There probably is no TL;DR for this so embrace yourself for the longest text in your life.
History:
Back in the days of Elite version 1.0, there were two owners, a might Phreak and a mighty Jo, their goal was to make one amazing server that everyone could play and enjoy.
then it went down.
Modern Day:
Same as the history lesson I just gave earlier, now this is Elite v2.0, and its only Phreak as the owner now.
The server is not a pay to win server, so you're not forced to donate, everything can be earned ingame through farming, or through blackmailing some specific people, so it's pretty easy to get maxed out within the first couple of days if you really are in the mood to play.
Donations are mostly to get custom costumes, or easy way out of farming which literally takes a couple days to do, and of course to help pay for server to keep it up because why not, it costs money.
There's daily pvping, raids go up to 60 people and could go to 60v60 at times if they actually do know how to organize PvP, most of the time they don't, but if they were able to, 60v60 is pretty possible to get on a daily basis.
The server is up for around 3 weeks now, PvP kills are up to 141k as of the time of writing this, and that of course includes the Battlefield Rune which increases kills by x2, so give or take around 70k kills in 3 weeks time is a good amount of PvP.
GRBs are useful to get maxed out, so if you join on a Sunday and just make a guild, or join a guild, do GRB and you're pretty much good to go on your first day ingame.
GS's in my opinion are pretty much close to useless, except for a specific someone winkwink.
I haven't had to experience any GMA's yet, some GM's are okay. [ADM]Dyn is a fake ADM but I love him regardless, and Phreak loves talking about himself a lot, but i love the guy so why not.
Of course, every server has its issues with their own staff members, as is this server, but from what I've seen, if they can get through some "managerial" changes, massive staff changes, and attempting to maintain a discord server as professionally as
possible. I use the word possible as loosely as I can because it's impossible with such a community that Shaiya has, but they try.
Moderators on the discord try their best, and that's good enough for me, and probably the rest of the players on the server.
Ollo section:
I would love to dedicate this section of my review towards my favorite player of all time, Sir [ollo], guild leader of Fierce One, previously known as Micropussy.
He is one of the best hunters currently in existence of the Shaiya community.
8/10 server join now because why not.