Jorgen297-Q&A-Xeth

1. Whats your opinion on Elysium?

I've had two experiences with Elysium, both of which were vastly different. I'll go into both.

First, we'll talk about Valkyrie's international realm Elysium 1.0. The team that ran Elysium 1.0 were the fastest responding, willing to help, that I've ever seen in a private server environment. Suzerain/Snow/Ruse would respond within minutes if you messaged them (if they weren't afk) to any issue that arose. It was awesome. In terms of the server in general, it felt like stock Mangos with as many fixes that they could implement before server launch. There was a large number of issues. Some examples: WPL worms dropping insane loot, BRD Arcanum Dwarves giving EXP, Onyxia's mobs not having proximity aggro, Majordomo attacking his own adds, and Ragnaros' Sons of Flame casting instant Pyroblasts. Those are just the big ones off the top of my head. The server overall, was like a C- in terms of quality. The staff was like an A- in terms of quality. It was small, tight knit, and they cared about their players.

Let's transition on to Elysium 2.0 (post-Nost core). Elysium and Nostalrius worked together and Nostalrius decided to give Elysium their core. Elysium took what Nostalrius and created the biggest hype the private server scene has ever seen. It was AMAZING. Absolutely amazing. The community's fire was re-kindled after it was put out by Blizzard following the shutdown of Nostalrius. The hype was off the charts. Anathema / Darrowshire (as they are called now) launched and both server had a large queue to get into because everyone wanted to be apart of the re-launch. All our character were back and it was as if things were before the shutdown of Nostalrius. Old guilds emerged from the grave, players came out of no where to come back to their characters, everything was great. Fast forward, Elysium 2.0 launched, and over 20,000 players were wanting to be apart of the next big server. It was fantastic, at first. There were server crashes, which were to be expected, but overall the experience was great. I got to play with old friends again, help make a fantastic guild which is still standing to this day and doing spectacular.

However, as time move forward with Elysium... I realized how much they had no idea how to manage the massive player base that they got. Their transparency was all but gone from the public eye. Snow (their head GM on Elysium 1.0) was no where to be seen for weeks, and there was not a post made that he resigned/quit or anything. Suzerain, who I had multiple conversations with in the past, could no longer continue Discord private message contact because there was just too many people involved. There just simply was no plan on how to handle the vast number of players that wanted to be apart of the "next big private server". This caused all the great things of Elysium 1.0, to disapper.

Throughout the course of the months following the release of Elysium 2.0, many things happened. Suzerain resigned, Anathema was hacked, Alexensual revealed large-scale corruption, Tyche's revelation, are just a few examples. All of these seperate situations made me realize how much lack of control Shenna actually had over the project. She truly had no control, whatsoever. Shenna/Elysium were simply trying to do the best they could with what they had, and I commend them for that. But honestly, they had no idea what they were getting themselves into when they worked with Nostalrius and convinced Viper/Daemon to give them their core for the betterment of the legacy community. I don't know whether the profiteering of Elysium/Shenna/Vitaly was 100% true, but the amount of screenshots/conversations about the whole situation leads me to believe that there was alternative motives of the team other than just hosting "the game we all love."

Why I quit? Well not only the changes and issues that I have mentioned above, but the lack of response in terms of inconsitancy of items in their proper patches, lack of knowledge and understanding of the GM/QA team, and major bugs involved with the server that were just quite frankly ignored, became too much for me to put up with. I don't care whether or not I play on the most populated private server, but what I do care about is a team that will admit mistakes and take ownership of them. A team that learns and adapts, a team that interacts and is vocal and works with not on other team members, but their player base as well to make their server better. I don't have that amount of faith and trust in Elysium, and that's why I made the decision to quit their server.

2. Why do you play on so many private servers instead of focusing on one?

Everyone's reasons for playing on private servers differs, but the main reason I play on multiple is because I normally just focus on one character and only for PVE purposes. For example, my paladin on Kronos has every item he needs outside of raiding, all of his consumables for Naxxramas farmed, and I get no benefit from PVP gear at all. I need nothing to improve my character outside of raiding. So I often pick up a new project, such as my paladin on Hellfire, and work on getting everything I need outside of raiding to keep the game fresh and enjoyable.

Another reason I play on other private servers is because I want to see what other development teams have to offer. I hear a lot of rumors about other private servers and why they are good/bad, but you never truly know until you experience the content yourself. You have to put in the time and effort and play the server for weeks until you truly can get a grasp on how good/bad a server is. Every server is going to have bugs and errors, there's no way to avoid it. However, what is broken on one server is not always broken on another. And vice versa. You have put in the time to know how good/bad server is.

3. Do you think centralization is good for the private server community?

I do not. There's on two ways to make privates servers produce quality content, in my opinion, and that's profit or competition. Most servers portray themselves as non-profit, therefore the only way to encourage their developers to produce quality content and convince players to play there is competition. If there was only one server, and only one team, wether they worked hard or not produce quality content wouldn't matter. The player base would play on their server regardless of whether it was bad quality or not because there wouldn't be anywhere else to play. Competition in the private server community helps bring innovators into the scene such as Crestfall or Burning Crusade (Gummy's server) to help bring about the next generation of emulation for World of Warcraft that we've never seen before. If we only had one server and one team, we'd never get anything better than what we already have.