The release GW2 queues were hilarious. At one point at release would be literally 10 people from each faction allowed in WvW.
This was in the last beta where queues were working more or less properly. I remember in release you'd see lines of 50+ people at each portal. The other problem with the queues is that it was faster to constantly requeue than to wait in the queue. The only people reliably getting in were those who macro'd a queue request + cancel that ran at 10hz.
The big driver behind waiting in a queue instead of going out and experiencing the world is that we initially had one day WvW fights and were competitive to the point of wanting to go undefeated, which meant we had to be on the top of our game every hour of every day since we could never accrue a substantial lead. We ended up going 30-0.