Now that Star Wars: The Old Republic has officially launched, the long queue times that players experienced at certain times during the early start are now working around the clock to keep you from logging in. How can you get your Sith on without standing around in a queue? The options aren’t pretty, but they’re effective.
As of 10AM Eastern time this morning, far from what anyone would consider peak hours, the queue to get into the official Kotaku guild server of Giradda the Hutt was 25 minutes, which is why I’ve been logged on since then and don’t plan on logging out any time soon, which brings us to the first method for avoiding long queue times.
Don’t Stop Playing
This is the easiest method for avoiding the queue. Just plan out the time you have, set your phone to vibrate, scoot the fridge over to your computer desk and stay put. If you never leave, you never have to worry about returning or accidentally attracting a member of the opposite (or same) sex with your pungent aroma.
This is also the least healthy option, unfortunately. You’ll need to take breaks to eat, sleep, and scrape off the layer of MMO funk that grows while a person is busy being massively multiplayer. That brings us to option two.
Be a Complete Jerk
In a perfect world, players would log on, play as long as they were able to, and then log back off again, making room for someone else to play. That’s all well and good, but it can be a little frustrating to run out to Taco Bell for a quick fix of processed Mexican food product only to find yourself facing an hour-long queue. How do you avoid logging off due to inactivity?
Simple. Fool the game into thinking you’re being active. Try auto-running against a wall. If that doesn’t work, weight down one of your movement keys with a handy household object, or get one of those nifty egg timers with the pecking chicken. Create an elaborate LEGO MindStorms machine to get the job done.
These are effective measures, but it involves someone else missing out on the fun because you’ve decided your time is much more valuable than yours, you arse. And if folks see your character turning in circles for minutes at a time they’ll quickly suss what you’re doing and condemn you via public chat channels as a right bastard.
And then they’ll find a secluded spot to do it themselves.
Abandon All of Your Friends
Want to know why certain servers are full up and others are empty? Because the full servers were used to assign all of the guilds and players that were in early start — in other words, every guild that formed before the launch of the game. Your friends are playing in those full servers, having fun with each other, joking around, flirting. And you’re waiting in line to join them.
Meanwhile there are brand new people wandering about the light load new servers BioWare’s opened since launch, just waiting to make new friends in a galaxy far, far away. Maybe they’re better people than the ones you already know. Maybe there’s a single man or woman on there that’s a ridiculously attractive recluse, just waiting for someone with similar interests to stumble along. Maybe they have candy there.
Whatever lie you need to tell yourself, get thee to another server. There is instant gratification there as long as you’re fine with scrapping the plans to play with your guild you’ve been looking forward to for months.
Just Wait
You can always not play, right? This whole thing will have blown over in a month, after which you should have no trouble at all slipping into whichever server you so choose, free from queues and all of the people that tried it out only to find they hated it. The constant World of Warcraft comparisons and ironic World of Warcraft comparisons making fun of the people making said comparisons will have died down by then.
Besides, if you wait to play Star Wars: The Old Republic that’s one step closer to playing for me. I approve.
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