Any ideas as to what server we will be on at launch?

[Enygmatik]

Some more around this, from reddit:

Hey all,
I'm the Director of Operations here for Carbine Studios and Gaff wanted me to handle this question for him.

Currently we have 9 realms open in both NA and EU. The EU realm names should not change at this point in time. The NA realms are more complicated. Four of the NA realm names have been around for over a year now, and we thought it would be pretty cool if we named the original realms after our major continents in the game (Olyssia, Alizar). Fast forward thousands of users playing the beta, and this is actually really confusing for us.

For example: A player reports "Alizar is crashing Olyssia" ... uh.. Is that the Alizar realm crashing the Olyssia world zone? Or is that the Alizar world zone crashing on the Olyssia realm? Soooo, we need to retire those two names for launch. So Alizar, Olyssia, and Cassus will have their names changed after open beta.

Additionally, "Nexus" is probably one of the few things that brand new players know about our game and I'm really afraid that if we leave that realm name up at launch it will be SILLY overcrowded. BUT! I am going to move that realm name to be the name of our PTR. So the Nexus realm (our original beta realm) is still going to be a part of WildStar (which is only fitting).

Okay, so what about all of the other realms that we haven't opened up to the Beta? I'm holding onto that list right now for a few reasons. The first one is that we haven't finalized our single realm PCU estimations/optimizations. The second being that WildStar is still growing, and in only 24 hours of Open Beta we've seen more people play our game than we have ever before seen - and those numbers are still climbing.

But what about the name reservations? What about organizing our guilds? To the former; name reservations are global. This means you will not select a realm when you reserve a name. Your name is attached to your email address for 90 days post launch, and no one else can get it. As to organizing your guilds, I'm totally sympathetic to your plight. I've done my fair share of day 1 guild organization and I remember one game in the past that we had to decide "Pick the first PVE realm that starts with a 'C'". I understand that isn't optimal, and I'm going to prevent our guilds from doing THAT level of last minute coordination.

But I'm going to hold that realm name list as long as possible in order for me to open up as few of realms as possible at launch. Having high concurrency realms is EXTREMELY important. The more people we can squeeze into a single realm means that we are setting up WildStar for success. Why is that? Because there will be more people online to group with at off hours, the world will feel more alive, and various other reasons (but I'm feeling like I've typed too much and I should stop about now )

Our fear is that if we release a realm list of X, Y, and Z realms, that if we find out that we don't need to open up Z at launch, but we've said we were going to, that we'd be forced into opening Z as well. Then we run the risk of Z (or another realm) being low population because everyone is spread out through all of the various realms lowering the individual realm concurrency of every realm. This example only uses 1 realm, and the overall world wide WildStar concurrency won't vary THAT much with a single realm, but this was for the purposes of the example. What if we release 400 names, yet our plans suggest that we'd only need to open 200 (numbers completely blown out of proportion for the example).... those realms could be pretty empty at that point. That's what I'm trying to avoid.

We will post the list before headstart, but I'd love to hold it until 24-72 hours before launch.

Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2 ... ar/chdxe9p

[Amy]

Thanks for posting that info, I was quite curious about that as well. Glad to know its global, makes it so much easier.

[Rock]

I swear, is this their first MMO? I'm not real confident about launch day at this point. If they are maximizing what servers they do spin up at launch then I think we're looking at queue's at the very least on launch day if not out and out crashing of servers...

[Oaire]

I swear, is this their first MMO? I'm not real confident about launch day at this point. If they are maximizing what servers they do spin up at launch then I think we're looking at queue's at the very least on launch day if not out and out crashing of servers...

They have said that they will be using an overflow type system for the first couple of zones so that should help with cutting down on queues.

[todmcfly]

Still no server? Getting antsy

[Soransis]

My guess is ops week.

[Zippity]

I swear, is this their first MMO? I'm not real confident about launch day at this point. If they are maximizing what servers they do spin up at launch then I think we're looking at queue's at the very least on launch day if not out and out crashing of servers...

Most MMO's always run into a few issues come Live Launch... I can only remember 1 maybe 2 games that had perfect launches the first few days it went live, and I'm not talking about Early Access... Only a couple of the early access's I participated in over the years had issues out the gate, it was mostly once it went Public Live that issues reared their ugly heads...

I would love to assure you that everything will be perfect out the gate, but that guarantee would be a fabrication... There is really no telling how it will go... And even if it were their first MMO, I've seen seasoned game companies have issue ridden MMO launches, so being new has nothing to do with it...

It is just a part of how MMO's sometimes operate, and you just need to learn that now so you won't be so upset IF it happens, which of course we are all hoping it doesn't...

Anything is possible, but 99.999% of the time, the MMO Dev's are usually good at squashing the issues post-haste with minimal down time... Only exception I ever experienced was with Age of Conan's initial release...

I wouldn't worry so much...

Zip

[Cercei]

Even tho I decided to skip Wildstar I hope that everything goes smoothly for you guys on launch day! Isn't early access literally a week from today? I would assume they have to release the server list within the next few days so folks can plan.

Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk

[bbates024]

Headstart weekend is normally where you see some crazy patches and unannounced downtime normally to prevent some kind of random exploit that is causing people gain exp/currency to fast.

Anyways open beta went pretty smooth way better then it went in SWTOR. I'm not worried about it to much as long as it isn't constant down time I'm good to go.

Time to stock up on energy drinks and catheters!
Only joking on one of them.

[Ambryana]

Has anyone seen this server status page yet? There are several new realms listed. I'm wondering if this is what we'll have to pick from at launch.

http://wsstatus.com/