Ysera

The thing that was the Ysera server, it's time to discuss it. Unless Alzheimers is setting in and I already have. I don't remember talking about it though, so it will be uniquely entertaining to me, if not to you. Anyway:

Ysera was a pre-BC and post-AQ server that opened up sometime after I was sick of playing on the Khadgar server and I decided to roll a new character there. I leveled up my hunter at launch, and managed to fold in with a good group of raiders who were all motivated to clear content asap.

We wanted to raid, but we had a specific motivation of supporting our GM's desire to do the AQ questline as quickly as possible and get him the Scarab Lord title. We were right there, leading the Horde in progression (guild name: Static) and starting our Molten Core grind when out of the blue, it happened.

Transfers had just opened on Ysera at the one-month mark. People started coming over from other realms and we had a few applicants, and we were just getting used to this when suddenly on a Monday night at 2am one of the Alliance transfers took the scepter of the shifting sands that he transferred with to Silithus and rang the AQ gong.

It was the single most horrible thing to ever happen to a WoW server.

Basically, the event is designed to last from the time the gong is rung until server maintenance. Maintenance happens on a Tuesday, so this transfer from off-realm started the event, no one was prepared for it, and no one got to participate in it because it ended four hours later when the servers went down for maintenance.

The effect on the server was devastating. Several of the top guilds (including ours) disbanded within a week. People immediately stopped logging in and went back to their old servers, or new ones. Ysera was crippled and demoralized, and people who had worked hard to prepare their guilds for the grind were infuriated.

With my guild in a shambles I left, depressed. I haven't logged back into my hunter on Ysera more than a couple times in the years since, considering it a failed experiment. Then this last week, I decided to give it another shot and logged her back in.

As it turns out, I didn't have false memories about how much fun my character was, it still is. My lady Tauren hunter has an old PvP title, a good name (Teacher) and is pretty fun to play. So for the last week I've been logging in over there and slowly leveling her up. I might just keep playing her for a while, enough time has passed between then and now that I can have fun again with an old toon.