Mike Ferguson comments on WvW queues

Hey everyone, sorry to not post about this sooner, the last few days have been a little hectic and I wanted to verify a couple things first about the issues we’ve been seeing with the queues before posting anything.

As many of you know, it is possible for someone to queue up for a map after you and get in first. We’re trying to get that fixed as soon as possible but unfortunately we still need a bit more time to solve the problem. We will definitely keep you updated when there is any news on our progress. I have been checking the queue sizes and wait times for each matchup, and there are a couple interesting things I’ve observed so far that may help reduce queue times for some of you.

Worlds at the top of the rankings can have queues that reach multiple hours (particularly for the Eternal Battlegrounds map), but most of the worlds in the bottom half of the ranking quite frequently have open spots in at least a few maps, and the lower ranked the server is, the more likely it is that there are spots available. I’ll be posting the up to date world rankings shortly.

When there are queues for every map, the wait time for borderland maps tends to be shorter. Enemy team borderlands tend to have the smallest queues for just about every team so you may want to try entering those maps first before attempting to queue for the Eternal Battlegrounds. If you are just entering the queue for the battlegrounds and not checking the borderlands maps first to see if they have space open, you could be missing out on playing in the Borderlands while you wait for a spot to open up for you in the Battlegrounds. That being said, while we still have worlds that consistently have open spots for more players, it would be fantastic if some players out there could help us spread the WvW population out a bit so we don’t have a few heavily stacked populations facing large queues on some worlds while many other worlds still have room to support people. While I know this isn’t what most of you wanted to hear, I also want all of you to know that we are still investigating numerous other options we can take to help resolve some of these ongoing queue issues and we’ve been discussing them internally every day to see what would provide everyone with the best long term solution, but we wont have anything ready on that front for quite a while. Ideally, we would see some people move from worlds with extreme queue times to worlds that need additional people and start building up active wvw communities there as well. Having more worlds with heavily active populations in WvW will be a very good thing for the long term health of the game, and spreading out the population will help reduce the queue times on the worlds with the longest queues. While queues do indeed suck, the fact that they are this bad is because so many of you are trying to play and that is actually one of the best possible problems we can have at this point. It may sound silly, but it means that there are quite a few of you out there are enjoying the game and we’re thrilled that so many of you are out there trying to fight for your world. We will do our best to make sure you can.

Finally, I would like to ask everyone to post any additional queue comments to this thread only from now on and refrain from creating additional threads about it.

Thank you all for your understanding and patience.