The Nexus - Beta Scams, VLogs, a Wiki, and an Ellipses

Finally back at full strength today after a week of just feeling run down. I am going to get down for a double dip at the gym tomorrow. Hopefully get things back on track. I have been particularly bad at getting off of fast food since getting back form Boston. We were able to think of 3 nights that we ate food out of the fridge instead of running down the street for something. Plus with the snow ... oh right, it snowed 4 inches over the last week. WTF April!

It's been an interesting week for Wildstar. Tuesday and Wednesday were all about the start of beta, and that pretty much consumed the news for the week. But I have a few items I can go into detail on, or provide links to.

• Warnings about beta scams
• Let's Talk About Servers! Friday Feature on the Wildstar Blog
• Richie posts the first episode of Nexus Talk
• Late Night Dominion records their first episode.
• A Wildstar Wiki steps forward

Warnings About Beta Scams

Lots of excitement about beta phase one starting this week. So much excitement that it is ripe for the pickin. The harvest of course is your personal information. Be wary of scams.

Here is a couple of warnings from Carbine:

Also on their Facebook Page:

And if a member of Protostar Corp is telling you he doesn't want your personal finance details, you know it's serious!

One final message about the Beta process from twitter that may put you at ease

Let's Talk About Servers!

I can't stress enough how much I hope that exclamation point is intended to be sarcastic. I also cannot stress enough how much I respect the work of David Ray, the Lead Network & Database Engineer at Carbine Studios. I respect it...but I don't much care about the details. Fortunately there wasn't a lot of nitty gritty here. Fortunate for someone like me who doesn't care too much about how this magic internet thing works. Unfortunate for anyone who is interested in server architecture, because this post only touched on the very basics. There was one quote I wanted to pull out though.

Chat can be handled on one to three of the daemons.  If it’s a direct message from one player to another, then it can just be handled on the user daemon.  If the chat is a say or a yell, it needs to go through the world daemon to figure out who is in the area to “hear” it.  And then if the chat message is for a user who’s not…. Well I’ll leave that feature for a later announcement. ;)

 Way to sneak in something to speculate about. I can only think of three possibilities.

• not...on your server. seems a likely candidate. Blizzard has the Battlenet system that works not only across servers but also across all Blizzard games. Guild Wars 2 has cross server communication and grouping.
• not...online. Perhaps they are hinting at some mobile device integration.
• not...part of your faction. They have not talked about interfaction communication, and that is something certain portions of the community are very interested in. But, since this information is coming from a network designer I feel like the middle two options are the most likely.

If you are interested in reading some basics on MMO server design you can read David Ray's post on the official blog.

Nexus Talk a new show from Bogotter

As I have mentioned before, I am a supporter of Gamebreaker TV and their hosts. Richie Procopio is a gaming fanatic and a father of two young boys. He's passionate and goofy. I think he's a fantastic addition to any fan base and I hope he comes to enjoy Wildstar as much as he enjoys Guild Wars 2.

Late Night Dominion

Another two Wildstar cast started this week. I think they stream it live, perhaps the details will be explained in the video.

Wildstar Wiki

I am a little hesitant to bring this up at this stage. It looks well constructed, but the information is pretty sparse. Time will tell if it becomes a solid source of Wildstar information.

That's it for today. Lot's of conversation still going on at Wildstar Central in the Item Slot thread started by Primus. Pop over there if you are interested in helping the team name the remaining item slots.

Have a good weekend, I'll be back on Sunday to talk about the most dangerous game!