When I created Beskar, one of the first rules I made for the guild was that we would be all-Imperial, all the time. This was even before the game developers had even said whether a guild could have characters from both factions, or not (for the record, they finally settled on guilds being single-faction only). In other words, if you were a member of Beskar, logging into our server, your character options would be Imperial-only. Want to play Republic? Choose any other server and go for it.

This was a neat solution, in my opinion, for a variety of reasons. First, it meant our members had eight character slots for Imperial gameplay. If they so desired, they could play each advanced class of each Imperial class, ie: 4 classes x 2 advanced classes = 8 slots. Second, it meant that when people logged into our server, they would be focused on Beskar and the Imperial cause. Again, no one would be told not to play Republic; they were simply, and politely, asked to do so on any other server.

But then came news of the 1.2 game update and the Legacy system.

While Bioware has done nothing to make it compulsory to play both factions on the same server, they have certainly made it compelling, with cool rewards and unlocks on offer for people who do it. And for obvious reasons – if people are encouraged to play both factions on a server, and given incentives to do so, it will not only help server balance, it will keep people engaged with the game longer and tie them tightly to their server. That should mean longer subscriptions in most cases.

So, as guild leader, I had a choice. Should Beskar continue down the same path for reasons of “tradition” (and yes, I understand how funny a concept that must seem in a game that’s barely been out for three months), even though members were likely to break the rules and roll Republic characters anyway or, should we approach the topic with good old-fashioned common sense and sit down, as a group, and determine how we wanted to proceed in relation to the Legacy system?

I put the concept of having a guild for Republic alts to the members of Beskar. Overwhelmingly, the membership decided that having a Republic guild would be the best way to move forward. By and large the attitude was, “I would like to have some Republic characters on our server and I would like to do it openly and in a guild with other Beskar members…” Even people who want to play Imperial-only characters on our server saw no real harm to letting fellow members dabble on the dark, er, light side once in awhile. It was a great, mature discussion – as you always find in Beskar.

So there you have it. TOR is changing with the 1.2 update and, as a result, so is Beskar.