Players of The Old Republic, which launched yesterday, are being forced to queue for hours at a time before getting to play BioWare's Star Wars MMOG.
In a lengthy post on the game's official forums, senior online community manager Stephen Reid warns that the situation will continue "for the foreseeable future," and asks for users' patience.
"We're experiencing high load and corresponding queues on some servers," he writes. "This is to be expected during launch, as a high number of people want to play the game, and for long stretches at a time."
Reid explains that, while server population caps are being raised, BioWare does not want to do so too quickly. "Raising them too fast will create an influx of new players and perpetuate the problem," he says. "We do not expect the queues to alleviate on these servers for the foreseeable future.
"If you do not want to queue, you should consider playing on another server, many of which have very low or no queues."
Which is fine, but characters are locked to a specific server; joining a new server means creating an entirely new character. With no World Of Warcraft-style character transfer tool - Reid says it is "being worked on, but there is no ETA" - players are left with a choice: roll new characters on different servers, or sit and wait.
Neither solution appears acceptable for a game whose launch was so carefully managed in a bid to ensure it went smoothly; EA was unable to guarantee pre-orders for the game, saying it was limiting launch supply "in order to ensure a great user experience." That appears to still be some way off.
Source: BioWare
Comments
3People complain about queues but look at the alternatives.
They let players flood the servers which could bring them down, cause huge amounts of lag etc...
They add a lot more servers, and when the initial rush is over and people play less you're left with a lot of half empty servers then they have to go through server merging.
They did also say way in advance this would happen.
When you have been playing since day one of early access, have built up a character on Tomb of Freedon Nadd and your facing another nightly que of 1800+ that has an estimated wait time of less than 1hr 50 (actual wait time over 3 and a half hours) the lack of a character migration tool seems like a bitch of an oversight.
When you finally give in and roll another character on a different server, play that for the night instead and the next day you log on to find that server now has an estimated que of an hour (which wouldn't be too bad if the wait times were anywhere near accurate) the lack of a character migration tool just seems stupid.