Castrum Queue and the overflow lottery

I stuck around in a map, doing everything needed while waiting for a queue to pop for CLL. Queue'd as was 18/48, I thought 'Great. I chose a poor instance anyway as had to wait closer to the full hour and must have just missed the last one'.

Only to find, that 55/48, I missed out. Most likely because of that shard priority engagement buff.

MF'rs stole my queue. I was so livid, I had to go and play something else for a bit to cool down.

Either way, point of the post is it's an interesting map, I enjoyed it, but mechanics like that where there's potential to miss out, no thanks. Not playing that part any further.

the "Priority" buff from cluster purchase does NOT work for CLL. it's up to RNGesus if you're queuing solo if you'll get in or not. probably have more luck with a full 8 man party going in.

I really wish we had a DR style queue for Castrum.

Wouldn't mind seeing a Delubrum themed queue for Castrum Lacus Litore. I equally don't understand very much why the instance population cap is 72, yet the cap for Critical Engagements and so fourth is 48. Just make them consistent and in-line at the very least.

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Originally Posted by Kaurhz

Wouldn't mind seeing a Delubrum themed queue for Castrum Lacus Litore. I equally don't understand very much why the instance population cap is 72, yet the cap for Critical Engagements and so fourth is 48. Just make them consistent and in-line at the very least.

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Because not everyone in Bozja is going into Castrum?

But what if they wanted to?

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Originally Posted by DrWho2010

the "Priority" buff from cluster purchase does NOT work for CLL. it's up to RNGesus if you're queuing solo if you'll get in or not. probably have more luck with a full 8 man party going in.

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Citation needed.

Literally the ONLY thing we know for sure about Priority is that the entire party has to have it for it to work. ANYTHING ELSE is speculation.

You say it doesn't work? You're working from the assumption that it's purely a pass/fail mechanic, where people with the buff will always get in before people without. Where is your source for this assumption? It could easily be something like "roll twice, take the higher number" or "roll + 50", either of which would sometimes make it look like the buff didn't work, but does still give you better odds of getting in.

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Originally Posted by Riyshn

Citation needed.

Literally the ONLY thing we know for sure about Priority is that the entire party has to have it for it to work. ANYTHING ELSE is speculation.

You say it doesn't work? You're working from the assumption that it's purely a pass/fail mechanic, where people with the buff will always get in before people without. Where is your source for this assumption? It could easily be something like "roll twice, take the higher number" or "roll + 50", either of which would sometimes make it look like the buff didn't work, but does still give you better odds of getting in.

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Sure, but given the buff states "Officially selected for priority deployment in critical engagements per Resistance leadership." and the fact that the other marching orders are a 100% guarantee you get into the CE, it's hard to imagine that Marching Orders is some random buff but not guaranteed mechanic, since if it wasn't guaranteed, it would fail to get you into any non-Castrum CE's at a decent rate (Since plenty of them have 60+ people queueing into them in the first zone regularly) and be well documented by now.

Even in my personal experience, I have never failed to get into a single non-Castrum CE even once with marching orders up across around a hundred or two of CE's, but have failed to get into Castrum 5x now out of 8 attempts with marching orders up. it's pretty damming evidence its ignored for Castrum.

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Originally Posted by Nafreyu

I stuck around in a map, doing everything needed while waiting for a queue to pop for CLL. Queue'd as was 18/48, I thought 'Great. I chose a poor instance anyway as had to wait closer to the full hour and must have just missed the last one'.

Only to find, that 55/48, I missed out. Most likely because of that shard priority engagement buff.

MF'rs stole my queue. I was so livid, I had to go and play something else for a bit to cool down.

Either way, point of the post is it's an interesting map, I enjoyed it, but mechanics like that where there's potential to miss out, no thanks. Not playing that part any further.

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Is this an alliance raid? (Didn’t know there are 48-man ones!) That happens to me sometimes. It will tell me there are 10/15 Dps queuing and I’m in the #1 position on the queue. Then suddenly everyone disappears and I’m suddenly 1/15 DPS. Just have to be patient, I typically only wait for a few minutes. Maybe queuing during prime time will help?

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Originally Posted by DrWho2010

the "Priority" buff from cluster purchase does NOT work for CLL. it's up to RNGesus if you're queuing solo if you'll get in or not. probably have more luck with a full 8 man party going in.

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Leaving things like this up to RNGesus is insanely dumb on Squeenix's part, just one of many reasons BSF needs a complete overhaul.

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Originally Posted by MariaArvana

and the fact that the other marching orders are a 100% guarantee you get into the CE

-...-

Even in my personal experience, I have never failed to get into a single non-Castrum CE even once with marching orders up across around a hundred or two of CE's

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Good for you, except you can't prove a negative. Meanwhile, I have had exactly that happen, so it is possible. And since the hotfix when queues have been overflowing I've gotten into all but 2 of ~20 CLL attempts, all with Priority. RNG gonna RNG, and confirmation bias doesn't change that.

