invited back. There are no hard feelings if people decide their path lies elsewhere, we wish them luck and they remain on our friends list. However we feel that TPC is something special, its values are important and so are its members.

4) We will not invite players to the Guild if they have their Main/Alt in another raiding Guild already. TPC is not a hardcore Guild, but it is a real Guild, it has many things to offer its members.

5) When friends of Guildies join us, we expect their friend to act as their sponsor.

As officers we have to make very hard decisions sometimes to protect the Guildies that are already with us.

Note: when answering the question 'Have you read our guild charter?' in your application to join our guild - please answer the question with the phrase 'Does the pope wear a funny hat?'.