The life of Smuggler's Paradise

13.0, the beginning of the Green Layer.

Negotiations are going difficult with Legio Mortes, the 2nd and only other guild on the league side.
Avarice, our guild, is trying to involve the other guild more into server activities such as Uro Boros, Suslanger Storms, 3x3 training pvp, Firocious. But they're not as willing as we had hoped.

They came to our server about a month ago now. They were hyped, many started to level, and they asked for space and time to prepare for the big patch, 13.0. They wanted no-pvp dominions to gather as much Realgar as possible for the P2P stats, rubies and Talent Points bonusses.

Sadly, looking back at it now, it was all in vain. Now almost 2 months later, they still complain about us trampling them down and having advantages despite having all our tier 3 gear wiped off. Everyone got reset to tier 1 gear after all.

Now with the opening of Melting Isle in 13.0, we were hyped to see Legio Mortes at the entrance for some good old school PvP. It was 3 minutes away from opening, and many of us were going crazy in Discord. Alas, instead they teleport back to Novograd to sit back and afk as soon as they see 3 or more Avarice players arrive at the entrance. The hype quiet down quickly.

it's a sad situation and we're unsure what we're doing wrong when we're talking about reviving the PvP aspect of the game, or our server for that matter.

The fact that the russian server config was just copy pasted onto the EU version, resetting our minimum player requirement for Battlegrounds of 12 back to 24 did not help it either.
We could get 12 people to sign up to have some PvP on a daily basis, but 24 is too much to ask for.

You see, the usual daily activity in Avarice is about 20 players on average now, considering that only about 70% of those are endgamers now.
Legio Mortes is about 14 players, mostly endgamers too, but not enough to combine for some Battlegrounds. Or not all are willing to go for Battlegrounds.

We have players in good standings with the EU CM's that are able to ask questions directly and get answers fairly quick, but that doesn't allow them to change the server config for us.
In total, we were unable to do Battlegrounds for about 2 weeks. Praise the devs for fixing it!

The beginning of the Blue Layer, 5th of May.

Today, we finally had blue unlock. It was a big relief. Especially with raids and compass dungeons unlocking again. We had to wait for a long time considering there was no PvP at all happening.
Legio Mortes is still running away and avoiding all PvP in Melting Isle.

I have given up going to Kingdom of Elements. Al Rihat PvP is non existant either, we don't understand why Legio Mortes Doesn't increase the % on their gear with Al Rihat insignia's.

Even though we're about 20+ daily players in Avarice, it's a lonely existence when we talk about the PvP aspect. We spar between guildies in Arenas and 3x3's Training to keep the spirit alive. But fighting the same 10 players for 2 hours a day starts to bore quickly.

Some of us have been here for over 3 years, day in day out, hoping that someday, something will change. I'm one of those deluded players, still having hope for our game and our server. Despite a lot of backlash from the EU community. Telling us all to give up on it and go play on the russian servers.

I don't see myself abandoning everything I achieved just to have some more players to play with. It feels like an enormous waste of time.

We focus on our guild, and the players. The fun surely is there, when we talk to eachother over discord, there is usually good laughter. We managed to set up 2 good groups that focusses on content, in the hope to show the rest of the guild what you can do as a team, and that they would form groups themselves. We finally have some compass competition. We sort of made our own little society. It's like running a city builder game, with a very small population. And you've got to manage everyone's happiness. Keep the players happy, and they'll play in our guild.

If they won't be as happy to play, you'll lose out on players and the overall guild kinda falls to a stand still.
It's like a city builder on hardmode, without a reset button. If we fail, it's going to cost us dearly.

I know only a handful of players are going to keep on playing for the sake of playing, and for everything they've got so far from the past years and months. We're micromanaging everyone into content so no one falls to a standstill, feels bored and disappears.

We had the leftover players from the empire join us too. It's not many but it sure counts when adding to the rest. We peaked to 35 players! We felt very proud. The goal is clear, keep these numbers up, and try to gain more.

We want this to work. We want to play our game. We want Smuggler's Paradise to thrive.

3 weeks later.

We're now a good 3 weeks into the blue layer, and not much has changed. On the contrary. People have been signing up less for Nihaz raids, and a lot of players are not crafting t2 gear. Despite the overload of guides we have, people keep asking the same questions.

Only obs raids seem to be of interest. We believe that most players are scared to go Nihaz, learn mechanics they don't know, and screw the raid.

It's now the 2nd week in a row that we lack about 5 players for a full raid.
Last week, we had someone disappear on raid to go 3x3 on ru servers for 3 fights, saying he had a problem with his grandma. It's quite hard to organise anything and make it look serious appearently.

We did quite good on old raids, since developers did an oopsie and made all old raids hard to do, we now organise guild raids that runs through old raids to help people get their rubies and World Mysteries done.

Usually 10 to 12 players there, so the interest is there. I just wish they added relevant endgame loot to the old raids. So it'd be worth doing for. I like how old raids are harder now, and require a raid. We spent 2 hours figuring out with 9 players how to do Catherina in Eclipse. The reading buffs, figuring out, I love it! But the reward is nothing to write home about.

We started a petition too to make Core Morphers more accesible too. The amount of drama we have every single week of players outbidding others on the Auction Core Morphers is getting very frustrated on many. There's just not enough sources for Core Morphers for everyone.

A discord full of raid schedules, ingame raids with a lack of players, some players quitting that never spoke before. We're facing hard tidings. I hope we'll make it through until help arrives, developers bring improvements. New breath. I feel pathetic asking for this only a month after we got 13.0. But the numbers show, the demand for something new, shows.