The point is we don't know. The closest thing we have to official word either way is the initial patch notes when the system was introduced, which just says "Critical Engagements". And CLL is a CE, at least according to basically all the UI elements we have access to.

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Originally Posted by SecretIsland

Is this an alliance raid? (Didn’t know there are 48-man ones!) That happens to me sometimes. It will tell me there are 10/15 Dps queuing and I’m in the #1 position on the queue. Then suddenly everyone disappears and I’m suddenly 1/15 DPS. Just have to be patient, I typically only wait for a few minutes. Maybe queuing during prime time will help?

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This particular one is not an alliance raid, but something more akin to a FATE that only pops once an hour. If you miss it, you miss it, and your options are to try for another instance, or wait another hour. Either way, you're gonna be rolling the dice again.

Regarding the Marching Orders: If more than 48+ people have on priority, then it goes back to pure RNG again. We've had half a party get excluded in one of our group runs, despite having on marching orders, simply because there were almost 60 people queued up for it.

The entire thing should be pulled out to Duty Finder like Delibrum was, but I imagine it was not something they could fix in a 2 week sprint once it became obvious how few people wanted to clear it. Now they caused the opposite problem, turning it into the most popular content in Bozja.

If anything, the best compromise for now could be to give double priority access to anyone who hasn't cleared it yet, when EVERYONE has priority access in the queue.

Hopefully by 5.5 they'll have a more permanent solution that doesn't leave people in the cold.

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Originally Posted by Riyshn

Citation needed.

Literally the ONLY thing we know for sure about Priority is that the entire party has to have it for it to work. ANYTHING ELSE is speculation.

You say it doesn't work? You're working from the assumption that it's purely a pass/fail mechanic, where people with the buff will always get in before people without. Where is your source for this assumption? It could easily be something like "roll twice, take the higher number" or "roll + 50", either of which would sometimes make it look like the buff didn't work, but does still give you better odds of getting in.

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The buff is not consumed when used for CLL, whereas it is consumed with every other CE.

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Originally Posted by oblivion238

The buff is not consumed when used for CLL, whereas it is consumed with every other CE.

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The purchased priority buff? It's not consumed by anything. You buy it, and it lasts the full hour. The CE-specific buffs last until ~5 seconds before the start of the fight, whether you actually queue for the CE or not.

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Originally Posted by Riyshn

The purchased priority buff? It's not consumed by anything. You buy it, and it lasts the full hour. The CE-specific buffs last until ~5 seconds before the start of the fight, whether you actually queue for the CE or not.

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I must be mistaken then, regardless, I've also gotten into CLL without the buff.

They should convert Castrum Lacus Litore to a queued raid, like Delubrum Reginae. This duty-within-a-duty thing is needlessly awkward and clunky.

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Originally Posted by Nafreyu

But what if they wanted to?

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Allowing all 72 participants to join in for Castrum would be setting it up to fail even more so than the current situation.

It's highly unlikely that everyone in the zone is prepared to join in, even if the instance is full - but the battle would be set up around the expectation that all those people could be participating.

It's like the previous issue that people could only scrape half a team together and they couldn't handle the geared-for-48 mechanics. That problem is already likely to resurface once the excitement dies down, so having it instead geared for 72 would only make it far worse.

That's actually not likely to be an issue with CLL. It already scales enemy HP based on population.

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Originally Posted by SecretIsland

Is this an alliance raid? (Didn’t know there are 48-man ones!) That happens to me sometimes. It will tell me there are 10/15 Dps queuing and I’m in the #1 position on the queue. Then suddenly everyone disappears and I’m suddenly 1/15 DPS. Just have to be patient, I typically only wait for a few minutes. Maybe queuing during prime time will help?

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This is separate from the Duty Finder. This is Castrum Lacus Litore which is locked behind the Bozjan Southern Front. CLL is required for part of the ShB relic which means that a lot of people are forced to do Bozja.

The problem is that once you're in a Bozja instance, CLL probably isn't going to be available right away unless you're really lucky. If it's a new instance, it'll be exactly 1 hour before the Castrum queue starts. CLL itself has a max of 48 players out of the 72 total players in the instance (as long as they are above Rank 10). So you could end up waiting an entire hour for the queue to start only for it to fill past capacity forcing players out. At this point, you could either wait another hour in this instance, or try to get a different instance and hope the Castrum queue is a bit sooner. The worst part is you could wait another hour and get kicked out of the queue again. This could potentially lead to you waiting several hours just to clear one run of CLL.

