The Shae Vizla APAC Server Is a Month Old Today

Maybe you're wondering how things are going after a month? Well, even if you aren't, I'm here to talk about it anyway, as I'm still playing there, both for seasons and just for fun (I collected a whole load of bounties during Bounty Contract Week for example).

I didn't know that this was going to happen when I joined Heroes of the Empire, but the guild quickly turned into the biggest one on the server, which means that in terms of Conquest it's currently always winning first place on the large yield planet in spite of not being a dedicated Conquest guild. It was bittersweet when I could display the "Conqueror of Belsavis" legacy title after my first week of Conquest being active... on Darth Malgus, Belsavis is the only one of the old planets whose Conqueror title still eludes me since it's always claimed by a mega-guild, even during Total Galactic War.

I've never been in a guild this big before and it's been an interesting experience. There are dozens of players online at all times of day and guild chat is a constant stream of achievements. This is also where all of our Conquest points are coming from despite the lack of an official Conquest focus - there are just so many enthusiastic people simply playing, whether they're working their way through the story, doing PvP or what have you.

In terms of guild development, I didn't realise just how many tasks there are to take care of when forming a guild on a brand-new server, seeing how my own guild dealt with all these things gradually over the years as new features were added one by one. On Shae Vizla, after the guild flagships for both factions were acquired, there was a contest to name them, then there was another contest to come up with guild heraldry for both factions, and now everyone's working on accumulating encryptions to actually open up all the rooms in the flagships - they still have to be earned and can't just be bought from the GTN en masse.

Heroes of the Empire out hunting Commanders for guild ship encryptions... something that hasn't really been a priority for me on Darth Malgus since 2014.

But let's talk about what general activity levels on the server are like after a month. The big "let's check out the new thing" rush is obviously over, but the population still seems quite healthy. Queue pops in lowbie PvP have slowed down, but that's because people have been levelling up and the midbie and max-level brackets are getting busier.

Endgame still seems to be a bit of a slow affair, I think because not many SWTOR players are the "rush to the level cap and raid" type. I've seen some story mode ops pugs in general chat, but I think for the majority of the population that stuff just doesn't feel that relevant yet. I'm only aware of one dedicated hardcore ops-running guild that moved in from Satele Shan (called Tauntaun War Veterans) but I don't know how hard they've been pushing themselves to gear up and clear all the content either.

The economy is also still pretty immature, which is both a blessing and a curse. If you're good at making credits, you can find some Cartel Market items at absolute bargain prices compared to how much they'd cost on the other servers... but you do need to make those credits via gameplay first (e.g. by doing dailies); you can't just sell a CM dye for a billion to get a head start. As an example, I got our overlord Savanna Vorantikus out of a seasons Cartel pack over a week ago and wanted to sell him. I checked prices on the other servers and at the time, the cheapest I saw was 25 million. On Shae Vizla, I still haven't been able to sell him yet even while listing for only 10% of that.

I would also say that the overall selection on the GTN is limited, as not that many people are at the point yet where they can or want to grind things just to sell, and items like craftable dyes that are tied to certain reputations haven't been unlocked by many players yet.

Using the Conquest point scores of the biggest guilds as an imperfect metric to judge server activity/population size, the server seemed to settle into what I'd call a medium-sized population shortly after launch. In the first week of proper Conquest, the highest score on the board (ours!) was over a hundred million points, but at the time the guild still had a lot of new players joining whose contributions didn't count yet. By week two we were up to 230+ million points.

Comparing that to other servers, it's nowhere near the kinds of scores that Sanctuary was putting out on Star Forge that same week (300+ million) but way higher than what we see on a small server like Leviathan, where even the highest scoring Conquest guild can get away with earning less than a hundred million points in a week. I'd say it's comparable and only slightly below the kinds of numbers you'd see on Satele Shan and Darth Malgus. Make of that what you will!

However, then 7.4 launched and as expected, that has led to a reduction in activity. It's hard to put a number on it, but I noticed that my own guild's Conquest scores (on both factions) were down about 20-30% compared to the week before (this is an estimate as I wasn't online before reset to see the final numbers). Now, a guild's Conquest score always fluctuates from one week to the next, but usually a patch would make it go up, not down, which to me indicates that this saw a lot of "tourists" return to their old homes.

When OotiniCast ran a quick poll on Twitter about how many people were playing on the APAC server, 46% responded that they'd made a character there just for fun, and only 10% were planning to make it their new home (the remaining 44% did not play there at all). Considering those numbers, a 20-30% drop in activity isn't that bad though and should hopefully still leave enough players to have a good experience, even if the server ends up being slightly smaller in the end. We'll see how things develop in the coming months - I'll be keeping an eye on it for sure as I'm planning to complete Galactic Season 5 on there if nothing else, which means daily logins and play for another couple of months at least!