I hope you haven't forgotten my role in this little story. I'm the leading man. You know what they say about the leading man? He never dies.
If you give in to your impulses in this world, the price is that it changes your personality in the real world. The player and character are one and the same.
Exactly. When the entire server population is trying to get their pvp on in a period of 3 days, of course there will be some queues. But even so, there are many saying there wasn't much wait time.
Take into account, on live servers the rush to play factor is gone, less people will be cramming playtime into the same window. On top of that, when you aren't limited to a 72 hour window, you will be more likely to not worry about a small queue with many other things to do.
Queues are a concern. But hardly a valid one before the game even releases. There are many things that need to be addressed before the game releases. But theory crafted queue times on WvWvW is hardly one of them. I am sure being a 50/50 pvp/pve game as they are. They will have plans in place, you can bet on that. But don't expect drastic preventative measures based on incomplete data as this is a problem more suited to fully address after it actually becomes a problem.
I'm thinking it's not really an issue, I never once saw a queue during the BWEs, and I imagine that ANet is aware of the load from the BWEs and where queues became necessary and will do what they can to alleviate it.
I never said i'd think it would be a real and likely threat. But ignoring any possible problems and not thinking about them untill when it goes wrong is just incredibly stupid. Especially when something like this can wreck an important aspect of your game, even if its not a very likely scenario.
Just being unlikely isnt a good reason to outright disregard something, if its severe enough. I think Arenanet has better numbers to crunch then we do, and im sure its something they are monitoring so im not worried. But i feel safer knowing they are keeping an eye on it then if they said "yah well, itll probably not be a problem so we'll ignore it untill shit hits the fan. And then rush a fix".
The thing is we've already tested the absolute worst case scenario and queues were a relatively minor issue. We had servers crowded to the bursting point with everybody trying to get maximum playtime in a 3 day window. That tends to put the numbers of people trying to participate concurently about as high as you can feasibly expect long term. Even under those conditions on sea of sarrows, one of the most overpopulated servers, there was only short to moderate queues for the central map during primetime bands and very rarely any queue at all for various borderlands at any given time. I saw one or two short queues for our own borderland but never saw a queue for any of the enemy ones.
While we may hit those population peaks in the first weeks after launch there is almost no chance at all of numbers staying as extream as the BWE's showed beyond that. There may be some frustration over not being able to get into your prefered map instantly but thats not a good reason to add an extra copy, particularly if the 3 borderlands have plenty of room still. All evidence so far points to it being highly probable that at least one map will have plenty of room at any given time.
Who is John Galt?
You're forgetting there were also mitigating factors that detered people from playing WvW. Performance being one, GW2 is still poorly optimized and people on lower end machines had an absolute bad time in WvW as soon as it turned into so much as a skirmish. These people would avoid WvW after watching a slide show of their own death.
Another thing that detered people was inbalanced servers. The server i was on dominated WvW against all the other servers it faced and after 2h (the average time it took to capture EVERYTHING) WvW was DEAD. No one bothered anymore. Not our server, or the other servers.
As you said, people had limited play time. This can also work against WvW. Why run around across 4 huge maps if activity is low, or you are alone and getting ganked? You dont have time to dick around with lenghty WvW play when there is so much else to see. So i dont think we've actually seen WvW pushed all that much as you might think.
Do you see a situation during busy times were people who are on there own(someone not in any guild.) being told to leave because there are guildie's trying to get in? To the point of being bullied and ignored until they go.
Monk, I need a monk!!!
It was pretty much impossible to get into WvW during prime time on Desolation-EU in BWE3. Too much "oo, this is best server yo, must come here" crowd. Queue system felt pretty broken under the onslaught of the masses. Didn't have this problem on the same server in BWE1 and BWE2, as these crowds hadn't decided what the "best server" is yet.
There was a queue even in the middle of the night, though that queue usually cycled through in about five-ten minutes.
Tbh, even if ideas can pop from here and there in reality queues will simply just stay queues. There will be smaller servers available, people can ofc spend their real cash to go there. And also, since the other maps except middle isnt full it's most likely there you should spend your time if middle is full since there's stuff to do there as well. Will there be annoyance? Sure, and I dont think it will come in pve endgame, I actually believe many of the people buying the game is after wvwvw from start so queues will be issues from day one same as we seen in beta and stresstests. However, what remains to see is how big these issues will be and if they will be lowered within a decent amount of time. I heard free server transfers first week, that might be extended into first month to have players themselves try to sort out the situation. That is my first bet in what will happen. But yea, I knew it would most likely be one of the big issues in this game and it seems like it will be, at least for those who can only play at peak hours. I wouldn't expect a launch without queues, and I guess most of you are with me on that one.
I hope you haven't forgotten my role in this little story. I'm the leading man. You know what they say about the leading man? He never dies.
If you give in to your impulses in this world, the price is that it changes your personality in the real world. The player and character are one and the same.