Star Wars: The Old Republic Beta Weekend Gets Massive Four Digit Queues

Giuseppe Nelva November 26, 2011 2:00 PM EST

Some may be wondering just how anticipated Star Wars: The Old Republic is, and while getting hard numbers is impossible, just trying to log into the beta today can give a rather clear idea of how many people want to try the upcoming MMORPG by Bioware.

Yesterday what has been labeled as the “Final beta weekend” of the game has started, slated to continue through today until tomorrow, and Bioware invited to the beta basically everyone that asked for it, in order to stress-test the servers and see how they fared against the onslaught of Jedi and Sith wannabes.

For such an event, queues as normal, especially when the number of servers is limited, but past a certain size, those queues fly stright out of the “normal” status and into the realm of legend.

At the moment of this writing almost all the servers have queues, and quite a few of them have over 1000 gamers willing to wait in like to get a chance to test the game. The server I’m on, The Leviathan, had 1081 (you read it well: one thousand and eighty-one) in queue before I alt-tabbed to write this piece. You can see it with your own eyes in the screenshot above, other beta testers on twitter and on forums are reporting even higher numbers.

if you think this is due to the small number of servers, you may want to think again. At the moment of this writing (I have to specify because Bioware is continuously adding new servers) there are 51 North American servers and 37 European ones, for a grand total of 88, and this is just the beta.

It’s worth mentioning, also, that the beta didn’t come with a small admission “fee”, as the beta client is larger than 20 gigabytes, which is definitely a turnoff for many, especially for those that have limited bandwidth available.

One thing is for sure: if the numbers of this beta weekend are any indication Star Wars: The Old Republic seems to be destined to be a real smash hit. If you’re waiting in queue like me, and need a nice pastime, you can read my preview, focused on the Empire faction, or the one by Chad, that went the Republic way. What side will you fight for?