Back in mid-September one of the Blue Mars beta testers, Marlii, creator of the excellent The Martian Mouthpiece website, had this idea:

Since there's a growing number of us around consistently, why don't we have a weekly meet and greet in-world? I'm thinking that we meet in different cities (like the seats in Shade City, different spots in Venezia, the hotel pool in Beach City, etc.) and someone could set up a streaming "playlist" (maybe an IMEEM playlist or something) that we can all listen to. It would be a cool way to meet the other colonists, explore the cities, and chit chat about stuff we talk about on the boards. How about it?

The suggestion was met with great enthusiasm by the rest of the beta testers, and would also serve as a real load-test on a single City. In a subsequent post in the Blue Mars forum, the date, time and location for the first Meet & Greet was fixed:

Date: October 4th, 2009
Time: 8pm GMT
Location: Shade City World Center

The Meet & Greet was a great success, and I managed to meet many people I had only see post in the forums. At one point, in the seafront lounge area we had 42 avatars within my draw-range (of 20m currently in Blue Mars). We even had a member of the Avatar Reality Team, Tiffany, aka Summer Studio, show up, doing a sterling job of welcoming everyone and keeping the conversations going.

I managed to either friend or chat with:

• Briarmelle Quintessa
• GoSpeed Racer
• Doc Holiday
• Phantium Longwell
• Ubik Rayna
• Chris Remspecher
• Dawny Cinquetti
• peruka
• Dazz Anvil
• Zetsumei Ieyashi
• Taarna Welles Taarna Welles
• Summer Studio
• Cadae Jewell
• Insomnia Sleepless
• Esprite Xavier
• Trayben Allegro
• Veron Helstein
• Reginald Beck
• Azure Sweetwater
• Hendrick Schroeder
• Atashi Yue
  

Two names there, peruka and Taarna Welles Taarna Welles, show that you can have just one name in Blue Mars, or even four!

My fps dipped down to 3fps at peak, which is not bad considering I have an aged Pentium 4, others were quoting 50fps! But come Christmas.... :)

I hope Avatar Reality can now check their logs and give us the peak concurrency figure. It should be interesting.