I love my guild, I've been with them for years. We've always been really relaxed, never demanded anything from our raiders or even from our applicants/trials other than turning up on time. A very social guild, we had no real 'structure', rules, ranks or hierarchy and all our members were great, friendly people. We acted and played incredibly casual yet made really good heroic raiding progress! We were among the top ranked guilds on our server. This is my perfect guild.
But sadly the guild has slowly disintergrated; most of our raiders have either stopped raiding or stopped playing altogether and the time has come for me to make the decision to either stop raiding proper or look for a new guild.
This brings me to an uncomfortable place though - all the guilds I've looked at appear really serious (regardless of progress); they require you to submit raid logs in applications, have strict ranks and "regulations", require you to speak over voice chat, use complicated point systems for loot, require detailed history of raiding experience, demand that you use all manors of addons and custom UI's and all seem to share delusions of grandeur...
Now I have been raiding since early TBC, was once the 7th top Warlock on my server (equalling people in some of the top 200 guilds there) and I have never even considered doing virtually anything of the above: I don't believe in it. I find myself in the position of not being wanted by guilds for my relaxed approach to raiding despite having greater experience and dare I say skill than most of their best players.
I've never had to search for a guild before, the only two guilds I've ever been in both found me. In my searching I've realized that I don't want to join any of these 'serious' guilds. I want one like mine... my perfect guild.
I came here to ask if guilds like mine actually exist elsewhere, or whether my guild was truly one in a million and If I'll ever find one like it again - a relaxed and casual guild with great raiding progress?
Do you think I should 'change my ways', give up my idea of a "perfect" guild and just join a guild I don't like, with people I don't like just so I can keep raiding?