I've been playing Planetside 2 since the beta. After recently returning to the game, it seems every night that I try to play I'm placed in a queue and asked to become a member. There were not these queues previously - it was just log in and play. Do they expect me to believe the servers are actually full? I play on Briggs, and the population these days it only a fraction of what it used to be back in this games heyday. Every day now that I log in, I just feel like it's a ploy set in place to encourage me to become a member. This is not good incentive and just makes me not want to play that night and switch to something else.
Yes, Look at the map where you choose to go to a continent. There is an option to enter the queue, but above it you are told if it's a Max Population queue, or a Balance queue. There is an undesired effect that occurs just as off hours are ending and prime time is beginning. You can end up with the only available continent in a max population queue. This does not last long though. A new continent will open with an unstable warpgate soon. With a membership the only time you'll struggle to get on a continent is during max population during an alert. Without a membership you should be able to play fairly quickly but might not get your first choice of where to go. It's all just designed to maximize player density on the continents. It's not a perfect solution, but works pretty well I think.
It's simply to balance out the factions. Lets say that NC is having an alert on indar, and Hossin is being overrun by TR or vanu. Every NC players wants to go to Indar for the alert, because well.. if you win it's 300 Iso-4 and there's a 30% exp bonus bound to alerts aswell. If all the NC players would just go to indar, what would happen ? indar having 40% NC, 30% TR/Vanu. or what ever combination you want/Is online. Lets say there's 200 people NC is a server, being 40% and TR/Vanu having 30% meaning both factions play with 10% ( 50 people!) less at that giving time. 50 isn't alot right.... Trust me, 50 people more or less can easily clear an area, win a continent because they can divide and conquer. At prime times it's even worse. we don't talk 200 people then, we talk 1-2000 people. imagine 10% at that point, meaning you have to fight with 200 people less. thats 100 Filled MBT(main and 2ndary gunner) or rougly 66 liberators filled with 3 man hoving area's. Thats just the difference over that what is up already ofcourse ( and no im not saying all 200 people will grab filled MBT's, just pointing out the difference). They have to make a Que to make people wait for the factions to semi balance out, having a 1-2% difference isn't that big of a deal, but the more advantage 1 factions gets, the more people from other factions will leave the area. And as someone stated above, beside prime time alerts, Que time normaly isn't that long.
Even with a membership on Emerald I am put in the queue during late afternoon into evening (peak hours?) play. Though the queue time is generally really quick.. anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes. Unless I'm on a faction who is winning an alert and I'm queued to join that map. One experience is I've still been in 20+ minute queues recently and only got on AFTER the alert was completed. I think they reduced the number of maps open to funnel players into more populated areas.
you get in a long que after an alert because alot of people leave after the alert(go to bed etc.). if your team happends to be the overpopping faction at that point, u've got to wait. had it myself aswell last week, logged in 2 AM(GMT +1) and i got in a que being 7/80 and it took near 20 minutes to get past that. ending up in an area where we had big big control of everything, and i could understand the que time, but it just sux coz i got home and wanted to play haha.
