Tonight, I queued at 6 PM CST to join our guild's pre-selected server. It's now 7:15 PM CST and I am still 150 in queue.
Here is the problem with queues. In order for me to move up in queue, the players in front of me have to be let into the game. In order for those players to be let into game, other players have to quit the game.
Seeing 1 hour + queue times in this pre-release phase is absolutely atrocious and completely unacceptable. This shows an extreme oversight on Bioware's part in anticipating the load on these servers.
The fact that Bioware knew exactly how many players were going to receive early access ahead of the official release means they should have been able to make a very accurate estimate on how to cap the servers, and how many servers to allow.
Furthermore, the guild deployment option should have given them EVEN MORE insight on how to balance the servers. Considering that they knew, yet again, ahead of time how many players from each guild to expect on each server, I find it completely unacceptable for the estimates to be this far off the mark.
Granted, they could have gone in the wrong direction, like Rift, and opened 40+ too many servers, leaving populations at 20%. Instead, Bioware went the opposite direction, and nearly every server is experiencing 50+ minute wait times on a Sunday night.
Listen Bioware. You're on your way to a great launch. You've minimized bugs. The game feels pretty solid.
HERE IS THE ISSUE. Many players have a very limited scope of time to play each night. Only a few of those have the option to queue up before they do their other tasks that consume much of their night. The majority might have a 2-3 hour time window each night to play this game.
If 1/3 of that time is being eaten by server queue times, they aren't going to subscribe to this game.
Fix this immediately. As in Monday morning. Or you WILL lose subscribers quickly.