Light's Hope Fresh Manifesto

Light’s Hope Fresh Manifesto

I’d like to start out by addressing the concerns currently held by the individuals who are strongly against a fresh server.

‘A fresh server will kill Elysium’

The whole argument is that everyone would leave Elysium to migrate to a fresh server. To say that the majority of the population will leave behind their guilds, friends and current progression is a stretch. There are members of the community that are fickle and will re-roll regardless of this but since Elysium has been up for ten straight months and most of the players have experienced what a fresh would give them; they would certainly not make the fresh realm their new permanent home. I would not be surprised if players did roll alts there to enjoy the fresh experience but those re-settling on the fresh server after progressing on Elysium would be a small minority.

A fresh server hosted by another project, seeing as the current core is open source, could potentially kill the entire Light’s Hope project. Without a fresh server there will be much less organic growth in population due to players hesitating to play on an ‘established’ realm and/or their perspective it has a ‘tainted’ reputation. There was an exodus of players when the corrupt or ‘Shenna/Vitaly drama’ occurred in February. A large amount of players, myself included, stopped playing on the server due to this drama. These players would be more inclined to play on a fresh realm rather than the current Elysium realm. This would bring a fresh infusion of players back onto the Light’s Hope project thus increasing the overall population of the project thus giving more legitimacy to the legacy movement. Depending on the current timeline for TBC, this would give Light’s Hope a larger playerbase to draw on for that release. If as most players are suggesting on reddit a fresh server will kill Elysium, what happens when that fresh server is released by another project and not just Elysium suffers, but the entire Light’s Hope project?

‘Do you want another Anathema?’

Anathema is a terrible example. For those who do not know, Anathema was originally the Nostalrius PvP server. This server was shut down in April 2016. It was brought back online nearly eight months later. During this time the players from that realm splintered into different projects, other games and other pursuits in general. There was certainly a large amount of them that came back but the damage was done. Guilds were broken up due to players not coming back, friend lists were much smaller etc. To assume this server should have reached its former glory, especially with the Elysium fresh server launching less than a month after, is short-sighted. The population initially spiked due to the fact that it was the only Vanilla PvP server currently available on the project. After Elysium was released it experienced a slow decline. Once the queue settled on Elysium and most players had migrated there the population settled at around ~5k in February, down to ~3k in May and now at its current level of around ~1.5k. This can be directly associated with the release of Elysium being so close to Anathemas ‘re-release’. Players who initially hoped to play on Anathema were greeted by full T2 players who had little interest in running the old instances again – outside of runs like live Stratholme for orbs, which they would still prefer going with other geared players to make it faster. This gap in progression caused many players to switch over to the Elysium realm. This same gap is starting to be experienced on Elysium and will only increase with the lull in content between ZG & AQ.

Elysium itself would be much less vulnerable to this due to the fact that it has a playerbase reaching 9k at peaks. This is over three times the retail Vanilla cap. For all of the proponents of ‘Blizzlike’ this is unacceptable. This also provides a large buffer in terms of the realm ‘dying’ in the future. When Blizzard introduced new realms during the retail Vanilla did all of the old servers die because of it? Namely the ones with the largest playerbase. You must also keep in mind that Anathema will eventually be merged into Elysium, which will inject a decent amount of population (~1-2k) into the server. The world has quieted down since players have started to ‘raid log’ and other activities such as ‘hanging out at the Ironforge Bridge’ or standing in front of Battlemasters but to say it feels ‘Blizzlike’ is a fallacy. Elysium has a strong playerbase to draw from and will still experience organic growth through players wanting to bypass the ‘early game’ that fresh provides in terms of doing Molten Core and Onyxia for six months and playing with friends who are already on Elysium. They also have had no interruption in service that Anathema saw, with most players losing the hope of ever seeing those characters again. On the contrary they have pushed through the early fresh content, joined guilds and made friends. It is highly unlikely that all or even a majority of these players will forsake their current progression for the chance to start all over again.

Miscellaneous Points

The current timing is great. With the staff being focused on cleaning up the reputation of the server by providing transparency (instead of: you want transparency? Fuck you go somewhere else) and quality management (how about that latency?) the hype for a fresh server couldn’t get much higher. Elysium is in a good position and Anathema/Darrowshire, while lower populated, are still stable with nearly all of the players who would have left for a fresh (Elysium) already gone. Elysium should be reaching AQ in the not too far off future which will provide a positive boost to an already raid logging end game playerbase. It will also give players from Elysium a chance to roll alts and enjoy the hype that a fresh server brings. Certainly not all of them will stay but it will nonetheless be entertaining. In a worst case scenario I could see Elysiums population dropping by half within the next nine months, roughly the time Naxxaramas should release and then the merger with Anathema will bring another population boost. Even at 5k~ population that’s twice the retail Vanilla cap and is more than enough for a healthy server.

Kronos 1, Kronos 2, OG Elysium

Kronos 1 had a population of maybe 1k. It had also had multiple 7x xp events which turned off a lot of people. After Nostalrius closed, K1 had a major infusion of players creating queues/latency/etc. There was a large need for a new server so they opened K2. While K1 did suffer a population drop there were still guilds there raiding etc. This is a circumstance of low population and non-Blizzlike events. K2 experienced a large drop in playerbase due to the hype around the Nostalrius relaunch – seeing as most of the players had played there in the first place. Its population had naturally waned due to server performance issues. OG Elysium opened with 1k players and remained extremely small. It was merged into Anathema and is a completely moot point.

The future of Light’s Hope

I think we would all prefer to stay on one project. To go forward with our characters that we have spent so much time on, into a new expansion and to experience new worlds with them. I feel that a fresh server would not only bring new players into the fold, it would provide a stronger footing for the overall project to succeed as the ‘hope’ of our legacy movement. The concerns about Elysium dying are overstated due to its established status and extremely large population. If we truly want to be the bastion for the private server community then we need to be able to open the doors to new players, especially with the new management that takes us away from the stigma of illegitimacy and corruption. While Elysium is not fully progressed it is far enough ahead to make players second guess the choice of starting there. With 9k player peaks there’s also little room to add to the population. A second fresh server, released ten months after the last one, would provide excellent timing. This would undoubtedly establish Light’s Hope as the ‘go to’ project for Vanilla. In the event that TBC is released within the next year or two, this also puts the timeline in place for all servers to reach at least near the end of Vanilla content. This new fresh server would be the last fresh server until TBC is launched by Light’s Hope.