I haven't had huge queuing problems on my server, but if I did, I would roll another class on a low-pop server rather than start over. For one, I plan on trying out other classes (and maybe alignments) anyways. So no big deal if I do that now rather than later.

*shakes head* Folks here must be pretty new to MMOs if they are complaining about SWTOR. The only serious P1 issue I've seen here is the Taris problem. And you know what? I don't recall that being discussed in beta (not that I tested for that long). Most MMOs I have beta'ed (8-10 by now, almost all as a closed beta tester) have had MULTIPLE P1 issues carrying over from beta. I recall a couple games where if your connection dropped, you weren't likely to be able to login again for hours. In fact, I think it was Eve where you had to wait for the daily downtime to clear it in the beginning. And Yep, they had, and still have, a DAILY shutdown. I can't imagine the screaming if that had been the plan here. And I think it happens around 11am-noon EST. SWTOR has had the smoothest launch of any MMO I can remember testing. LotRO might have come close, but I still think this one is ahead by a large margin. Other than Taris, the queues are a symptom of the game's popularity, at least for now. Yeah, I wish games could figure out a better way to handle player population--as Eve has tried to do with one unsharded universe. But they would explode under the weight of a launch as big as this one.

Personally, I plan to solo as much of it as I can, since from an RP perspective that makes the most story sense. As for Heroics, you can do the 2+ ones easily if you wait until you've hit the end of that planet. The 4+ ones probably can't be solo'd, but again if you wait until you've outleveled them, the right 2 person group can do them. Try doing Esseles as a level 19 solo... I couldn't even notice my health bar (or actually my tank companion's) going down, and that was even with the Champions. For the final fight, I actually told my companion to step aside even though I'm a fledgling Balance Sage--not exactly known for my toughness

I have a Dell XPS16 Studio i7 Q820 w/8GB memory and an ATI 4670 running at 1920x1080 windowed. I have the graphics turned down all the way because performance is more important to me than beauty, and frankly, it looks fine to me. I get pretty good frame rates in all the normal PvE zones that I've been in so far. Haven't tried a warzone nor am I likely to though. In particular, no lag at all so far. I'm playing on an East Coast RP-PvE server.

I played all last evening on a server listed as Full (but no queue), and didn't notice any real performance problems. Of course, since the game relies on zones, it's possible some zones are worse than others. In terms of a launch, and I've been at a number since 2000, this is so far looking to be the absolute smoothest one I've yet to see. The next after this was Earth and Beyond, though it had a number of performance issues, though was relatively stable. If you think this is a bad launch, you haven't been around MMOs very much. At least, so far. We'll see what happens if the player pop hits 2mil

No, actually it will be very much like waves. People who buy physical copies will do so at various times during the day. I very much doubt that there'll be lines at Gamestop come the 20th waiting for them to open. And then they have to get home, install it, then (ha ha) download probably a pretty large patch. People who buy online will have to DL 20GB, and that can take from hours to days. This contrasts with EA, where just about everyone has a client all ready and can jump in immediately.

FYI, this post on reddit is tracking the EA waves. About half the preorders are in, it appears. It seems likely that most of the rest will get in on Thursday, which was also my prediction when EA started yesterday.

I'm working so I can't play atm, but I have had the game on, sitting on the server select page (for NA), and I can definitively say I haven't seen any listed as full. Most were light until about an hour ago, but the number listed as Standard has increased pretty steadily from about 2 a few hours ago to about 20-25 now. If you're looking at a web page, maybe that calculation is different.

OK folks, for reference, I got the pre-order code confirmation at 8:31 am EDT on 7/21, and got the EA invite at 7:25 am EST today (12/13)

This ought to teach Bioware and other companies that doing early access is best not done. If it wasn't for the fact that it's the BEST WAY to handle the one-time instantaneous load of a launch, I'd advise companies against it. Just given the number of pre-orders, this is probably the biggest MMO launch since WoW. BTW, I'm guessing that they'll have all preorders in by Thursday, barring a technical problem, and opened up 2 days earlier because a) they were ready, and b) that'll give everyone a minimum of 5 days, even though they only promised a maximum.