A Week of APAC Adventure

The Shae Vizla server has now been out for a week, and its first weekly reset has come and gone. At the time of writing this, I'm up to about 24 hours /played on there, which is quite a lot considering I've been working full-time as normal and also doing other things. Before the first reset I'd accumulated over a million personal Conquest points despite only having a stronghold bonus of 15% (from claiming my free Nar Shaddaa stronghold and nothing else).

Levelling is always good for Conquest, but I think most of my points actually came from PvP, as I completed both the warzone and the arena weekly twice on the same character, something I don't think I'd ever done before. I've just been having so much fun with the lowbie PvP. It's always been my favourite bracket, but at the same time it's also the one that sees the least activity on the other servers nowadays, meaning that it pretty much only pops during prime time of whatever the server's time zone is.

On Shae Vizla on the other hand, the vast majority of the population is still low level right now and doesn't have a choice but to queue in that bracket, plus the server is in the unique position of currently attracting players from all over the globe for that "new server smell", meaning queues are popping quickly all around the clock (though I haven't tried playing during Australian night time yet). It's simply delightful.

It's also been fun to watch the guild I'm in (Heroes of the Republic/Empire, founded by Kal from Today in TOR) thrive and grow. The guild bank is effectively not functional yet due to the withdrawal wait timer the devs added when they introduced the trade tax a few months ago, but getting a guild ship felt like a matter of urgency to start earning Conquest rewards.

I remember when guild ships were first added, I wrote a post called "Want a guild ship? Hope you got 50 million lying around". Back in 2014 that seemed like a pretty steep price, but with how much inflation there's been since then, I could single-handedly afford a hundred guild ships without breaking a sweat.

On a brand new server though, where every credit has to actually be generated through gameplay from scratch and people have a lot of expenses to begin with, things are not as simple. Even with the cost of guild ships having been dramatically reduced to only eight million credits recently, that still wasn't a number a single person starting fresh could just pull out of their pocket in week one, so Kal solicited donations/loans (he said he'd pay people back with interest) from the guild membership to speed things up. Thankfully everyone was feeling very excited and generous, so both the Imperial and the Republic guild were able to fund their guild ship and invade a planet in time for the first week of "proper" Conquest. At the time of writing this, it looks like the Imperial guild is set to win first place on the large yield target, and the Republic guild might win first place on the small yield planet.

Other guilds haven't been slacking either, with the large yield scoreboard being completely filled up already (showing ten active guilds) and three guilds competing for medium and small yield currently. It makes sense that larger guilds would get there first, but I'd expect a number of smaller guilds to also be able to afford guild ships after the first few weeks.

It's definitely going to be interesting to monitor activity on this server over time. Right now everyone's excited because it's the new place to be, but it does feel like even beyond its purpose of serving as a new home for APAC players, there's also a real chance of establishing it as a unique space where players from all regions come together. However, over time many will probably feel the pull of returning to focusing on their legacy on their main server. I suspect the first real litmus test is going to be the release of 7.4, when people will want to see the new story on their mains.

Of course there's also the option of opening up transfers, but I also think the devs will want to be careful with not doing that too quickly so as not to kill the mood. It's going to be a challenging balance to strike between preserving the fresh start excitement as long as possible and not losing too many players to inertia pulling them back to their old homes.