Guild Wars 2

You can call The Lunar Circle a guild or a PvP team or whatever you like; the idea is to hark back to the mutual improvement societies from the Age of Enlightenment such as the Junto or The Lunar Society, originally known as The Lunar Circle, from which we take our name. The goal is to assemble a group of people not only to play together, but to try to help one another to continuously grow and improve, both in terms of mechanical skill and in terms of knowledge and understanding, always looking to delve deeper into the game. Every member is at once both a teacher and a student.

The Lunar Circle is focused on organised play in sPvP, though members certainly may be found dabbling in WvW and even occasional PvE. We will consider applications from any server, including across regions; sPvP is not constrained by server, and many dedicated PvP players have cross-region alternate accounts. The Guild system in GW2 functions seamlessly across regions. The goal here is to aggregate like-minded individuals and forge a community together where we can share, discuss, practise, and progress both individually and collectively; to that end, finding the right people is more important than where we find them. Our home servers are Desolation (EU) and Ehmry Bay (NA), for those interested, and we’re currently residing in the excellently tidy and organised Ehmry Bay Teamspeak server for primary voice comms.

Anyone who shares our goals is encouraged to apply, regardless of your background or experience. Whether you’re relatively new to the Guild Wars 2 sPvP scene and looking to delve deeper for the first time, or you’re a veteran player already competing with an established team, you can find a place among our ranks if you have the right mentality.

What does a successful candidate for membership in The Lunar Circle look like?
1) You’re comfortable with having your beliefs and ideas challenged. You’re also confident enough to challenge the beliefs and ideas of others, and mature enough to do so respectfully. (See the Code of Conduct for more on this point.)
2) sPvP is your primary game mode. You certainly don’t have to spend 100% of your game time in sPvP, but it will probably be where you spend the majority of your time, and moreover, it should be where you invest the majority of your mental energy in the game. You PvP because you love PvP, not merely because you want the achievemnt points or because WvW is dead this time of day or whatever.
3) You’re able to play during EU evenings—roughly 20:00-01:00 CEST (UTC +2). It doesn’t have to be your primary period of activity, but you should consistently be available at least once or twice per week during those hours.
4) You’re motivated by the constant pursuit of mastery. You play in order to be the best player you can be, and you aren’t satisfied with merely “playing for fun”; making great plays and winning is fun—much more fun than just haphazardly flailing about, in fact.
5) You’re the sort of person who is always driven to understand why and how things work. It’s not enough for you to know what is optimal; you want to understand what makes it worthy of that status.
6) You’re interested in actively participating in discussions on the guild’s forums.
7) You’re comfortable participating actively in voice communication.

Requirements:
1) Teamspeak, including a working microphone, is non-negotiable.
2) All would-be members must register on our forums in order to apply. Active participation on these forums is a part of being a productive member of the Circle.
3) “Soft majority representation”, by which is meant that The Lunar Circle should essentially be your default guild. We are never going to be an all-purpose PvX guild, so it’s entirely understandable that members may have other guilds for specific purposes. But if there’s nothing that specifically calls for you to be representing another guild, you should revert to representing The Lunar Circle. If you’re playing with other members or just PuG’ing it, you should be representing. If you want to level up a personal bank guild, just cough up the paltry 5 gold. If you’re feeling the pull to represent one of the giant PvX guilds, then perhaps you need to re-think whether your mindset really aligns with that of The Lunar Circle.
4) Anyone interested in joining the Circle must post a completed application form.

A bit of background about myself—the founder—and the Lunar Circle project itself.
I’ve been playing MMO’s since the release of the original EverQuest, where I was a well-known figure in the Shadowknight community (Slein Jinn) for a very long time. In twelve years of EQ1, I did just about everything a person could do in the game, from top-tier raiding to being one of the pioneers of a technique for solo clearing a hundred or more NPC’s at once, but what I was most recognised for in the community was what the current generation of MMO’s would call “theorycrafting”. It has long been joked that I play MMO’s to give me an excuse to play with MS Excell. I love delving into the minutia of game mechanics, understanding the governing maths, and always looking for the most optimal ways of doing things, but I also try to make sure my mechanical ability is sufficiently practised to be able to put that knowledge into practise.

I’m not the sort of player who tends to play multiple games at once; I guess I look at it as I have a limited amount of resources—time, mental energy, etc.—and I feel like I get better results if I focus my resources on mastering just one game. I dabbled in other MMO’s a bit here and there during that time, but I mostly remained faithful to EverQuest until RIFT entered the picture. After being very active in the beta, I finally did leave EverQuest for RIFT at release, and that was the game that began my transition from PvE to PvP player. RIFT didn’t really endure, though, and it wasn’t until GW2 that I finally found “my game” again after having completely left EverQuest.

In GW2, I began as a predominantly WvW player. I ran with a solid GvG/zergbusting group on Ehmry Bay (NA) for a while during the server’s peak, and after that guild broke up, I launched a new guild—Odyseja [Seek]—from the ashes, which focused on coordinated havocs in WvW. We had a lot of success in that theatre until we lost many of our core members to severe health problems, real life obligations, other games, etc. During that time, I was gradually becoming more and more focused on sPvP, to the point where it made more sense to launch a new PvP-focused project—which has resulted in [Mind]—rather than trying to revitalise [Seek]; it has been several months now since I’ve played any game mode besides sPvP seriously.

I’ve looked across both regions for already established groups that align with the goals described above, but it seems evident that none exist. So I’ve taken it upon myself to start one. I’ve been working on laying the groundwork for this project for some time now, but the huge balance revamp looming so close on the horizon has pressured me to roll The Lunar Circle out sooner rather than later, as that seems like just the sort of moment when such a group will be most called for.

At this point, I’m a fairly veteran PvP’er, with thousands of games played and some fragmented tournament experience, but I’m hardly world-class. I can definitely help other motivated PvP’ers to grow and develop, and I’m also very interested in finding people who can help further my own development. I love the idea of being a part of a group of like-minded players who can help push each other to new heights. I see a lot of value in the Enlightenment idea of “mutual improvement societies”, and I think it offers an excellent model for how GW2 players could seek to advance their collective ability levels.

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