It wasn't this bad before. Until the recent hotfix that buffed the rewards from it, it was rare to get more than 20-30 people to queue for Castrum. but now that it speeds up one of the relic steps considerably, instances constantly fill up and everyone that's able to is queuing for Castrum.

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Originally Posted by Riyshn

That's actually not likely to be an issue with CLL. It already scales enemy HP based on population.

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I thought people have said that it doesn't? Or possibly it has the problem of the other skirmishes where it's based on previous participation so a small group after a large group is out of luck.

Still, even if the difficulty scales, a small group is going to rattle around an arena built to be packed with 72 players, and mechanics requiring a certain amount of players to do a thing are harder. There's also probably less margin for error and more chance of a wipe simply because there are less people around.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

I thought people have said that it doesn't? Or possibly it has the problem of the other skirmishes where it's based on previous participation so a small group after a large group is out of luck.

Still, even if the difficulty scales, a small group is going to rattle around an arena built to be packed with 72 players, and mechanics requiring a certain amount of players to do a thing are harder. There's also probably less margin for error and more chance of a wipe simply because there are less people around.

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It doesn't scale linearly - a full group (should) still have an easier time than a small group. But it's also a matter of people being prepared. A group of 13 (the smallest party I know to have cleared it) bringing full DPS essences and action will likely have an easier time than a group of 30+ who don't bring anything.

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Originally Posted by Dhayze

This is separate from the Duty Finder. This is Castrum Lacus Litore which is locked behind the Bozjan Southern Front. CLL is required for part of the ShB relic which means that a lot of people are forced to do Bozja.

The problem is that once you're in a Bozja instance, CLL probably isn't going to be available right away unless you're really lucky. If it's a new instance, it'll be exactly 1 hour before the Castrum queue starts. CLL itself has a max of 48 players out of the 72 total players in the instance (as long as they are above Rank 10). So you could end up waiting an entire hour for the queue to start only for it to fill past capacity forcing players out. At this point, you could either wait another hour in this instance, or try to get a different instance and hope the Castrum queue is a bit sooner. The worst part is you could wait another hour and get kicked out of the queue again. This could potentially lead to you waiting several hours just to clear one run of CLL.

It wasn't this bad before. Until the recent hotfix that buffed the rewards from it, it was rare to get more than 20-30 people to queue for Castrum. but now that it speeds up one of the relic steps considerably, instances constantly fill up and everyone that's able to is queuing for Castrum.

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It was worse before. Every single CLL instance would get around 16 participants who would all abandon because there weren't enough players.
At least now 48 players get in instead of no one.

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Originally Posted by Riyshn

Good for you, except you can't prove a negative. Meanwhile, I have had exactly that happen, so it is possible. And since the hotfix when queues have been overflowing I've gotten into all but 2 of ~20 CLL attempts, all with Priority. RNG gonna RNG, and confirmation bias doesn't change that.

The point is we don't know. The closest thing we have to official word either way is the initial patch notes when the system was introduced, which just says "Critical Engagements". And CLL is a CE, at least according to basically all the UI elements we have access to.

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Except dataminers (and people who use a certain -engine- program) already confirmed long ago the buff's internal mechanism in the code showcased it's a binary flag; it guarantees the server picks you for CE's, unless there's at least 48 others who have the buff, or an equivalent 'Marching Orders' from fate-specific ones, then the game RNG's who gets in from the buff wielders alone. The thing is, Castrum isn't classified as a CE internally. Whether intentionally or as a bug, Marching Orders doesn't work on it. So a visual demonstration on how Marching Orders works on all non-Castrum CEs:

>Server checks all players who queued.
>Sorts queuers into two groups: those who have a marching buff and those who don't.
>Takes all marching buff players and adds them to 'successfully queued' array
>Checks to see if 'successfully queued' array is full.
>If no, randomly choose players from non-marching orders array till it reaches 48.
>if yes, it then checks to make sure the selected players isn't over 48.
>if they are, it randomly chooses who gets kicked out until it has 48.

Beyond that, Square is often extremely picky with their word choices for buffs. if it says 'Priority', a word that can be defined as 'the right to take precedence or to proceed before others.', it ain't hard to figure out that it's ignored on castrum when it doesn't let you in. If something isn't guaranteed, they usually word buff text to say something akin to 'increased chance'.

IIRC, Duel's aren't classified as CEs either, and Marching Orders gets nullified on those as well, so there's already precedent through visible observation in Bozja itself.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

I thought people have said that it doesn't? Or possibly it has the problem of the other skirmishes where it's based on previous participation so a small group after a large group is out of luck.

