The following editorial contains views that are the opinion of the author and not necessarily the views of Allakhazam.com

I have a hypothetical scenario for you. Let's say you just got off work and decide to meet up with your friends who are currently eating at a restaurant. Of course, everyone else seems to have the same idea as you weave through rush hour traffic worse than the “Office Space” opening scene. You finally get to the establishment and walk toward the entrance, noticing a line has formed. Actually, scratch that. It’s more of a mammoth throng of people vanishing into the distance, waiting to get inside. It’s a bloody queue.

You go up to the greeter and ask how long it'll be until it's your turn. “Five minutes,” she says. Then she pauses. “No, wait, make that two hours.” Another pause, “45 minutes maybe?”

You sigh. You probably should have expected this since it this is the most popular restaurant in town (hell, it's so good that most people try to copy it), but it’s ridiculous to think you should arrive early every time you want to eat. You've asked the management in the past if there’s anything that can be done about the wait time, and you keep getting the same response.

“We've been opening up new locations. There's no wait at most of them. In fact, they're pretty empty right now. Why don't you go try one of them out?”

That could work. It’s just too bad all your friends are in this particular restaurant. You can see them through the window and they’re all wearing matching guild tabards…

OK, I’ve gone too far. You get the idea. World of Warcraft is the most popular MMO on the planet right now. I play it, you play it, and 11.5 million subscribers play it. That's a lot of people to fit into these servers, and it’s no easy task. Some MMO developers nowadays only have to keep track of a handful of servers, but Blizzard has literally hundreds of carbon-copied Azeroths, Outlands and Northrends to oversee throughout the globe.

On one hand, the vast amount of players is a testament to the quality of their product. On the other hand, should a gigantic company with such money and resources at its disposal have the server instability and queues that many players face? Activision Blizzard won't release its year-end 2008 results until February, but CEO Robert Kotick predicted, in November, an outlook of $4.9 billion in revenues and $1.2 billion in operating income. Even though the economy's not doing so hot right now, I’m betting some of that money could go toward alleviating the massive queues on some realms while stabilizing lag.

According to the official realm FAQ, each server has an optimum number of players, in the thousands, to foster a sense of community and prevent overcrowding. “Thousands” sounds a bit low to me. Overcrowding is only a problem in popular areas; some days it's hard to wade through the mass of avatars in Dalaran, but step foot in a vanilla zone and you may not see another toon for hours. And as for a sense of community, guilds create that. It’s a nice thought that players may walk into an inn where everybody knows their name, but it's a bit unrealistic. If Blizzard could lower queues by increasing the population cap on servers without introducing lag, I doubt most players would mind. It is called Massively Multiplayer for a reason, after all. Sure, some popular leveling areas can be packed, but players could work together or you can venture off the beaten path for a bit.

The problem with queues is that they happen during peak times. If you're a night owl and log on at 2 a.m., you're probably fine and may be wondering what a queue even is. If you're like most players and have a specific window of time in the evenings, you're out of luck. Personally, I'm not even sure why some servers are more popular than others. It's like the people who don't have to wait to log on are missing out on something amazing, like an “Everything’s 75% Off!” sale on the Auction House.

Blizzard, to its credit, has been open about the queue issue. Zarym mentioned this month on the official forums that about 75 realms have queues right now and even ranked some servers regarding their wait time. As of Jan. 7, Warsong had the highest queue, followed by Illidan. Both are PvP. Arthas and Kel'Thuzad, two more PvP servers, were also in the top five. So yeah, PvP realms are popular, especially if they have highly recognizable names. They should name some servers Legolas and Sephiroth and watch the servers collapse at the mad rush.

In order to help alleviate queues, Blizzard has been offering free transfers from high population realms to lower population realms with no wait. In the same thread Zarym acknowledged that such offerings don’t solve the problem, but it is “certainly a start.” I will agree that the free transfers are beneficial and necessary, but in some ways it seems like an unfair alternative to some players. What should you do if your friends and guild are on a specific server? Ask everyone to move all at once? And the response to finding a new server is always to research the forums, but that’s not so easily done when there are hundreds of realms to choose from. You may as well throw a dart at a list of names and hope for the best. And of course for every packed realm like Warsong, there’s a desolate server somewhere else.

In fact, it could be argued that more servers create less of a sense of community. Whenever I find out someone I know plays WoW (and it happens a lot) I ask them, “Which server?” The answer is always something different. I'd feel like I’d won the lottery if somebody actually mentioned my server. Sure, you can roll alts to play with different friends on different realms, but for many players that’s just time away from their main.

Another option is that Blizzard sometimes locks realms to new character creation. This can be a step toward stabilizing the population on a server to ultimately cut down on the wait time, but again, it's a temporary fix to a problem that could really use a long-term answer.

Aside from the queues, there’s also the issue of server stability. Patch 3.0.8 rolled out this week and, in turn, Wintergrasp and Arenas shut down for a bit. There was some emergency maintenance, followed by some rioting in the streets and looting. Peace was eventually restored, but lag can still be a problem.

In all honestly, I don't think the implementation of the patch went that horribly. I've played other games where downtime meant days, not hours, and Blizzard provided updates throughout the process. It’s obvious they worked as quickly as possible to bring the game back online. There are always going to be glitches like these that must be fixed, but it's the hardware side that's the issue.

I personally feel that Blizzard constantly makes an effort to listen to its players, which is a commendable endeavor considering the size of its fanbase. The devs read every thread on the official forums, as demonstrated by Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street and his massive post count, and ask gamers for their input. But sometimes I feel more emphasis is put on deciphering the exact mathematical equations regarding Death Knight abilities than the issues that actually affect logging on and playing the game.

We can all argue until we're blue in the face about game balance, nerfs and whether the end-game has gotten too easy. Those are all things that evolve over time in any MMORPG. It's just the nature of the beast. In fact, the possibility for change is actually one of this genre’s best features. But, if waiting in a virtual line cuts into your play time, or the lag makes you character freeze for chunks of time before performing every attack you selected at once, that’s generally in the hands of the developers, not the gamers.

So if you're fed up with your queue, I suppose you could start signing on in advance, switch servers or just not play at that time. All are viable options. But it's your hobby, and you should be able to play when you wish. Emergency maintenance rarely happens and you can plan around regular maintenance, but queues are consistent if you picked a popular server.

Darryl "Togikagi" Gangloff
Editor
Allakhazam.com