Regarding server queues

[Bragar]

You realize games used to close at Beta, wipe the servers and go Live? Everyone started from scratch.

 

No head start, no Galactic Market cornering, no credit stashing, no guild stackers or know-it-all smart asses loling at a noob's questions behind the safety of a CAT 6 cable. Yeah, ya paid $5 more to get the download... woah! Big deal.

 

We put in at the MOST maybe 6 days in a game that you will most likely play for years and you are freaking out about everything from que times to errors to re-rolling or even quitting... on LAUNCH DAY of all days.

 

Come to think of it, maybe a fresh start wipe is the best way to launch a game...

 

It is SO obvious you have no conception of customer service. And fyi there was a wipe after beta ended and before early release started

[OdonKnight]

Am I the only one who thinks the long queues during the day today may be what Bioware is doing to try to push people to the new servers? Maybe they lowered the population caps as the control since they don't have a way to lock new accounts from rolling on the high pop servers.

 

Not saying it is a good idea, but no real response is making me wonder if it is intentional.

 

^This

 

Bioware shot themselves in the foot. Think through the logical progression:

 

Bring up a core group of servers - transfer in guild onto preordained servers

Wave one unaligned join and choose servers. Many would choose those with healthy POP, others choose unexplored territory.

 

Second group of users comes online - servers increased by a few. Again, some will see "moderate" or heavy" which mistakenly is referring to current player POP and not total character POP so many join healthy POP severs for community, others go for unexplored territory.

 

Bioware adds more servers - a second RP-PVP E, other RP-PVE servers E, (naturally PVE and PvP servers) and third wave of users sign-up. Those users who got online when population of already heavily populated servers were not at FULL but moderate/heavy - again many would join healthy POP servers, others less so or unexplored territory.

 

i.e so far each wave is bringing more people but not distributing them in new territory but letting them distribute all over especially as people first sign on and see Moderate and Heavy thus no big huge red flags go off in their minds as that is current usage and not total pop.

 

Last night the coup-de-grace - everyone booted. New and early access people get online - early access to their server or one of their servers (hiding/masking their pop usage elsewhere) and new players see the normally heavy and full pop servers as light to medium. Thus many but not all new players had a more evenly placed addition across servers regardless of those server's true populations.

 

Today everyone trying to crowd into limited spots at the same time apologists saying it will work out. Only possible if characters deleted/moved/abandoned as many people will "wait and see" hoping the other guy moves where the other guy is hoping you move.

 

All come down to psychological design and effect. New players can see heavy and thinks it is # of people - they look at heavy and think lots o people running around - light they see near ghost towns in their minds. Again not all but many will perceive as above.

Edited December 20, 2011 by OdonKnight

[Josen_Roilh]

STO had this problem at launch but resolved it very quickly. I expect better from Bioware so I will be patient... that being said I am now in a 45/50 minute one. So sometime after my grace-launch-period I am giving Bioware, I will find it unacceptable to wait more then 10 minutes; I really don't expect to wait at all. Edited December 20, 2011 by Josen_Roilh

[Illwill-]

What I found out about queue's, that just means everyone makes a macro to leave there character logged in 24/7 . I have already heard of many, many people doing that...

 

Thinking about doing the same, once I get out of Taris that is.

[flyforajedguy]

Took me an hour to get into my main today because once I finally go through the que the game crashed on load and when i came back in was back in que once more. Glad servers are being added and I did create an alt on a lower pop server but still pretty frustrating.

[Warriorraider]

Adding dozens of servers a day is not "done NOTHING".

 

Yes they are trying everything to fix this. Server transfers may alleviate the problem some. However, to fully fix the problem I hate to say it may have to take it offline for awhile til everything is fine. But then we would have more QQing saying that "You worked on it for 5 years, and now your taking servers offline to do reworking?!" Honestly, WoW had that done already on launch. It was taken offline for a MONTH cause of server issues. Don't deny fanboys. You know it to be true. I was told from people who went over to AoC from WoW.

[Bragar]

Adding dozens of servers a day is not "done NOTHING".

 

It is if they continue to allow people to have unacceptable queue times on servers they actually want to play on because they were the ones originally offered by BW when they rolled a character...

[Dasffion]

It is still unacceptable - you all refer to this as being normal - why have no game company learned from others mistakes?

 

If anyone, I would have thought BioWare to be more responsible - to succeed where other have failed. Instead, history - apparently - repeats itself.

 

I am longing for quality craftsmanship!

