Good morning testers of all flavors and stressedness.

In about 8.5 hours from now (depending on how long it takes me to write this post), we will begin our biggest stress test we've ever done. In fact, it'll be the first time that any of our testers has the chance to log in to multiple realms.

Yup, we are going to be spinning up multiple realms for this test. Stressing a single server is NOT good enough. Oh no. We had to turn it up to 11.

My teams are going to be as communicable as possible during these two stress tests (and probably others from the Studio). However, that means at a global level and not individual levels. There are a lot of you now, and we are going to fall even more behind if we tried to respond to every post and every thread. Expect to see lots of server status updates, lots of broadcasts in game, and if I can pull Scooter away from Streaming maybe even a VINE or two will go up. (Maybe it'll be Virtue curled up in a ball in the corner this time!)

We have a lot of goals for these two tests, and almost all of them take lots and lots of concurrent users to be logged on at the same time. We structured the Stress Tests to be friendly to NA time zones tonight, and friendly to EU and NA time zones tomorrow. To those EU testers that are going to stay up for the next 9-13 hours, I applaud you and I want you to do that if you feel up to it. HOWEVER, if you can only make one of the two tests, make Saturday's. Don't sleep through tomorrow's because you stayed up too late tonight :) (or do, play your way!)

Okay, so what do we need from you? Patience. Excitement. Tenacity. I actually do expect people to get to play during these two tests. Sure there will be crashes, but thankfully our architecture is such that if we have a server crash it's already spun back up before you can get logged back in (and you'll think you just had a client crash). We are going to be pushing buttons and causing distress here and there - but we'll tell you about that. We might cap the realms at a lower population forcing a few of you to sit in a realm login queue (we have to test that too - crappy as that might be), we might randomly shut down a realm and tell everyone to log in to another realm all at the same time to test our Auth bottleneck.

But we'll have fun while doing this.

Oh! This is important to Closed Beta Testers. Realms other than Nexus might spin up, and feel free to make characters on those realms (heck we might force you to!), but once the stress test is over don't expect to be able to access them.

To balance out Nexus being our sole Closed Beta server (and we are tracking metrics there) we might not do all of the 'fun stuff' we typically do at the ends of Stress Tests on that realm. Meaning if one of our engineers goes crazy and starts spawning multiple large monsters in various zones for people to gang up on, I'm going to tell them not to do it on Nexus to not pollute our metrics. (I also don't know if I've got the man power to do fun stuff on every realm/faction combo - which makes me sad - we'll see though).

FINALLY - phew - If you want to, one of the things that we are going to test more than we have previously is anything that is cross realm functionality. Account level friends with your friends being on a different realm, PVP queues, make a character on Realm B, log out make a character on Realm A, log out and back in on Realm B -- whatever you can think of. We are stressing not only capacity but all of the underlying multiple realm technology that we have.

And if you don't want to do anything other than play WildStar on the coolest sounding Realm available to you, absolutely. Have fun, and we are happy to have you :)

Oh, I almost forgot. I made a 2hr long Spotify playlist for one of the previous stress tests that's kind of amusing. You'll sense a theme from that, no?

WildStar Stress Test Tunes

We might need to add more songs to get it up to 4hr long playlist. Suggestions? :)

SO EXCITED!

It burns so good.

Craig "Cougar" Turner

- Sr. Operations Producer, WildStar