Playable Worlds is running a server slam for its sandbox MMO Stars Reach on Saturday, August 8 at 2:00 p.m. EDT, one of the last technical checks before the game enters early access on August 18.
The event is designed to replicate the opening hours of early access rather than to showcase later content. MassivelyOP reports that players are being asked to create entirely new characters, gather in the starting zone of Haven, and work through the tutorial before heading out into open space — the same path a launch-day crowd would take, compressed into a single scheduled window.
What the test is for
The value of the exercise scales with attendance: the more players who join, the more data the studio collects about how its servers behave under a launch-shaped load. Playable Worlds has told participants to expect downtime and, in its words, various oddities during the session. That is the point of a slam — the failures it produces are cheaper to find now than on August 18.
The slam sits inside a short run of pre-launch events. A Fireside Chat livestream with the development team was scheduled to premiere an hour before the test, and a homestead building class is planned for Sunday, August 9 at 1:00 p.m. EDT, running both in-game and on Twitch.
The August 18 date has not been universally welcomed. MassivelyOP frames the launch as arriving whether or not the wider MMORPG-playing public considers the game ready, and the run of tests and classes in the days before it reads as the studio trying to answer that in public rather than in a patch note.
The server slam is the studio’s answer to the technical half of that question. It leaves ten days between the test and the early access launch to act on whatever the session turns up, and the data it produces depends entirely on how many players turn up to produce it.
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