Players need to endure huge waiting times, but BioWare will fix this

Dec 20, 2011 09:27 GMT  ·  By

BioWare has talked about its just-released Star Wars: The Old Republic online title and how the server queues, which force players to wait for quite some time before being allowed to actually play the game, are being addressed by its team.

Star Wars: The Old Republic went online today, with BioWare turning on a huge number of servers in both Europe and North America, allowing the millions of people who bought the title access to the virtual world created by the studio in the last few years.

As you can imagine, despite the number of precautions taken by EA, like the limited release or the Early Game Access, the servers of the game aren’t handling the strain all that well, resulting in lengthy waiting times for players.

Star Wars: The Old Republic’s executive producer of live services, Jeff Hickman, talked about these issues on the game’s website, promising to try and fix them in the best kind of way.

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

Hickman admits that, while the studio can’t completely eliminate queues, it’s going to alleviate issues in the best kind of way.

“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.”

Have you been faced with long waiting times while trying to play Star Wars: The Old Republic or was it a smooth enough process?