Carbine gives us some feedback on what broke, what is fixed, and who went crazy during the most recent WildStar Stress Test.

For this week's WildStar Wednesday Carbine decided to give us some postmortem feedback on all of the data collected during the most recent WildStar stress test including what, and in some cases who, broke around the office. Let's dig in!

As players who were lucky enough to receive a stress test invite about a week and a half ago prepared to start wreaking havoc on the WildStar servers, the Carbine team was preparing in their own way: making sure they had possible fixes in place for systems that they predicted would break under the influx of players. And boy did things break according to the Carbine team.

Carbine's Live Producer, Craig Turner, who spearheaded this phase of the stress test had some words to say about how the test was being handled around the Carbine Office.

"Within 2 minutes of flipping the switch to turn the stress test on, I was literally running through the hallways at the office. There was not going to be a slow ramp up of users, oh no. We were at critical mass almost immediately. It was awesome.

What wasn’t awesome is that we broke in a way we weren’t prepared for. We had some contingency plans in place to make things playable should we have fallen over in the spots we thought were fragile, but as things tend to happen with new systems; we didn’t know what we didn’t know. The great thing is, is this is exactly what the Stress Test was intending to accomplish. We needed to see what was going to break in new and interesting ways so that we can prevent those problems in the future."

So it would seem players did exactly what they were brought on to accomplish, but thankfully Craig (in between moments of panic) and other members of the weekend stress test team were able to collect the data they needed in order to help test, fix, and prevent a lot of the issues from cropping up again when the game goes live.

While getting data from stress tests is important, David "Scooter" Bass, senior community manager at Carbine, emphasizes how communicating with players during these tests is a key thing of importance as well.

"Updating the community regularly. This is tough when you've got people in three offices across the country tracking issues, but we wanted to commit, at the very least, to posting every half-hour (if not more often) with an update. Most of the time, these were pretty basic updates of "Still no updates, but people are looking into it!" but that commitment to constantly staying in communication with people, especially during what proved to be a frustrating game-play experience, is what we feel really creates strong communication between players and the team."

Most MMO players who participate in these types of stress tests or beta tests know how frustrating the play experiences can be. Even those aware of the fact that multiple issues may occur (as is often the case with stress tests) still would like to know "why" and what the development team is doing to help address the issues or, at the very least, if they are aware of them. In this matter it seems like Carbine agrees and is headed in the right direction by keeping players in the loop as much as they can.

In short, it would appear that the stress test was a success in the sense that things broke without Agent Voxine shooting up the place, and the Carbine team sounds like they will surely be doing more of these in the future as needed. For more information on WildStar be sure to check out the Official WildStar Website, and keep your browser locked to ZAM for more WildStar news updates.

See you in game!

Corey "Crimzen" Jenkins