Queues are back in WAR

The guys from Mythic had this idea which sounded so good to make the server queues more bearable: If you were logged in and somehow left the game, voluntarily or involuntarily, game crashing, or just your internet connection having a problem, you wouldn't have to wait in queue to get back into the game. You would have a reserved spot and could log on and play immediately. Marvelous, isn't it?

Until you think of the consequences: Everyone leaving the game, whether he wants to come back soon or not, has this reserved spot. And the reserved spot is taking up a slot on the server, so no other player can play instead. Result: On my server, where due to cloning the server queues had shrunk from 300 to nearly zero the queues are back with a vengeance. Last night I was number 508 in line, and, also due to the changes, the queue advanced much slower. Took me an hour and a half before I was in.

Of course I didn't sit 90 minutes in front of my computer watching the queue, I went off and watched TV with Mrs. Tobold. Came back 2 hours later, and apparently had logged in and been kicked back out for being afk. But no problem, now that I *had* been in, I was able to log in immediately, and skip the queue. And then I had to test something: I exited the game via the menu in the regular fashion, and then restarted it. Bingo, I got back in again, although the server queue was still at over 300 people at 10:30 pm. So apparently even people logging out for the night have a reserved spot blocking other people from playing. And the reservation period seems to be rather long, not just a few minutes.

So what sounded like a good idea just made the problem worse. The law of unintended consequences. I think the reservation period has to be shortened to 5 minutes maximum, which should be enough to reboot a crashed computer and restart the game if the leaving was really involuntarily. Letting lots of people reserve spots for long periods just results in there being too many people with an option to play directly, and too few people actually playing, because the others are stuck in the queue. Bad idea, really; or at least a bad implementation.