Queues, oh my!

So the queues are up again.

For my home server Stormrage EU, this means a 15 minute waiting time to come online. I can’t remember last time this happened. We used to have some pretty bad instability issues a year ago, and this resulted in a major exodus from the server, bringing down the population to middle size. But now we have a queue and I can only imagine how bad it must be at the more popular servers, those that were labelled “full” even before the launch of Cataclysm.

Of course the queues were to be expected, and I believe that most players can understand and accept that there is a certain waiting time during the peak period that follows the release of an expansion. However, the queues that are reported on the official forums now are more than long. They’re extreme. We’re not talking about 15 minutes, but rather 4 hours. The question is what Blizzard can or should do about it.

Bashiok's posting

Blue poster Bashiok has made an effort to try to moderate some of the threads of wrath and hatred, doing exactly what companies should do in situations like this. He shows that Blizzard is listening and that they’re aware of the situation, he expresses his compassion and concern and he points out what they’ve done to address the situation so far and the possible solutions for the future. But obviously this isn’t enough for the infuriated players. Finally Bashiok gives in and says that he’ll stop responding, since “people are just consistently quoting things out of context or just not reading my replies at all before posting.”

The thing with the queues is that there isn’t any quick fix to it, at least not anyone that is good.

To quote Bashiok:

“How do we handle the thousands upon thousands of people, per realm, that have come back from weeks, maybe years of not playing to play today on their old realm? Delete their accounts? Forcibly move their characters to low-pop realms while they weren't looking?”

As an emergency measure, Blizzard has decided to raise the cap of how many players that can be online at the same time on a certain realm. This seems to have helped a little, but it hasn’t wiped the queues as far as I understand it. And is it really a good solution? It will no doubt affect the player experience, with increased piling on the questgivers and worse competition for popular quest mobs. Not to speak of the risk for lag. In the end it’s a question about the balance between quantity and quality, and I hope that they won’t go too far in this direction, just to get rid of the queues. And the complaints will still be there, only that they address the density on the server rather than the waiting time. I’m not sure if it’s that much of a gain.

One thing I think that Blizzard should and could do is to give out better information about the queue situation on different realms. On the Battle-net website with the list over the realms, there’s a column called “queue”, but the only information they put there is “yes”, which I assume means that there is a queue. What it they could make live updates on exactly how many players are in queue for each realm and how long the estimated waiting time is?

Such an overview could help players to play their gaming better. Even if the queue is an annoyance, at least it won’t have to come as a shock. If you know about the queue in advance, you can join it and go and plan for other things to do while waiting. Also: if players see how bad the queues on their home realm are, they might consider spending that night on an alt on another realm, just to see the new content.

It could also possibly inspire players to consider switching to a less populated realm. Don’t be too sure about it though! The psychology of queues never ceases to fascinate me. Even if we grumble about queues, and you never hear about anyone enjoying them, we’re at the same time weirdly attracted to them, light a night fly to the torch light.

Queues as marketing
For how crazy it sounds, a proper queue can be one of the cheapest and most forceful marketing activities you can come up with. There is some strange logic that tells us that something that is so popular that there is a queue for it, must be so good that it’s worth queuing for. If there’s a queue, we’re quick to join it, because who knows how quickly it will grow?

I’ve seen examples of it in real life, as people join queues that they don’t even know where they’re leading, for instance in theme parks. Rule number one is to secure your spot in the line. Once you’ve done this, you have plenty of time to start worrying about what the line is about.

If you apply this to WoW I’m afraid that the more popular a realm is, the more attractive is it to the players. “Oh, so Argent Dawn in EU is apparently a hot spot. There must be something fantastic about this realm. What do they have that we don’t have? I’d better queue up and check it out for myself. It must be worth it or there wouldn’t be so popular”. And equally a low population realm can easily be overlooked. It gives the same creepy feeling as looking into the window of an open restaurant that is empty on customers. “Ouch. No people! There must be a reason. The food is either bad or expensive. I’d better go somewhere else.”

I guess much of the queue issues will sort out themselves in a not too far distant future, when the powerlevellers have done their thing and the holiday season arrives, when players will either go afk for real life issues or spread out their gaming over the day, since they’re off from work and school. I think Blizzard does right not to mindlessly open new realms in an act of desperation to counter the queues. If a realm is crowded now it doesn’t mean that it will be the same in a couple of months, and players on "empty" realms tend to be even more misarable than they ones that are stuck in queues. Blizzard must plan further ahead than the nearest week.

But even if they don’t act, they must keep communicating. So big kudos to Bashiok, for at least trying.