Regarding server queues

[Robby_]

I don't mind queues that are 5 mins or so. But on Mind Trick right now we are at 30+ mins and it isn't even peak.

 

My guild was auto created here and I've level 24. I'm not uprooting all my guildmates and starting over so that isn't an option to go elsewhere.

 

The queues should not be this long.

 

i dont mind waiting 15 to 30 minutes but after that its tooooo long.

[SmokeGSU]

I think the biggest issues is.......... what happens to these queues after launch? Unless free transfers are made possible, why are people going to want to reroll on a different server when they've already spent several hours of in game time on a server that has enormous queue times? Unless free transfers are made available, I find it difficult to believe people will willingly want to transfer and lose all that time despite horrendously long queue times.

 

I think the best option would have been to of had servers allotted that from the start that were designated as pre-launch guild implemented and other servers for people who had pre-ordered the game but not been pre-assigned a guild and server. I see the biggest issue as being people who weren't in a guild (like the Aussie players) are designating such-and-such server as the "unofficial Oceanic server", which really shafts the US guild players who were preassigned that server from the start. You go from having a normal server pop to suddenly have a flood of hundreds or thousands of players to that server. Is there even a cutoff for how many people can join a server? It seems to me that if queue times (the past few nights for me have been at least an hour) are in excess of an hour, and God help those who've been in queues 5+ hours, that the players should NOT have been allowed to continue joining that server!

[TUXs]

30 min, 35 min, 45 minutes is NOT "reasonable". I'll wait 5-10 minutes, but anything longer is unacceptable in my mind.

 

I understand your (Bioware's) position and concern with future populations - I share it as well and I'm VERY pleased you understand that's a concern - too many developers don't take future populations into consideration and will simply dump in more and more servers.

 

However...as a paying customer, the idea of waiting 45 min every day to play will turn me off much quicker than a shrinking populous. Servers can always be merged, my time simply can't be extended though.

 

In addition, this is just EARLY ACCESS. What happens next week? What happens after Christmas? If the wait continues to be nearly an hour every time, it will be a major issue that you'll be forced to contend with - either with cancelled accounts or adding the resources required to accommodate your customers in a timely manner.

[EvilEwak]

I agree these ques times are grazy long estimated time means nothing cause ur usually in que 2-3 hr longer than that or even longer. How about opening more servers like a Oceanic one, and free up some room for us in the mainlands

[coffeoholic]

There are some things you can do to help the que.

 

Don't tab out auto running into a wall. You know how many people I have seen doing this?

 

Things like that aren't helping this que.

Edited December 18, 2011 by coffeoholic

[DedeeB]

There are several issues with not having enough servers. 1. the wait time to play is ridiculous! I have been waiting over 45minutes & just 1/2 way through. 2. My husband is playing on his computer while I wait to get in and he is so frustrated as there are WAY TOO many people playing that people keep taking his task just before he gets it. Making him WAIT and he's actually playing! 3. Doesn't make sense to go to another server as we have been building our characters already on the overloaded server. We had 1st day early game access so we didn't know the particular server you assigned to our guild would be so ridiculously over loaded. Please make more servers for new comers!!! This Game is awesome but how worth it is it if we cannot play!!!

[kjumper]

More servers now

[MookieFett]

I think the biggest issues is.......... what happens to these queues after launch? Unless free transfers are made possible, why are people going to want to reroll on a different server when they've already spent several hours of in game time on a server that has enormous queue times? Unless free transfers are made available, I find it difficult to believe people will willingly want to transfer and lose all that time despite horrendously long queue times.

 

I think the best option would have been to of had servers allotted that from the start that were designated as pre-launch guild implemented and other servers for people who had pre-ordered the game but not been pre-assigned a guild and server. I see the biggest issue as being people who weren't in a guild (like the Aussie players) are designating such-and-such server as the "unofficial Oceanic server", which really shafts the US guild players who were preassigned that server from the start. You go from having a normal server pop to suddenly have a flood of hundreds or thousands of players to that server. Is there even a cutoff for how many people can join a server? It seems to me that if queue times (the past few nights for me have been at least an hour) are in excess of an hour, and God help those who've been in queues 5+ hours, that the players should NOT have been allowed to continue joining that server!

