WildStar’s head start players greeted with full realms and login queues

Yesterday, at 12:01am Pacific, Carbine Studios opened the servers for their new MMORPG, WildStar. Though the official launch isn't technically until June 3, yesterday marked the beginning of the three-day head start. If you pre-ordered the game, then this means you are now able to login and start playing.

That is, if you are able to login. WildStar has been suffering from intermittent downtime and server restarts. Though the downtime is short, it is periodic and can be frustrating for players looking to get the most out of their headstart. And in some cases, even when the servers are up, realms quickly become full, meaning you must wait for a spot to become available to actually start playing or choose a different realm. In some cases, the estimated wait time is over five hours, though it generally goes faster than that.

Launch day struggles are nothing new for MMOs, or really any game these days that requires internet connection, but it's still frustrating for players. To Carbine's credit, they've been quick to establish new servers and new realms to play on. Unfortunately, if you've already created a character on a certain realm you'll have to wait in the queue to continue playing with that character.

On one hand, this is probably good for Carbine as it shows high demand for their game. But it's disappointing as a gamer that these types of issues still plague online games. Hopefully many of these issues are solved come official release day on Tuesday.

The good news is that once you do login, WildStar is really fun. I've already logged 11 hours this weekend and at level 16 I'm still having a blast. I just wish I could login now instead of write this while waiting in a queue of over a thousand people. Check back for our review in progress sometime this week.