I like long queues and I cannot lie

I think one more reason that I've been playing my hunter more lately is that I enjoy having slightly longer queues in the dungeon finder, even if dps queues are pretty short these days anyway. Yes, you read that right. I like to wait. I do not like instant or really short queues.

Am I mad? Maybe.

I understand why people like to have short queues. They have limited time to play and want to get to the content that interests them as quickly as possible. However, while I've generally adjusted to the dungeon finder like everyone else, this attitude of a dungeon being something that you do during your lunch break is still one that I can't quite wrap my head around. In my mind a dungeon should be (and in early WoW, it was) an epic adventure, and that takes time, including time for preparation beforehand. So I never queue for an instance unless I know that I've got plenty of time to spare, way more than the actual run should take up. That one time when I was late to work because I had agreed to heal a Halls of Stone run when I really didn't have the time for it was enough, thank you.

Joining the dungeon finder as a tank is still a bit of a culture shock to me every time. "Hm, I guess I could do a dungeon..." BAM! Here's your group! You're in the instance! Now gogogo! There's no "sure I'll tank the daily for you, just find us some more dps" and the associated idling around. No "I can tank a run for you, a bit later". It's now or never. It's kind of funny, because people complain about how everyone always expects the tank to lead, but the thing with the dungeon finder is, the tank is the leader before the party has even formed! Join up now and lots of people will follow you into a group (even if it's fully automated). Wait a little longer and everyone else in the queue has to wait too. It's more power than I ever wanted.

More importantly though, instant queues mean that running a dungeon or doing something else (such as questing for example) is always an either/or decision. Either you queue up for a dungeon and run it now, or you don't. You can't queue up now and join later. You can decide to do something else now and queue up later. But the moment you queue up, you instantly have to stop whatever else you've been doing.

The result of this is that I'm always struggling to get more than one thing done on my tanking characters, because I'm very wishy-washy at decision making. If I start questing with the intent of doing an instance later, I'll keep wondering when I'll find the right moment to queue up... but I'm in the middle of questing, I don't want to interrupt myself now! /whine. Then I just end up questing the whole evening and wonder where the time went. On the other end of the spectrum, I'll queue up for an instance as soon as I log on, then find myself back in Orgrimmar half an hour later and go: "Huh, what was I going to do again? Nothing important I guess, if I'm still sitting in Org. I can do another dungeon I guess..." Rinse and repeat, and I never even get out of the city.

Being a healer is not much better. Usually you'll have at least a few minutes of wait time, which gives you a chance to mentally prepare yourself for whatever lies ahead, but at the same time it's usually too little to get anything done properly, and the pop-up will appear at the most inconvenient moment, before you've even had time to finish taking care of your mail, or while you're in the middle of your first daily quest. This just leaves you wondering why you even bothered to start anything. Of course if you do not start anything while waiting, the wait time will grow longer and longer and longer while you tap your foot, waiting for something to happen already.

A queue of twenty minutes or more is a wonderful thing on the other hand. You can go out and actually get some things done, whether it be quests, farming crafting materials or working on your archaeology.

You could rightly argue that technically, there's no difference between me questing for twenty minutes and then joining a dungeon via an instant queue, or joining a twenty-minute queue and then questing for the duration of the wait time. The end result is the same! And the instant queue has the advantage that if you don't want to do quests or anything else, you'll never be left with spare time between dungeons where you have nothing to do. How efficient.

Unfortunately there's this thing called the human mind, and it likes to play tricks on us. I already explained my dilemma about whether I should join up to get an insta-party now, or later, or never, but on the other end of the spectrum there is waiting. Waiting is a funny thing, because technically it's not an activity, it's a state of mind. While you sit around and read or do whatever, you're thinking about something that you expect to happen soon, ready to stop your current activity in its favour. Yet somehow this still feels like something that we're doing actively, so if I'm waiting in the queue and doing some quests at the same time, I actually feel like I'm multi-tasking and consider myself wonderfully efficient. When there is no queue to wait in, I can only ever do one thing at a time. How sad.

Also, anticipation. I hardly need to explain how it makes everything you like just that little bit better. Now dungeon finder pugs may not always turn out to be great, but I wouldn't be queueing up for one if I didn't expect the experience to be enjoyable in some way, and the longer I wait for it, the more I get to be excited about it. Which is not very excited, I'm not that crazy. But a little. Ooh, only five minutes to go on the estimated wait time, any moment now!

The only WoW queues I don't like are those where the game can't even give me an estimate. It makes me fidgety. In the battleground queue, you have no way of telling how close the system is to actually getting a game together. Are we just one person away from having a Warsong Gulch match? Or have less than five people been in the queue for this for the entirety of the last hour? In the dungeon finder you get to see which roles can currently be filled by the system, but that doesn't make it much better. If you've ever had a really long wait where you saw people join up for different roles and then leave again (maybe because they were put in a different group), then you'll know that it's just another type of agony, making you wish you knew who that person who just got greyed out was, so you could reach out to them and beg them to stay for just five more minutes, you almost had a full party there...!

But generally? I'm cool with waiting in queues. It adds another dimension to the game where getting into groups instantly falls kind of flat for me.