This coming Wednesday, the 15th of October, Carbine studios will be taking Wildstar offline for up to 24 hours. No, the game isn’t dying. In fact, Carbine is migrating to Megaservers. So, what does this mean for the average player? Its pretty simple really: The servers for each region and gametype are being consolidated. Going forward the North Americas will have one PvE Megaserver and one PvP Megaserver. The same is true for the EU. All characters of level 3 or more will be moved along with all their gear. Additionally, guilds, arena teams, social circles, mail and auction items will also be moved. It’s important to note that if you have a level 2 or 2 character that has not been logged into the game within the last 30 days, it will be deleted. Thats the technical details out of the way. So what else is happening?

Due to the loss of game time, Carbine will be rewarding all players with a month’s worth of Boom-Boxes. You can open one per day, and Boom-Boxes contain rare items such as mount customizations, gear, housing decorations and the like. Additionally, all players are getting one day of free game tame, to be credited no later than the end of October. With the move comes the possibility of identical names, so Carbine will be prompting players to add a surname to their characters the first time they log into the new Megaservers. As a happy bonus, if you love your character’s gear, but not their name after 400 hours of gameplay, you will be able to change your name at that time as well. Not that I plan on renaming Shelbybot. That would never happen, because that name isn’t stupid at all. This also extends to Guild names, since it’s entirely likely two guilds on the old servers had the same name. Carbine has also created special channels for players transferring to the Megaservers from French or German realms.

The Megaserver transition is intended to increase server capacity and make it easier to group with friends and guildmates for raiding and PvP. Some see this as an admission on Carbine’s part that WildStar is dying, while others see it as a smart move given that Guild Wars 2 has already made the jump and WoW looks like following suit soon.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments!