The End of Galactic Season 5 & The Future of Shae Vizla

We're in the last week of Galactic Season 5 and I'm happy to say that I managed to complete the season reward track on the Shae Vizla server with several days (and several weekly objectives) to spare. So did many others, based on the chatter I've seen about it.

I don't think this is a coincidence. I'm pretty sure the devs counted the days and intentionally launched the Shae Vizla server at a point when there was just enough time left to complete the season track without using any buyout options - ensuring that seasons fans would be drawn to the new APAC server and give it a nice boost in activity for its first two months. It also seemed to me like the weekly login reward was giving season points more often than usual, presumably to help get more people over the finish line.

Personally, I finished the season at legacy level 27, with one character at level 80, and three alts at 59, 34 and 30 respectively. None of them completed their class stories yet, but at least the warrior is getting close, having just finished Belsavis. This is a lot more progress than I made on Leviathan and Tulak Hord when I first started playing there in Season 2, but as mentioned previously, I've been doing more than just seasons on Shae Vizla. Grinding Gree reputation during Gree event week for the first time in years was one hell of a nostalgia trip; I'll tell you that.

I can't help but wonder what lies in the server's future though. As per my post from a month ago, there was a noticeable drop in activity when 7.4 came out and a bunch of "tourists" presumably returned to their home servers, but after that things were pretty stable for a little while. However last week, which was when I believe the very first players were able to complete the season (if they had maximised their point gains with 12-point objectives every week), I noticed a pretty sharp drop in below max-level PvP activity. Until then, I'd been completing both the warzone and the arena weekly on my levellers pretty consistently, but seemingly overnight, lowbie and midbie matches of both types just stopped popping completely, making it impossible to get any PvP done if you didn't have a max-level character yet.

Now, the seasonal model always affects the levels of in-game activity on all servers, but personally at least I've never noticed this being quite as pronounced as I've seen on Shae Vizla. Whenever I queued for both warzones and arenas for example, you could tell which mode was a season objective that week because it would suddenly pop much, much more often. When I decided to try gearing up my level 80, I thought I'd queue for GSF since I remembered that being an easy source of gear early on. I queued for hours without getting a single pop. The next week, there was a GSF-related seasons objective, and suddenly I could get the weekly done easily, multiple times over. I also know that (what I think is) the third biggest guild on the server advertises openly that its focus is on doing Galactic Seasons across all servers. I for one am curious to see what happens to them and the population in general once the season ends. Not that the devs leave long breaks between Galactic Seasons nowadays anyway, but still...

The Transfer Question

One obvious way of giving the population a boost would of course be opening up server transfers to Shae Vizla. I don't think many people minded transfers being locked initially when the server first launched, but pretty much from week two onwards, long-time APAC players with legacies on other servers kept asking why transfers weren't open yet. Shortly before Christmas, Keith took to the forums to say that they weren't even sure whether they should enable transfers at all, a statement that received a fair amount of pushback. Justifiably so in my opinion - while I've enjoyed the fresh start experience a lot, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that the main purpose of the Shae Vizla server was to provide a home for both new and existing APAC players.

Yesterday we finally received another update on this matter, as Jackie confirmed that transfers are indeed coming, and that there'll even be a limited number of free transfers available for loyal subscribers, however they'll limit the number of credits you'll be able to take with you. This makes sense because the disparity between the Shae Vizla economy and those of other servers is currently so big that someone transferring in with a stash of a few billion credits earned on e.g. Star Forge would be able to buy out literally the whole Galactic Trade Network.

While I'm generally in favour, I do wonder how this will affect the experience of those who choose not to transfer any characters. (While I've got characters on all servers nowadays, I've made a point of keeping all their legacies separate.) I expect guild chats may become quieter as anyone who took a transfer will no longer be popping achievements all the time, activity at level 80 will pick up but will likely also be a bit of a two-class system for a while if people transfer over with full gold augments. Even with a stringent credit limit I suspect that there'll be at least a small degree of inflation. However, ultimately Shae Vizla should be allowed to become a server just like any other, one that simply happens to be located in the Oceanic region. The fresh start has been fun, but ultimately wasn't the goal.