Logged in tonight on Connery, and sure 'nough -- it's another night of INDARSIDE! And I can't get in. For the umpteenth time I go to the console with the big planet-logo on it and, just out of force of habit, try to see how long the queue is. Click repeatedly on Indar. Nothing. Nada. No result. For the umpteenth time I then try Instant Action, trusting like a dumbell that it'll dump me into the biggest fight on either of the other two continents. I do this twice. Nothing. Still standing in the warp gate with '***** running around bouncing bullets off each other. And for the umpteenth time, I log in sheer annoyance. Look, devs. The whole rationale behind giving each empire footholds on each continent is to get us into battle faster, right? To appeal to the illusory crowds of modern teenage ADS gamers you're chasing, right? It ain't working. Even when it *does* work, I have to redeploy two or three times to get where I want -- where all the bubblegum-fireworks on the map are popping off. More often than not, when I get there my side is losing and I die a useless death. So you redeploy again and again until you finally fetch up amongst a critical mass of your own kind. At that point you can finally freaking PLAY. Ten bloody years ago I could either (1) hit Instant Action, which *always* worked, or (2) hang out for a minute or two in the HART building at my empire's sanctuary and drop wherever I wanted in the entire world, so long as it was outside a base's sphere of influence. I could do either one over and over, as often as I pleased. And if I died a horrible death upon arrival, I knew a bunch of boiling-mad Terrans would be at one of two or possibly three locations linked to that base. It never took long to hook up, thanks to the old lattice system. I know you're forging ahead with an updated neo-lattice that you'll never *admit* is a lattice at all, and the primary object is traffic control -- getting the zergs pointed at each other. But I'd like to suggest it also serves a vital function in allowing reinforcements to find their side so they can do something besides lone-wolf around for long frustrating minutes trying to find someone to kill and/or fight alongside. And even that is predicated on having a warp queue and IA button that actually FUNCTION. You know what happens when they don't? I bail. I don't add to the spectacle that your paying customers are dropping money for. I imagine I have plenty of company. You need to fix both before your start f*rting around with yet more new features. Oh, and while you're at it, write a bloody user's guide. But that's another rant.
The only things I happen to agree with is the fact that something with the Q's are messed up and not functioning properly all the time. It comes and goes, sometimes working but usually not. And my last comment is that IA needs to drop you in a battle on the continent you're located at right then, it would end the problems of waiting for it just to send you nowhere and need to be clicked over and over until the Q lets you through...
And let's not forget, when you finally DO get instant action to work, and it drops into a friendly base with just a couple of enemies trickling in and getting massacred by 20 other guys. If I wanted to go to said friendly base, I'd have spawned at the spawn point. Instant action is much better used taking me to an enemy base. For starters, I can EASILY identify bases of my own under heavy attack by looking at how many enemies it says are there. I have no way of knowing which enemy bases have a lot of my team attacking. The only time I want to be dropped at a friendly base is when the SCU is down. Either that or it drops me at an enemy base with one other ally in the entire hex, who also arrived by drop pod. We run around, get 1 or 2 kills, then die 5 against 1.
Yep, I like to play this game with my outfit, but when only half the outfit can run an operation in the continent because they're paid members and the other half of the outfit are non-paid members stuck in queue, the result is you have half a platoon trying to win a battle against the other faction. I'm sure all outfits are experiencing this and with little unity between outfits, the strategic portion of the game just got less impactful. Sure what this does, it forces the non-paid members to organize a platoon on another continent (half a platoon's worth of members) but it slowly erodes when they finally get let-in by the queue system. The long queue times are annoying, so I end up alt-tabbing and playing another game while I wait (say BF3), but the inactivity timer just logs me off before I can get into the continent... so I just end up continuing playing BF3 since I can't play the objectives on PS2 with my outfit (which really defined the whole PS2 experience for me).
Getting into the queue stops working when too many people try to get into the queue. It's like how the emergency warp core ejection system from Star Trek is always the first thing to go offline in an actual emergency.
Last night I was 1st in queue for about 30 minutes. Finally felt like something was wrong so I left the queue and went back in - was put in slot 5 and warped to Indar shortly after. Im a paying member so I assume the queue was broken and stuck at 1 min est .
