This weekend may be a different story with the queues. Picked the server my guild was preassigned to, and it's at a 30 minute wait to play during primetime.

The fundamental architecture that these MMOs run on needs to change to help improve the customer experience. I'm patient enough for now to wait, but if it continues, I'll want to play elsewhere. For me, seeing a premiere MMO launch in late 2011 with tons of isolated shards, and no easy way to move between them makes it seem like nothing has changed since Everquest in 1999.

WoW also frustrates me a bit here. Over the course of the game (7 years now), I've made new friends, and wanted to play with different people. The shard boundaries make this difficult, and $25 per character to change servers gets pricy quick. Blizzard is trying to address this with some of the Real ID friend groups, but it's hard work retrofitting that in this late in the game. It's also not a full solution yet for the desire to play with various friends, as only some activities can occur with RealID friends.

Eve has the unique position of being able to have just one shard due to the nature of a pure space game. Other games though have tried to address the shard issue in other ways. Everquest II, Champion Online, and a few others had the concept of instancing popular zones, IE "Freeport #1, Freeport #2, etc" to scale with load.

Gaming still has many issues to tackle down the road. In a way I'm glad, since it means more challenging jobs ahead