 

As I said before, the ONLY way to prevent this and still maintain healthy server populations would for Bioware to individually place each and every player giving you 0 choice in your server population. People wouldn't go for this. If you give people choices then the majority are going to gravitate to servers that already have larger populations and/or names that they like. There's nothing Bioware can do about that.

[Orca]

What I found out about queue's, that just means everyone makes a macro to leave there character logged in 24/7 . I have already heard of many, many people doing that...

 

Saw this in Rift too... if you see them just report and hopefully a GM will boot them so someone else can get in.

[Saben-]

Ques suck Wake up at 6am go to work home at 6pm get in que at 6.15pm get in game at 8.00pm play for two hours go to bed...... playing an mmo for 2hours is like hitting yourself in the balls! (Painful for most)

[Sylfarin]

on LAUNCH DAY of all days.

 

To clear things up, this thread, least the original message from the community manager is not from launch day, the complaints are from back in early acces days, this has nothing to do with the actual game launch, the very same issues, the very same queue times have been here since two days in early acces.

[Amandar]

NA server stats as of ~Noon CST:

 

Full              51 (41.5%)Very Heavy  15 (12.2%)Heavy          11  (8.9%)Light            46 (37.4%)Total          123

 

I am less concerned that that queue exist (it is launch and it is the holidays so players are on holiday break/taking vacation time) and more concerned that there isn't better balancing of populations between servers - servers are either full/heavy or light and nothing in between. EA/BW needs to find a better way to balance out the populations.

Edited December 20, 2011 by Amandar

[Katsushika]

this is now a complete disgrace 2-3 hours queueing even if its a server side d/c fault what happens when people are ready for endgame content what do we do if people get thrown off servers? cancel raids, Full servers should have been locked last night forcing new players onto low population servers then reopened later down the line, this is by far the worst launch and worst man management ive ever seen in my life, get it sorted! As a paying and paid customer this is not acceptable.

[Bollah]

http://www.pcworld.com/article/212517/battlenet_servers_slammed_as_world_of_warcraft_cataclysm_launch_looms.html

 

Happened during every WoW expansion and WoW release.

 

Blizzard totally ignored the problem and now no one talks about it.

[dduttonnc]

Adding dozens of servers a day is not "done NOTHING".

 

Wrong, wrong and WRONG. They have inc server capacities by 50% since EGA for launch. There's just a lot of people who keep piling onto the same damn servers

 

That's why we have server right now with 20-120m queue times, and others at "light"

 

1/2 the issue is the player bases fault for piledriving onto a several servers.

 

Now, BW does need to reallocate HW and balance the load, but they can NOT do this with the game up.. and they can NOT just do this in one time. Ordering, receiving, and setting up new HW takes time and money

 

Simply put.. if none of you are happy with the queues:

 

1) Wait a few weeks till they die down

2) Send BW feedback - whining on the forums does little to get a companies attention

3) deal with it

4) pick a lighter load server

[GregoriusMaximus]

Seriously Bioware, why only ONE RP-PVP English server in Europe?!? Most of Europe will be playing on the English servers (For a start: Britain, Sweden, Russia are all countries with massive gamer populations and will all play on the English servers), you only give ONE RP-PVP server... if you're trying to force people onto the lighter servers at least give them somewhere to go rofl!

[Noelemahc]

Well, it's been nice talking to you, but I'm queue number 46 by now, gotta go pay attention lest I miss it =)

 

P.S. This is still a wonderful game, doing lots of things right from the start. If only it would have done EVERYthing right...

[Fairamount]

LAUNCH DAY

few queues.

This hasn't just been happening today, it's been happening the past week (give or take). It might very well improve in the coming weeks, I love the game and this won't sway me from playing (or trying), but these sorts of problems deter people and with the amount of the time that they've had and potential workarounds used by other titles, its wholly unacceptable on its launch day for these sorts of server issues. What was the early access for, if not to get servers popped and controlled?

 

OT: Like the name.

[fushnchips]

Adding dozens of servers a day is not "done NOTHING".

 

That's not going to solve the problem with current players because they already made there player on another server so this will only be good for new players.

 

But I can handle 15-20 in que that's nothing but people reporting hours of waiting time is not so good.

[dduttonnc]

Deleted my subscription 10 minutes ago.

 

Good riddance to another person who has no idea how and what it takes to get an MMO off the ground, and one less complainer on the forums

[Obilam]

I think this will kill SWTOR for the average casual player.

 

When I get home from work or before I go to bed, I'll have around 45 to an hour to play.

 

At this stage at least 30 minutes of that is spent queuing. Today (I appreciate it's launch day) I am queuing for 90 minutes.

