Server:Ysera US/Guilds

Ysera is a young US PvE server which came online March 31, 2006. At the end of June 2006, it was available for inbound paid character transfers - attractive to those looking for a young, low population server with stable hardware. As a result, the population is part native reroll and part transfer, leading to some tension between native guilds and transfer guilds.

The Ysera gate opening event exacerbated the friction between native and transfer guilds. Since many guilds were hoping to participate in scepter creation quests and the reputation benefits of the all day world event, the opening itself had been delayed to August 12th, with sufficient warning for as many people as possible to participate. However, others were equally impatient for AQ content to be unlocked on the server. On August 8th 2006, Valafar, a warrior in  who had transferred to the server with the scepter quest partially completed, rang the gong in the early morning hours pre-maintenance, several days before the date several other guilds had agreed upon for the event. As a result, most of the world event occurred during the weekly maintenance window. Many players felt this cheated the rest of the server out of participation in the world event and prevented other scepter quest holders from receiving their epic Bug mounts. Others were more frustrated that Axion had resorted to a transfer to fulfill the part of the quest line they were as yet unable to accomplish (clearing BWL in five hours).

The ensuing complaints and debate appeared on Blizzard general, customer service and technical forums, in addition to multiple threads on the Ysera forums themselves. Since then, Blizzard has increased the transfer lockout on new servers to six months from server launch. Empyrean lead the charge of guild progression for a good number of months, but they slowed down because they lost players to transfer guilds that were further into instances. Then their original GM, Corwin, left the game and caused the guild to completely stop their fast progression and take a small break. Empyrean came to life again in the last months of 2006 under the leadership of Sparc forming an alliance with The Jaded. The progression charge was passed on to Malice who managed to slay the Four Horsemen in late November but could not reach Kel'Thuzad before the expansion came out.

Now, with The Burning Crusade in stores and most players of this realm deep into Outlands, all the frictions between natives and transfers have somewhat disappeared. There are still disgruntled people who have not come to terms with the idea, but most of the guilds and players in the server have benefitted from transfers. It's still a coin toss to see which guilds will be successful and which guilds will disband with the new 25 man raiding instances. Gear will no longer be an excuse for many guilds and now it will all come down to guild stability, good leadership and strong bonds within the guilds.