 

been waitint for join since abou 7pm ................ :(

[Ravill]

Can't really say anything that hasn't been said already at this point but when it comes to resolving these queue issues I hope the devs are looking to the future instead of just the present. Adding servers and fiddling with them in all sorts of ways to control the population is nice but if you want to make people happy give them a grace period for disconnect issues and allow for FREE (can't emphasize that enough) server transfers so that years down the road the players themselves are capable of adjusting the populations of the servers to suit their needs.

[Rahid]

There are some things you can do to help the que.

 

Don't tab out auto running into a wall. You know how many people I have seen doing this?

 

Things like that aren't helping this que.

 

Doesn't work anyway. Tried this after waiting in my first 1hr queue. Still got logged out while I was eating dinner.

[SilensNeco]

I have been waiting 1 hour and 30 min and I am half-way through the queue. This is by far the most ridiculous wait time I have ever been in. It took me three hours to get in yesterday..I got to play for 30. I can't change servers because my guild is on an overpopulated server. I will straight up stop playing if this not fixed soon. Absolutely ridiculous.

[coffeoholic]

Doesn't work anyway. Tried this after waiting in my first 1hr queue. Still got logged out while I was eating dinner.

 

I hesitate to tell you how to do this. Don't hit autorun as in the keybind, you have to put a pencil or something in the keyboard to stick the key down to run.

[Apano]

I can honestly say that I've never been in a queue. Of course I only play from 6am-12pm. I work at night, working right now. Edited December 18, 2011 by Apano

[coffeoholic]

I can honestly say that I've never been in a queue. Of course I only play from 6am-12am. I work at night, working right now.

 

Graveyard shift unite. I'm about to head into work. I could play there but sadly our internet connection is down.

[Rahid]

I hesitate to tell you how to do this. Don't hit autorun as in the keybind, you have to put a pencil or something in the keyboard to stick the key down to run.

 

What is wrong with you man? You complain about people doing it, then you tell them how to do it better?

[OrionBowman]

Maybe you guys should of released some Oceanic Servers from the start even though the countrys werent scheduled for purchase release, wouldve stopped us clamming up the US west coast servers for one.

[TactualRain]

While we can’t promise that there won’t ever be queues, we can promise you that we are taking this matter seriously and constantly reviewing them to make sure that they are manageable and reasonable.

 

I'm not sure I'm seeing evidence of that. 90 minute queues off peak? Some people with 5-6 hour queues? In no way is this managed or reasonable.

 

On any given day I have maybe 2 hours to play. If I get home, and spend 90 minutes to queue, 3/4 of my "2 hours to play" time has been spent in a queue. There's no value for money in that experience.

 

I think we can all agree the current situation isn't working for anyone - it's giving BioWare/EA negative press, and people can't play the game. Because the problem's ongoing, and ballooning, you've now got to the point where people have friends entrenched in servers - say level 30+ - and are going to want to hop into that same group.

 

...and be rewarded for trying to play with their friends by enourmous queues. The people already there and entrenched don't want to move because of their investment, and perhaps new people they've met.

 

Seriously? Fix it.

[coffeoholic]

What is wrong with you man? You complain about people doing it, then you tell them how to do it better?

 

If they didn't already know how to do it then odds are they weren't really thinking about doing it or trying it, or they would have found out eventually. I learned the trick from RIFT and tested it in TOR Beta.

Edited December 18, 2011 by coffeoholic

[KMFA]

I hope that when we start paying monthly it is all fixed .

I do not see a need to pay money to wait to play a game IMO

[Boffo]

What is considered a reasonable queue wait, BW?

[roszce]

since I've got so much time on my hands sitting in queue, let's do some quick server queue theorycrafting.

