WoW, what’s going on?

Hrm, this is the first evening/night I’ve been faced with this “queue” to login to the World of Warcraft PvE Realm of my choice. The queue on this Realm was longer than that of my original homeworld of Zul’jin but I was still 200 back.
I guess there are many reasons why someone would have multiple characters on different types of servers. I’m having no problems getting connected to the RP or PVP Realms… [update: I was able to get to my character screen listing properly on the RP PVP server but nowhere else. The PVP servers didn’t have the lineups like the Normal servers.]
And I notice that instead of my Queue number going DOWN, it’s actually going UP quite regularly. In the time I’ve been writing here, the number has gone up to 479 or so, and it’s currently at 470. What’s that about? How come people are butting in line? Is it because I’m a trial account?
Ah well, I guess I’ll head over to one of the less-popular Realms and fiddle there.
[time passes]
Okay that won’t work. I got more information on the problem. This seems to be the second time in a couple of weeks I’ve heard this has happened - the whole game is down for everyone, every Realm, etc, for hours and hours at a time. It’s been at least 3 hours here, that I know of.

I’m used to playing Runescape where individual worlds were taken down but folks could just log into other worlds and continue on playing just fine, because there wasn’t the whole “Realm” concept in Runescape. And occasionally there’d be a login server failure that would prevent EVERYONE from logging in but it rarely lasted more than an hour.
Regular WoWers, please tell me this isn’t “normal”. I mean, I know it’s post-Christmas and they’re probably suffering load issues (I see they rolled out 2 more Realms to try to address the problem), and I’m okay with thinking that that is the problem… but I’m hoping it’s not something that was regular BEFORE the Christmas rush.

It isn’t normal. In just over a year of playing, I’ve encountered login queues twice. They were quite frequent immediately after the game launched in 2004, but Blizzard’s greatly expanded the number of world servers. Now, you’ll likely only see a queue on a particularly heavy day, on an old server. I think Christmas holidays led to the spike in activity.
Comment on January 5, 2006 @ 8:11 pm
Ah hey, thanks for the response! Nice to know. That’s what I was thinking but it’s always good to ask those more experienced when in doubt :)
WoWgrrl
Comment on January 6, 2006 @ 8:50 am
If your queue position goes up, it’s a feature!
When your computer crashes or you have to logout or exit for some reason, you have a window of time to get back in without going through the Queue.
This means you can get back to your character where they were, generally without dying or anything.
Comment on April 8, 2006 @ 5:27 pm
So why did the server boot me and now my queue went from 71 (at 4 min) to 102 (92 min) without offering me a chance to take advantage of this “feature”?
Comment on October 11, 2006 @ 7:56 pm
Hi all.Where can i get World of Warcraft for cheap?
I checked pricegrabber and the cheapest that I came up with was 35ish and the site was down. does anyone have a better site that i can buy this game from?
Comment on December 6, 2006 @ 1:56 pm