One of my guildies wrote this it is exactly how I feel and I thank Bioware for all their hard work over the years of production, and an amazingly well thought out release from a Systems Administrator perspective.
"Context. Context is the cold slap of reality to unrealistic expectations.
This is the launch of an AAA MMO. Every AAA MMO that has launched in the past 12 years has had launch time issues. One of the common denominators has been the population balance at launch. Note, I consider MMOs launched when it is open to pre-orders, not to the general population, keep that context in mind throughout the rest of the message.
People are pointing out the queue times of other MMOs to point out two things:
1: Queue times at launch should be expected.
2: That other launches have been handled far, far worse.
Launch time balance is a hard thing for companies to get right. Very hard. Because they don't control their customers. While there are general trends and things they can do to encourage people to balance the load some people will say to hell with that and pick overloaded servers because of loyalty to the name in Beta, or the name is cool, or they have friends/coworkers who are playing on that server. Or the most counter-intuitive of them all, they don't want to go to a low-pop server which bones the server just opened to relieve pressure on the other servers.
The best they can do is try to provide as many options as possible, give the unaffiliated people as much information as possible, and pull every trick they can to get people onto the servers which are lightly loaded. Which, according to an interview over on Ten Ton Hammer (if memory serves) they are doing.
But the reality is they have a tenuous balancing act. Too few servers and they've got massive queues. Too many servers and if the player base radically contracts post launch they've blown money on resources and now have to try to figure out server merger strategies. What they want to hit is a balance where populations during launch are slightly overloaded, but not too much, so that when the eventual 1-monthers bail on the game they have just enough decently populated servers.
In the same interview the Bioware rep. said they are shooting for 15-30m queue times on the outside. The don't want more than that. I remember Aion's launch. 15-30m queue times would have been a dream. Rift, same thing. Star Trek Online, same thing. Yet a week after launch queues dwindled and disappeared. I wasn't around for WoW's launch but was there for City of Heroes, same thing. Hell, Asheron's Call back in 2000 still had population problems a few months in. We knew when the servers hit over 2500 concurrent connections because everyone started lagging; they didn't have queues.
Let's put that 15-30m queue into perspective. Compare that wait to going to the opening night release of a wildly popular movie franchise (Star Wars, I choose you!)/ There's lines to get tickets, a line to get in the door, a line to get snacks and then the mess of actually finding a seat. Then you have 20-30m of the pre-previews commercials before another 10-15m of previews. The whole process might take you upwards of 2 hours all to see a movie with a 1h45m runtime. You literally have queued for longer than the entertainment took to digest and spend enough to purchase an MMO and a month or two of subscription time.
So far TOR's launch has been the best AAA MMO launch I've ever been a part of. Before this Cryptic's handling of City of Heroes was my benchmark against which other MMO launches were judged, and failed. Bioware launched 2 days early, has managed to get ~700,000 preorders ramped into their game in under 3 days, will have all the pre-orders in before the weekend. This gives the December preorders, people who thought they'd get a day at most, a full 2 weekend days more than they were expecting. Meanwhile their servers have had no downtime that I'm aware of, minimal lag (some people have exceptions but it is on an individual basis which points away from the server) and hitting their 15-30m queue times.
That's not something to call a failure. That's to be applauded, recorded, and pointed to as the gold standard every AAA MMO from here on out should try to hit.
I understand completely people's grumpiness for not getting in. After so many years I'd be bouncing off the walls too. But I've got an adorable fluffball of a ferret that I can entice into tussling with me. Ok, she tolerates me holding her for about 35.7 seconds at a time. But queue times melt to the uber cuteness of ferrets. So for those without ferrets I offer this, two ferrets snuggling in a hammock."