 

There are currently 55 US Servers marked as FULL on http://www.swtor.com/server-status

 

Many players are reporting queues of 900-1000+ players, the estimated 5min queues appear to hold roughly 250-300 people. I'm going to give Bioware the benefit of the doubt and assume the average queue size works out to somewhere around 500 people, somewhere near the middle, leaning towards the low end.

 

That's 27, 500 people waiting in queues.

 

Even if you love Bioware so much you really want to believe the average queue size is only 300 people (it isn't, but let's go with it) - that would still leave 16, 500 people sitting in queues.

 

Here's a tip for the artists and scientists at Bioware: It was time to open more servers a long, long time ago.

 

I appreciate the goal of long term stable server populations. This is not achieving that. This is pissing off your customers before the game has even properly launched. This is turning people away from the game.

 

1. Open more servers

2. Offer character transfers. Players who started on the morning of the 13th do not want to reroll their characters on a new server now. Players who are in their guilds do not want to move servers and be seperated from their guildmates. Offer transfers to new servers.

 

Even better: Open (several) new servers and make 2 or 3 ONLY eligible for transfers.

 

But enough with the queues Bioware. Like everyone else has said, queues > 15mins are not acceptable. This is not being managed appropriately, and the response so far is insufficient. You have a massive game on your hands with an even bigger player base. Don't f*** it up.

[shuttick]

245 people in front of me. I trust that the issue will be solved quickly but that still doesn't make it any easier during the wait lol

[Barkebain]

Who here played Rift at release? I did I remember this same thing happening. TRION was quick to add new servers. In fact out of the new servers I picked one that was full and had a 30 minute que. Time went by and the ques got better... then one day we all looked around and the servers that they added that were once full were empty. RIFTS went unchecked, I quite literally did not see a single non NPC character for a whole two days. It felt like I am Legend but less awesome (the book).

 

If they just start adding a ton of servers the same thing is likely to happen. The server cap will need to be increased but in order to do that they are going to have to shut the servers down for awhile.

 

Rift actually communicated with their customers - they admitted when queue times were too long (over 10-15 minutes), they also agreed that ghost town realms were a real issue, and asked us to wait for a couple of days while they decided how best to proceed. Within a couple of days, we had free realm transfers, including entire guilds, with no issues like losing character info or achieves, etc. When the community stated a problem, they responded to us via the forums, kept us posted on the issues, and fixed them in the time frame stated. They also had customer support available for customers that had issues that did not explode in the forums - Rift cared about their customers. Not getting that vibe at all from EA/BW.

 

Let's all agree that EA/BW does not have a magic wand to wave to fix this - maybe they should have seen it coming, but clearly they did not (or did not care...). The problem here is that they have still not agreed that there is a problem, or defined what "acceptable" queue times are, or given a time frame (well, they can't since they have not admitted a problem). They also have not communicated what they are planning to do when the number of active players doubles (triples??...who knows) on the 20'th. The explosion of this thread is at least 90% dues to EA/BW's silence on the issue. Please don't point me to the OP - it says nothing at all. In addition they are offering zero customer support for any issues at all - at launch, no customer support at all - unthinkable.

[Essentials]

Queues are for companies who failed to plan accordingly, or developers who designed their game inadequately.

 

Edit: Incidentally, I can't afford to sit in a queue. I simply don't have that much time in my schedule on a daily basis between two kids, a wife and a full time job. I just can't sit there waiting around for the game to start.

 

I know I'm not alone.

Edited December 18, 2011 by Essentials

[Master_Khyven]

Part art? Bring more servers online. You over populated some of the servers during the guild launch. The guild I am in was to be on a West Coast pvp server. Instead we ended up on a East Coast pvp server with 2 hour wait times. I doubt we were the only ones. It seems like something went wrong with the balancing.

 

As I had a power outage while I was playing I am now in a 2 hour queue. I am looking down the list of queues every server but a handful are listed as FULL with the remaining listed as heavy. It's time to bring on more servers asap! Don't wait for the revenue of the game sales to come in. Some $$ needs to be spent asap on infrastructure.