Red Alert System (at least on Mattherson) is terrible

Basically if you login when a red alert is happening all of your friends/outfit members are already at the red alert continent. You can't get there because the queue will be well over an hour and will flat out probably just not let you in before the red alert expires.

Is anyone else frustrated by this?

Are there any plans to increase the hardware so continents can handle more players?

These are supposed to take place when server pop is low but Mattherson is a busy server so it's easy for us to fill the alert continent. I don't think you'll see any hardware upgrades that allow more than 2k on continent but people will leave the game over time and it won't be so hard to get in. In the mean time your stuck especially if you're are not premium.

Get a membership if it bothers you so much, that is sure to bring the time down quite a bit.

I appreciate the answer MM

Also Nella if a F2P game is charging me to play with my friends it's not so free anymore. I have people in my outfit that ARE premium members and still get stuck off continent!

Member queue for Esamir was 23 deep Saturday night. I got in it, and went and killed VS and NC while I was waiting. Took about 10 minutes.

And last night the fight on Amerish (non-alert cont) was top notch. I completely disagree with OP.

I guess this might also be a bit of a plan by SOE to make membership more desirable.
Not that it's a bad thing, you can still play on other continents and the devs do still need to eat and such.

I had one of my best PS2 experiences on Miller last night during an alert. The last 10 mins or so was very tense! Then it ended in a draw which was very anti-climatic... fun nonetheless though!

The problem is though that as it is free we should just be thankful that they don't limit what the free players can do in any way, its up to them to decide to queue, go somewhere else or get a sub (and maybe still queue), its just bad luck for people just logging in and unable to get on, but thats not their fault.

While it sucks that you can't play with your friends, at least be glad the server has enough players to garner an hour long queue.

Now only if people realized you didn't have to say at the warpgate terminal while you wait...

omg this so much this. I actually had to log off last night and go play something else till the alert was over. My outfit was on the alert cont, 2 platoons, both on the alert cont. I couldn't get over, queue was an hour long. Its just ******* stupid.

Alerts are great if you are in game when they happen. Its easy to go to warpgate and warp right away at the beginning, but if you arent there at the beginning and your guys are there, the game cannot be played. Sure I could play with some random platoon, but its a pain to find a good one and I want to play with my outfit. Which I have always been able to do, in 300+ hours of playing this game, never been an issue until now.

Also I doubt SOE will do any hardware upgrades, their hardware can't handle the current load. Also, peoples computers and internet connections are pretty close to being maxed out. The issue is the alerts are very poorly implemented, a quick fix tached on feature no one took the time to think out.

I do not know how to fix this, I don't think it can be fixed. They could make it so when a cont fills during an alert, they do a second alert on another cont, at least then we could go fight there and get the bonus xp, but we still don't have are buds. GG SOE. You broke the damn game.

Ive spent $100 in sc, I don't really think of myself as a free player And I would say it is their(assuming you meant SOE) fault, its their game and they created this situation.

Remember, the plan is to implement more alerts of different sizes, right now these are pretty much alerts to test the system.

These won't be the only alerts, we can expert more of different scale and frequency.

OP, I completely agree. The continent capture alerts basically screw over non members (note: non members does not mean non paying customers, I have spent $70 on this game, I just don't subscribe). If you aren't already playing when the countdown to the alert begins, chances are you are not going to get in as the queue time will be longer than the remaining alert.

Basically, if I attempt to join a queue with less than an hour left in the alert there is ZERO chance that I will get in. Members keep jumping the queue and taking EVERY SINGLE SLOT that opens up because so few people leave the continent (since they want the points at the end).

I wouldn't be so bad if the rest of the empires that are on other continents actually continued to fight, but for some reason 90% of the people in queue just idle at the warpgate (probably because their outfits are on the alert continent and they don't want to play alone).

Hopefully once they add other alerts (like capturing a certain type of base on all 3 continents) this problem will be alleviated, because right now the alert system is more trouble than it is worth.

Probably. But more likely SOE will add capacity by adding more continents.

The players moaned about low pops and wanted server merges, so they did as the players had a point... so now people are going to say pops are too high? So you want them to do what? split servers back up again so an alert isn't pop locked?

How have they broken the game? These Alerts are fantastic. More people are focused on fighting for territory and the fights seem to be a lot more intense, especially in the last 30 minutes.

Heftier servers that can carry more people would be nice during primetime or on balanced servers, but what about off-hours and factionally unbalanced servers (that already have issues)? If two factions can't reach 666 players and one can, increasing continent populations will only make the situation worse.

The only downside that I see to these alerts is that more players stand around in the warpgate doing nothing when they could be out playing.

Being stuck in queues isn't very fun, but there are two other continents to fight on while you wait. It's just on the Alert continent now, not only Indar.

The queue lock was clearly their intention in the first place, or they would make alerts go across all three continents. This is just another example of SOE milking their dead product instead of trying to fix it.

Nothing wrong with pops. The issue is the entire pop goes to one cont, the cont also happens to have an XP boost. Basically what they made were more indars, indar on the alert cont and ghost capping on the other 2.

Mega alerts (maybe when server pop reaches a decently high number) across all three continents would be pretty awesome.

Yeah, forgive me but wasn't that the entire point? To have the alert take the players from 3 semi active conts and put them into 1 for a good fight, though admittedly there is a bit of an issue if the alerts go off at times when threes more than 1 cont's worth of people playing.

Well, if everyone were poor or cheap this game would seize to exist?

Also, if you bought premiumship, wouldn't you like to have som perks like getting more certs, sc cash for new weapons and maybe not having to wait in line for poor people that can't spend like 10$ on a game that will make them come here raging like crazy if there is the slightest downtime?

The whole point with having F2P with microtransactions is that it's actually P2W (or at least make it a lot easier). Me as a paying customer is worth a lot more than you, why? Because when they collect their pay checks some of the cash in there is from me, not you.