Is It Time for Cross-Server Queues?

Tier 1 scenario queues were next-to-instant, it wasn't quite as a fast as in Beta, but it was enjoyable. The average queue for Nordenwatch (which was the most popular scenario) took anywhere from 5-10 minutes to pop.  This was exactly the pace that I wanted to play the game at. Me and my group would find a good PQ, queue up for the scenario, and then just grind the PQ in between PvP matches. We gained plenty of experience, influence, renown, gear upgrades, etc, and had a lot of fun to boot.

When we first heard of Warhammer Online giving us the option of leveling to cap solely through PvP, we all decided we'd be mostly doing this instead of questing, despite the questing being decently entertaining as well.

As soon as the first batch of us hit rank 12 and were too high to participate in the tier 1 scenarios, the game started feeling slower. Queue's took anywhere from 20-30 minutes, and the PQ's we were doing in between started to feel repetitive because of the lack of PvP we got in between. Scouring the RvR zones for world PvP/Objectives and Keep Sieges kept us entertained for a while, but being ported to a town upon exiting a scenario if you entered whilst in an RvR zone quickly killed our enthusiasm. Not only that, but it's not every day that you run into constant world PvP.

Now that we're in tier 3, sitting around level 24, the queue are almost non-existent. There are 2 scenarios per faction pairing in tier 3, so we thought that it might move faster, but to no avail. We split our party into 3 duos for questing in the 3 different pairing zones so that we could be constantly queued for all possible scenarios; even like this, none of the scenarios stood out, like Nordenwatch did, to be the fastest queuing or most popular. The fastest queues we've gotten were a 30 minutes wait. The longest we've gone without getting a queue was a shocking 7 hours. I'm not sure if the queuing system is bugged, but that's a completely ridiculous time to have to wait.

Now, I'm a reasonable man, and rather than simply rage at the game until I got a queue, I put some thought into what could be the cause. I came up with a few possibilities, but the most obvious one is that we've simply out leveled the server population, we'll come back to this later because, as it turns out, there's plenty of people in this tier.  When travelling between all the different tier 2/3 zones, there are plenty of players in our level bracket to be seen. Maybe they're just not queuing?

While that might seem like a ridiculous notion, it's entirely possible. While you do get a substantial amount of experience for winning a scenario, it's not exactly enticing when you lose. If the majority of players are racing towards 40, for whatever dumb reason, they may simply have chosen the more efficient leveling path of only-PvE. Knocking out quests, PQs, and the odd PvE instance could very well be the fastest way of reaching level cap, especially if you or your PvP group aren't exactly the cream of the crop. For reference sake, the difference between winning and losing a scenario in tier3 is approximately 10k experience, so I can definitely see the thought process behind this.

Faction Imbalance is the other strong contender in our ‘wtf-is-der-no-q'  contest. We play destruction. I don't know too many people on Order, but the 2 aquaintances I do have from the goodie-goodie faction swear that they get 15 minute queues in tier3. Bragennix, a fellow author on thewarjournal here, mentioned he had read a population analysis of each server earlier today, where our server (Sylvannia) was listed at having nearly a 3:1 ratio of Destruction to Order, whilst most other servers were similarly unbalanced. Shouldn't have made Order so ‘preppy' I guess...

 

Coming back to the first, and probably most likely reason, as to these increasingly long queue times is; people just aren't high enough level in tier 3. I didn't think this would be the reason at first, I hadn't been leveling as fast as I could have been, and with mostly relying on Scenarios and RvR for experience, I definitely didn't think I was ahead of the majority of players. When I heard a couple days ago that our server was already housing our first rank 40 players, I figured there was no way that tier 3 was under populated.  Most of the people I play with had the game pre-ordered and began with the 2-day head start, however some did not. While I've been stalling on the leveling game with my main so that everyone could catch up, most of my guildies without a head start have already reached at least rank 20. Now, when I was leveling in tier 2, the queue times were around 20-30 minutes on average, and now I'm hearing that these have started becoming 2-3 minute queues. This gives me hope. Maybe we did just out level the majority of the server. There's a good possibility that people are just trying out various classes in tier 1 to see what they like, or just fooling around on low-level alts because they don't want to wait hours on end for a queue in tier 3, and that's causing the population is stay in the lower tiers.  I'm waiting, though impatiently, for these slackers to catch up to tier 3. I bought this game to PvP my way to level cap, so there's no way I'm about to grind quests instead. I guess we'll see if it gets any better.

 

Whatever the reason for the super-long queue times, two things are certain; One, the game comes to screeching halt in tier3, and two, it's entirely too early in Warhammer Online's life to jump to conclusions as to why this is happening, or to worry about this being a problem a month or two down the line.

There's a very good chance that this problem will fix itself. Once the rest of the server catches up to tier 3, or some of them reroll Order, or some other cause is rectified that we have not considered. However, there is the possibility that these problems will NOT fix themselves. What's the answer? Sitting and waiting to PvP is definitely not it, and will cause me to drop this game faster than third-period French.

Cross Server Queues.

There aren't many things that I enjoy about World of Warcraft, but one of them is instant-queues. If only those instant queues led to something worthwhile. There really is no logical reason not to implement cross server queuing, it multiplies the pool of players trying to participate in certain activities by a fairly large amount, and will most likely result in never having to wait to enter a PvP Scenario ever again. Then why the hell isn't this in the game already?

My guess would be the opposition of the player community. I remember seeing threads on various Warhammer forums about Cross Server Queuing being a possibility, and the majority of responses were hate-filled rebuttals about how it would ruin the feeling of a server community. I get it. I totally understand that players want to see, and fight, the same players over and over. What good would a PvP game be if you couldn't seek out revenge on those that bested you, or be feared online because of your amazing video game prowess? Right.

My proposal would be to implement Cross Server Queuing, but with limitations. Get rid of the 20-server battlegroups that WoW is famous for, and clump servers into clusters of say, 3. Now you have faster queues, a larger community, but not so large that you'll never see the same player twice. As an added bonus, I feel Cross Server Queuing would hit the server-community-feeling-thing of Warhammer a lot less than it did for WoW's. Keep in mind not all the PvP here happens in instanced zones that require queues. You'll still be able to stomp people in World Objectives, Keeps, Open World RvR from your server.

The only big problem I see with this is zone control. I'm not sure how Mythic would be able to manage scenario wins affecting the zone control when players from other servers are involved. This could very well be impossble and one of the prime reasons Cross Server Queuing is not a feature in this game. Just another thing for those to consider who are adament about this being added ASAP. Who knows, maybe there is a way of doing this right.

I guess we'll see.

TLDR Version:

Queues are slow, non existent  in Tier 3. Is this because of population imbalance or players just not being high enough levels. Perhaps cross-server-queuing with limited battlegroups of 3 or 4 servers per cluster could be the answer, increasing queue speed and maintaining a tight-knit rvr community. Is this even possible with scenario wins affecting zone-control? What are your thoughts?

- thewarjournal.com

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