Posted by Lethality in News | 8 Comments
BioWare’s Jeff Hickman Talks Server Queues
This past April, we learned that MMO industry veteran Jeff Hickman had joined BioWare in Austin after the departure of Gordon Walton. Hickman was to take over some of Walton’s responsibilities, including that of Live Producer.
In light of the recent launch of Early Game Access, and some growing consternation of fans waiting in line to play the game, Jeff posted an update to the recently released Star Wars: The Old Republic Community Blog:
In order to ensure that the service would be smooth and stable, we staged how we brought people into the Early Game Access program, adding people in waves. As you know, there are a lot of folks who want to play the game right now and we want to make sure they have lots of people to play with. Balancing this with figuring out when to bring new servers online to help alleviate the size of the queues is part art and part science.
While Hickman’s statement doesn’t offer any magic bullets to the solution, it shows that BioWare is paying attenion and very much aware of what the player base is talking about.
Hop over and read Jeff’s full blog entry here.
Tick Tock.
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Give us 400 credits for each 30 minutes waiting in the queue :) sounds great ^^
The problem is that wont work. Staggering the servers is cause of the problem.
On Day 1, there are 7 West Coast servers… so all the first day people go onto those. On the second day, their friends come along and join the first persons server…
People choose servers based on where their “Friends” / “Guilds” / “Communities” (ie unofficial Oceanic) have ended up. Not what server is empty and which is full. Staggering the release has feed this problem.
This results in servers filling up, and not stopping. What we need to know are the servers themselves getting more capacity to handle their existing populations.
The issue of Oceanic servers needs to be resolved too, Australians are killing the West Coast servers.
This is not just about Hardware or Server management, its about People/Population management, and so far they are doing it way wrong.
they need to enable guild migrations to less populated servers prior to the launch on the 20th, then look to ‘persuade’ character creation balance some how to keep servers from spiking.
1.5 hours in a queue is not worth $15 a month
They been planning this for years, they have proven case study on what not to do… and they #&@$ed up.
They sold millions of copies and have done the same thing Blizzard did, they didnt cover themselves server wise.
They are expecting, nay! planning this game to grow… and releasing “not enough” server space is rediculous.
Over on the EU servers we have encountered a problem. We’re on the Red Eclipse server and, as there have been no Spanish servers opened, some bright spark had the idea to post on the forums “Hey everyone Spanish log onto Red Eclipse.”
I’m in favor of Spanish servers. Mostly as it is a language spoken by a lot of people but also as Red Eclipse now has on average a 1+ hour queue time. I wish there had been some response to this from Bioware, other than to remove the post (once they were made aware of this).
Thats the same for ever major effected server. They were declared an unofficial community server.
Unofficial community servers have been around for decades, it helps build communities in games, atm a lot of people are treating them as “evil” they are not.
Bad sadly they are an effect. An effect that shouldnt of occured, cause EA/Bioware were warned and should have had the foresight to include “Official” server types beyond the basic regional codings.
And you cant remove posts… Google unofficial “X” swtor server and you get told by hundreds of pages. The internet is a living memory.
The Red Eclipse server has also been nominated to server to go to if you are danish, we have simper danica, ace of danes and alot of other very large danish guilds on the server. My problem is that in my experience the spanish speak spanish in general chat, but the danish do not, even though that it is the server to be on if you are danish.,- off topic, But my main concern is that now that Red Eclipse have been promoted to both Danish and spanish server, there are way too many peopleon it. Our guild Danes of Talus moved from frostclaw to Re eclipse because our allys moved there, in other words, this supports the idea that ppl move to the server that their friends are on, or where the most prominent guilds are. As i can imagine the crusible pits are for the american servers.
And who’s at fault? If Bioware had put one official Spanish server, that wouldn’t be a problem. Now, well, 80% of the Spanish players are unable to write in English,so they won’t. Quite a feat is for them even to play in English. So, yes Spanish players will talk in Spanish in general (and everywhere, usually Spaniards are very talkative), so get used to it. It’s unavoidable unless migrations gets allowed and put an official dedicated server to Spanish-speakers (from Spain and south America).