surnames
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WildStar's megaservers deploy this week
Carbine has just announced that WildStar's megaserver implementation, first revealed in September, will deploy this Wednesday. Megaservers are intended to increase server capacities and deal with fading populations without disrupting players, though they have the side effect of muddying server communities and eliminating the ruleset servers on which players originally rolled. The servers will go offline on Wednesday, October 15th, at 8 a.m. EDT, for up to 24 hours. To make up for the extended downtime, Carbine is giving all players a month's worth of in-game Boom-Boxes and a free day of game-time. Characters level 3 and up, as well as guild, arena teams, circles, mail, and auction items, will move intact, but characters under level 3 that haven't been played in the last month will be nuked. The team is simultaneously introducing surnames to avoid duplicate name conflicts.
Nethaera talks about supporting roleplayers
There's a huge forum thread over on the forums right now (though it's been going for the better part of a month) about Blizzard putting in more for roleplayers -- player housing, surnames, and "a more interactive world" are all asked for, and much later in the thread, Nethaera does weigh in with a nice long statement about how Blizzard is dealing with all of this stuff. The bottom line, as always, is that there's only so many hours in the day, and Blizzard has to prioritize what gets worked on. And as of yet, neither player housing nor surnames or any of the other suggestions have made their way to the top of the list.Which makes sense -- as many roleplayers as there are, nobody would really call them the primary audience of the game. There are definitely other games out there that are much better for defining a character. Which doesn't mean that we'll never see these things ingame -- player housing has been wanted (and promised) for a long time, and surnames are something that's common in almost every MMO but World of Warcraft. Neth just says that it's a matter of time, and that while player housing is still on the horizon, the world of Northrend will be more immersive and interactive than the rest of the game so far. Which is good news not just for roleplayers but for everyone else as well.
How soon is now?
Restless for the 2.2 patch to go live, players have been flooding the official forums for updates on long requested features: surnames, player housing, engineering revamp, to name a few. The response to all these requests was the same: we'd like to implement these ideas, but don't know when.The only glimmer of hope the Community Managers could give was about class reviews. Word is Ret Paladins and Enhancement Shamans are receiving "changes" sooner rather than later and for Priests, the Holy tree and Discipline tree will receive some dev lovin'. For those classes not listed and feeling the need for review, there's always the next expansion. TBC did wonders for the druid Balance and Feral trees. Now we must wait for the Voice Chat patch to go live and then Blizzard can be more specific about what game changes are coming next and which stay on the back burner.
