Forums for the Grievance Family

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.

Rock wrote: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...

Rock wrote: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...