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Update, 11/03/2016:

Ubisoft have implemented a patch for The Division’s queueing issue, see this news piece for more details.

Original story:

When a game with massive online scope like Tom Clancy’s The Division launches, its inevitably going to be besieged by network issues. Sure enough, the game launched – and everyone had downloaded the 3GB day one patch – players were complaining of connectivity drops and other general performance niggles. While these sorts of issues might be considered inexcusable by some for a finished product you’ve paid $60 for, they’re generally an accepted downside of online gaming; they could even be seen as entirely understandable after the potential for wildly inaccurate beta test numbers from last month.

But once you get the obligatory patch and you manage to hold a stable connection, you’d expect to be able to crack on and play the game grind some levels, right? Think again.

At the beginning of The Division, players are funnelled into a safe house, and in that safe house is a laptop, on a table in the centre of the room. In order to progress with the game’s story, you need to interact with this laptop. So far, so simple. But what happens when hundreds of players are all trying to use the laptop at once? That’s right: chaos ensues… for a short time.

People were taking to social media to question whether this was a bug or another network-related performance issue, before coming to the mass realisation that everyone trying to use the laptop at once was causing the undesirable behaviour. If one player tried to use it while another was already on it, it would cancel the incumbent’s action; multiply that by hundreds of users, and nobody was getting anywhere.

Then, almost spontaneously, players did the most practical – and frankly, British – thing possible in the circumstances: they formed an orderly queue.

The Division queue simulator

Redditor joshhubi captured this image, but there’s plenty of evidence of exciting The Division queue action to be found online, like this one:

The Division queue

And this one:

We can imagine that Ubisoft hoped people would be waiting in line for Tom Clancy’s The Division, but this probably wasn’t what they had in mind.


Want to try The Division queue simulator? Pick it up from Amazon.

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