For those with early access, there’s been a fairly regular issue of queues on most servers.

It’s not surprising by any means, and Bioware state they’re monitoring it closely (I’d be a bit worried if they weren’t!). Stephen Reid has posted an update on the SWTOR forums, on behalf of Jeff Hickman, Executive Producer of Live Services (i.e. Head Server Dude):

“We know there have been questions about the queues on the servers, so we wanted to take a moment to give you some insight.

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. On one hand, you do not want people to wait too long – on the other hand, you want to make sure that people have a dynamic, engaging community to play with for long after launch. Either way, we have one clear objective – to make sure folks have fun.

While we can’t promise that there won’t ever be queues, we can promise you that we are taking this matter seriously and constantly reviewing them to make sure that they are manageable and reasonable.”

Ironically, the desire for Oceanic players to hang out as a community has arguably increased server queues on the unofficial PvE and PvP servers, meaning Oceanic players are reporting long queues during the day and into early evening. That’s likely to shake out as more servers come on board and some players shift servers.

When it’s all said and done it’s hard to disagree with Jeff Hickman: it’s a balancing act between queues and players wandering around struggling to find people to group with. The only certainty is that Bioware will be doing what they can to find that balance, even if they don’t always get it right.

How have you found the queues so far?