700+ Player Queues on Illidan

The other night I read on the forums that Arena Season 3 was starting soon.  Knowing that I had a good bit of PVP honor on any of my mains - BGs is about all I did after hitting 70, I decided I'd see what was available for purchase from Season 1.  Wrong!  700+ player queues on Illidan.  WTholyF!  I tried later.  900+ queue.  My jaw dropped and my eyeballs almost popped from their sockets.

Curious to see what the hell was going on, I tried logging into WOW a couple of days at varying times.  Meh, I just wanted/needed to pop on for a few minutes.  I tried right after work which is 6ish for me, after dinner (7ish), after working some more (9ish), late night just before bed with a book (11ish) and always a similar result, HUNDREDS of players in the queue to get on Illidan.  They lowest was in the high 200s after 11 PM EST.  OMFG.

Geez.  This harkens back to the days of when AQ and then BWL 40 man raids were the rage.  I'd have to start logging on at least an hour before a raid to be sure I was on time.  Back then logging in wasn't even the worst of it.  Many a night we had to flat out cancel or bail on raids because the lag was so dayum.  You couldn't do the Raz kite-fight if you couldn't move.  And tanking didn't go so well when instant heal spells were more like 3 second casts.  If you somehow managed passed these other problems then the instance servers would die and your whole raid was disconnected from the server. Time to queue up again and hope that people didn't get pissed and quit for the evening.

Of my favorite lag issues on Illidan was showing up in a cities to find them devoid of NPCs.  Good times, good times - ganking people in Gadget when that happened.  Those were some epic battles and you made do with whoever was there to help out because no one else would be able to land there.  If memory serves, gryphons would also freeze up a lot and you'd see people stuck mid air on one.  A little Dante's Inferno - can't get off and the damn thing won't fly on to your destination.  If that happened to you while arriving in TP for your MC raid, you could expect to be ganked by the opposing faction just waiting for your little unplanned ride to end.  Haha!

Holy cow, whatever Blizzard is doing works and then some.  I guess people are taking advantage of the improved leveling curve, getting ready for S3 or grinding honor to buy PVP gear or whatthehellever.  It dawned on me that I could get my stats off the Armory but that was hiccuping as well, I assume from increased traffic.

WOW - just...WOW.

Comments

[Romagoth]

Yet more reasons that I have not played WOW in almost a month now. Canceled that subscription, yessir I did....

I wonder if the large que has anything to do with all of the kids being off for the holidays? Mmmm? What else do twelve year old's have to do after eating turkey and lighting up the post dinner cigarette? I miss the good old days of WOW....

[Relmstein]

No queue times on Shadowmoon but I hear a lot of servers in Europe are really maxed out all of a sudden. It's amazing what happens when a patch introduces content for casuals and raiders. Everyone logs on. Expect the same thing to happen with Patch 2.4 since it will have a new dungeon and raid zone.

[Capn John]

I hate the login queues, not that Kilrogg has had them lately, because you sit & wait in queue for 20 minutes (or more) to get in, to move half a step and stop, and wait, and wait, and wait, only to get DC'd, log back in, and get put at the back of the queue which was now 30 minutes (or longer).

There should be an ID on your account so if you log out or get lagged out, even with high queue times, if you attempt to log back in on the same server within 5 minutes (for example) of logging out, you go straight to the front of the queue, or at least to the back of the express queue with the rest of the people who got lagged out.