The Old Republic Really Loves Queues

News by John Walker Co-founder

Published on Dec. 22, 2011

Edit: Turns out you can't redeem codes anyway, as that's broken at the moment. A lot of players are a touch upset that their 30 days free with the game aren't actually accessible until you enter payment details to pay for the next month.

Aaaand now my patience has run out. As if the extensive hours-long queues to get in to play Star Wars: The Old Republic weren't frustrating enough (that's if the game's online to let you play, of course), now BioWare/EA's infrastructure can't cope with people trying to visit their website. I have never, in my life, ever seen a queue to visit a website before. Yet that's the position I'm in, trying to enter a code so I can carry on playing the bloody game. A queue I can't seem to win at.

We understand what it's like when too much traffic comes to your site at once. Something as simple as a tweet from Notch at the same time as a big Redditing can slow us down, causing our amazing tech bods to leap into frantic action, buff our caching, and fight to keep the site online. We get it. But then, we also work hard to ensure we're spending enough money, and have the servers in place, to cope with expected volumes of traffic. As tiny as we may be compared to a company as big as EA.

But this is just getting silly. Not least because the queue doesn't work. Despite being told to sit back and not refresh, I've yet to see the page go anywhere other than here:

And this is all despite restricting sales of the digital game, as they long ago promised they would, to control the numbers of people getting access. And at 1pm in the UK, with the US audience yet to awaken.