WoW realm queues and server age

If you ever tried to log on to one of the more populated realms (servers) of World of Warcraft during prime time, you know them: Waiting queues, telling you that you are player number 163 waiting in line to log on, and giving you an estimate that this might take 24 minutes. Apparently these queues have been put in place by Blizzard not only to prevent overloading the servers, but also due to game design reasons. So ideally the queues prevent not only lag, but also zones becoming overcrowded, with too many people hunting for the same mobs.

Of course for that to work you have to assume some sort of player distribution over zones. Letting, lets say, 3,000 players on the server only prevents lag and overcrowding if these 3,000 players distribute themselves over the world in a "normal" fashion. The world event of the gates of Ahn'qiraij opening was a good example of how that could fail, because a much larger percentage of players gathered in Silithus than normal, causing horrible lag.

So queue or no queue, on the first days after the Burning Crusade expansion goes live, we can expect lag and overcrowding problems, because people will be concentrated in 3 zones: The draenei and blood elf newbie zones, and Hellfire Peninsula for all level 60 players. I thought I could escape overcrowding by going to an instance, but that might have been optimistic. On the beta server I already got the message once that I couldn't enter the Blood Furnace instant, because there were already too many groups in that instance. So there seems to be a limit on the number of players the instance server can handle.

But what I am even more afraid of is having to wait in a queue. Blizzard will raise the cap of how many players are allowed per server by 25%. That will probably be sufficient for the latest and newest servers, but I doubt it will suffice for the older servers.

By the time the Burning Crusade comes out, the oldest World of Warcraft servers will be over 2 years old (3 months less for the oldest European servers). During these 2 years a lot of people stopped playing WoW, but they still have inactive characters on the servers. Blizzard keeps inactive characters indefinitely. So the older the server, the more inactive characters accumulate. The Burning Crusade will most certainly cause a large number of players to resubscribe, like after every major content patch. So the number of people trying to get online on an older server will be much larger than the number of people trying to get online on a newer server.

As my main character, the Horde priest, is playing on one of the oldest European servers, part of the original batch of servers that were available on the first day of World of Warcraft in Europe, I'm afraid that I will run into major queue problems. That is especially annoying when you finally get in, but then get disconnected for some reason. Sometimes the game will allow you to bypass the queue and reconnect immediately. But we had several raids where somebody who lost connection only came back 20 minutes or more later, due to having to wait in the queue. These queues might get 1 hour or more long after the expansion comes out. Not a very appealing prospect.