 

To be honest I don't even really know why I'm trying to log in as I know that by the time i can come back to play I either still wont be logged in or I will have logged in and then been logged back out again.

 

If this is hte way it is, then fine, but I'd really like to know as I won't renew my subscription beyond the game time that comes with the first purchase (regretting the Delux purchase now).

 

Regards

[Bob_Ta-aar]

The majority of people understand what happens during the launch of an MMO. This is the norm, and there is nothing that can be done to fix it.

 

I am sure they care that 300 randoms are crying over queue times, most people don' t like it but they understand it is the norm in a game as popular as this.

You obviously haven't put a minute of thought in your post.

 

1. There have been TONS of suggestions about how to improve/fix the situation. Saying, that there is nothing that can be done is just plain, blind, stupidity, I'm sorry.

 

2. With queues of over 1500, it's HIGLY unlikely, that there are only some 300 people who are annoyed by it .

 

3. Wenn 3/4 of the servers have no queue at all, but the rest has queues of 2-5h, then it's NOT just the norm, but it's plain unnecessary punishing of the people of those servers. People who like the game just as much as everbody else. People who pay the SAME DAMN monthly fee, like everybody else!

 

Of course it's only natural, that things like queues happen, especially during launch-time of such a game.

But if nothing's done about it (especially with lame excuses like "there is nothing that can be done"), then it's just beeing an *** and as absolutely nothing to do with 'norm' or anything.

 

Now, this was for all those 'stop crying about queues'-guys who are actually playing on a low-pop. server and have never even experienced a queue themselves.

 

I DO know that BW is working on it and I do appreciate it. Still, it really gets more than a dragging annoyance for people on servers like Bloodworthy! It's ruining the whole game-experience for us, and that really can't be BW's goal.

Why not allowing character-transfers to other server? This would be the perfect solution!

Why not allowing people who had a DC to rejoin without queue? There's NO reason whatsoever that they gotta wait another 3h to keep on playing!

[TooLittleTooLate]

Fix this *********** **** or it's refund time. I moved servers only to get a queue again.

[Atatuma]

Anytime you get on a game at 1 or 2 pm and get in a queue, that is not acceptable, how about later tonight when the people that are working get home, welcome to your 2 hour queue thank you for purchacing SWTOR. Sorry you had to work all day, and cant play on the server you created your toon on, please try another server and start all over again. Thank you for wasting your time on the server you started on in pre-release. Dont forget to give us your subscription info so you dont have any issues getting on your new server!!!!

[Valkaern]

The majority of people understand what happens during the launch of an MMO. This is the norm, and there is nothing that can be done to fix it.

 

I am sure they care that 300 randoms are crying over queue times, most people don' t like it but they understand it is the norm in a game as popular as this.

 

You are not the majority, but a tiny minority.

 

If they really want to "keep" customers they should worry about the long term health of servers instead of short term health of servers. They shouldn't pull another Rift and then merge servers later on.

 

People will put the "I quit" card over everything, those are people that usually spout empty threats and should be ignored. WoW is a great example of this, people play the "I quit" card but keep playing the game.

 

These are empty threats. If a person really quits over this, the game would be better off without them.

 

Some lovely insights you have, how lucky for you to have actual facts and figures. Meanwhile as I mentioned quite a bit earlier, of my wife and 5 of our closest gaming friends from over the last 12 years I'm the last one remaining that hasn't cancelled my subscription.

 

It's not hard to even roughly extrapolate from that, along with the fact that many servers have well over 2k people in queues, that it might be a slightly larger number than 300.

 

But then again, I'm just using logic and reason as opposed to your secret inside info regarding exactly how many will truly cancel their subscription.

 

I never once played the 'I quit' card, but one fact that's probably just easier for you to deny (I know you're on a mission, I know the forum champions have a job to do, I won't stand in your way!) is that while I enjoy the game and the Star Wars universe, being charged for this kind of service is not something I'm personally interested in. No drama, if it's not fixed I can just go join them in Rift. However I would personally prefer the Guild Deployment fiasco be rectified.

 

I know your forum rules so I understand that you may need to deny that and that you probably have a better understanding of my intentions than I do so I won't slow you down or stand in your way. Meanwhile I'm staring at the reality that 6 of the 7 of us that started this game together have already quit after one week due to the queues.

 

But it's probably better for everyone if we don't think for ourselves and just adhere to your factual figures of 300. That seems like a rational thing to do...

Edited December 20, 2011 by Valkaern