Council Chambers: No Server For You!

Council Chambers is all about the ins and outs of guild leadership in Star Wars: The Old Republic.  Each week, we’ll look at running and managing a guild through good times, bad times and everything in between.  

Monday’s big excitement came with the announcement of servers for guilds in the Pre-Launch Program. As you can see there, as well as over on Massively.com, the TOR Universe was all abuzz with people posting their guild’s server placement, compiling lists of total servers for the game, and sharing this information with anyone and everyone they could.

The RP-PvP Dilemma

Unfortunately, there is one group left out of all this excitement and mayhem: RP-PvP servers. The problem is that when the Pre-Launch Guild Program was created, only three categories of servers existed – PvE, PvP, and RP. RP at that time applied to PvE servers only – just PVE servers designated for roleplayers and that tends to draw communities that enjoy playing their characters and acting as that character would, rather than their offline selves. RP-PvP servers did not exist, and were not listed as options in guild server selection.

Later, BioWare decided – in part due to requests from the fan community – to add RP-PvP servers at launch as an option for players. However, because this was a later addition, the option never became available in the Pre-Launch Program.  This meant that guilds seeking an RP-PvP experience either had to select just RP or just PvP, or to choose to form their own communities.

While it may not have been the ideal outcome that RP-PvP guilds would have preferred, they banded together and formed a remarkably robust community to help those guilds that enjoy roleplaying and player-versus-player environments to connect with each other and look to form their own server communities pre-launch. Initially, this was managed through the official forums, and many guilds connected there. Once the forums came down in preparation for launch, the RP-PvP guilds moved their organizational efforts to http://frag-world.com/forum. As of Monday, December 12, 2011, there are fifteen guilds represented on the Frag World forums, the majority of which appear to be East Coast RP-PvP guilds. If your guild is one of those interested in RP-PvP and looking to connect with other RP-PvPers, I highly recommend you head over to Frag-world and connect with those guilds to work on a launch placement for your guild.

Community Construction Project*

In a previous Council Chambers piece, we talked about the innovative way that some guilds were using the Allies and Adversaries program to try and build a robust and active server community. This is similar, in that the RP-PvP community sought a way to bond together and unify and launch to build an active community on their server, but lacked access to the Allies and Adversaries program and so used official forums and then the Frag-world site to coordinate guilds and servers for Early Access.

There have also been efforts to do this through the http://swtor-rp.com community as well, designating super-servers of active roleplayers both in Europe and in the US to draw in as many roleplayers as possible. In this case, it seems as though a number of guilds that were assigned to other RP servers are moving to the Lord Adrass servers in the US, and The Progenitor server in the EU.

What is interesting about all of these examples are the ways in which players and guilds have worked together and used all manner of methods to meet up, connect with other guilds, establish connections, and work together to build robust, active, and rich servers with guilds and players of similar minds. So whether your guild was assigned a server that you are happy with, a server that you wish to switch from to join other guilds, or were not able to have a server assigned for the RP-PvP option, the good news is that there are lots of options to place your guild on a server with like-minded groups!

Things to Come

Now that we are into Early Access and the game is going live as I write, we’ve got plenty of guild related content to cover in the weeks to come.  Next week, we will be looking at Guild Hosting Options for websites while the Guild Headquarters is offline starting in early January, and the week after we will talk about how to find the perfect in-game locations for your guild activities, meetings, events, and roleplaying.  Keep writing with your questions, and we will answer them soon!  Until next week, looking forward to seeing folks online and in game.

* Author’s note: In case you were wondering about the subheader, it comes from a sociology experiment by the same name.  The article title comes from something far more fun and entertaining. Enjoy!

Got a question for Council Chambers?  Drop a line to ladyoftherepublic@gmail.com or post a comment here, and you may see your guild questions answered in a future column.