Still, even if the difficulty scales, a small group is going to rattle around an arena built to be packed with 72 players, and mechanics requiring a certain amount of players to do a thing are harder. There's also probably less margin for error and more chance of a wipe simply because there are less people around.

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It scales to a point. It stops scaling downward roughly at about 20-24 players, but it does scale upward all the way to 48 players.

The thing is, its scaling isn't exactly a 1:1. Theoretically, a full group of 48 players doing proper rotations, essences + lost actions would completely annihilate the bosses even compared to a group of 24 doing all the same things, since the boss HP scales around a player doing average dps for their job, well below the max output of a job's rotation.

But in practicality, the rate that the bosses die between smaller groups and larger groups will be about the same since people will be missing essences, missing lost actions, not doing proper rotations, etc. The more players mostly equates to extra ressurection power to prevent wipes.

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Originally Posted by Nafreyu

I stuck around in a map, doing everything needed while waiting for a queue to pop for CLL. Queue'd as was 18/48, I thought 'Great. I chose a poor instance anyway as had to wait closer to the full hour and must have just missed the last one'.

Only to find, that 55/48, I missed out. Most likely because of that shard priority engagement buff.

MF'rs stole my queue. I was so livid, I had to go and play something else for a bit to cool down.

Either way, point of the post is it's an interesting map, I enjoyed it, but mechanics like that where there's potential to miss out, no thanks. Not playing that part any further.

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Nothing was stolen from you, it was like this on day one. The highest contributors get in, going around the map and doing the most CEs. That weighs much more than the priority clusters.

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Originally Posted by Daeriion_Aeradiir

Except dataminers (and people who use a certain -engine- program) already confirmed long ago the buff's internal mechanism in the code showcased it's a binary flag; it guarantees the server picks you for CE's, unless there's at least 48 others who have the buff, or an equivalent 'Marching Orders' from fate-specific ones, then the game RNG's who gets in from the buff wielders alone. The thing is, Castrum isn't classified as a CE internally.

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Interesting. I don't suppose you have a source for this? Would definitely like to see that, and my Google Fu is failing me.

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Originally Posted by technole

Nothing was stolen from you, it was like this on day one. The highest contributors get in, going around the map and doing the most CEs. That weighs much more than the priority clusters.

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Yeah, I did a full hour of every C.E as a tank getting Gold rating on each. As a tank, you'll understand enmity puts you at top for completion..

I queued as 18 out of 48, and I didn't get in.

So actually, my spot was stolen because I made sure to be active and participate and be in the first few to register.

That's what this entire post of mine is about.

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Originally Posted by Nafreyu

I queued as 18 out of 48, and I didn't get in.

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It's a lottery. You were one of the 55 people to enter it. If being #18 mattered then they'd just stop recruiting once it hit 48/48.

And are you certain that simply participating in other CEs gets you some kind of priority? The only time I've gotten priority for a CE was the one following the Unicorn Flakes skirmish, specifically from completing that skirmish. That's happened to me twice.

Perhaps I haven't spent long enough in one session to see it, but that doesn't seem to be the same mechanism as general participation.

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Originally Posted by Nafreyu

Yeah, I did a full hour of every C.E as a tank getting Gold rating on each. As a tank, you'll understand enmity puts you at top for completion..

I queued as 18 out of 48, and I didn't get in.

So actually, my spot was stolen because I made sure to be active and participate and be in the first few to register.

That's what this entire post of mine is about.

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spots can't be stolen. it chooses randomly from registrants. what number you registered as is inconsequential.

It was quite worst before to the point where you could hardly run Castrum without a premade group, or happening to be in the same instance as said group.

The lottery in itself isn't very attractive for sure and that's even more true for Duels imo. The bright side is that you have more chances to get picked for CEs/Castrum than not, even in the worst case scenario of 72 people queuing for it.

Funny little screenshot taken by a friend after the last hotfix making Castrum way more interesting reward-wise. Not only for the relic but also now gives way more coins, xp and mettle upon completion.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachmen...06/unknown.png

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Originally Posted by Riyshn

Interesting. I don't suppose you have a source for this? Would definitely like to see that, and my Google Fu is failing me.

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I mean, google isn't going to help you. Dataminers don't exactly want to be found with simple google searches, given what they do.
When Bozja was first released, there were private discords dedicated to figuring out a lot of systems in it, along with figuring out things such as Marching Orders since a small group also wanted to try and World 1st the duels and Marching Orders was pretty important to that if it did work.

Statistically though, speaking purely on a math front and disregarding what I know, its also easily observable that Marching Orders isn't a % chance and is guaranteed outside of a single niche case. As Maria pointed out earlier in this topic, if it was a % chance, it would readily fail you often on every other CE on the southern front, yet despite playing a lockout of Bozja nearly nightly with marching Orders perpetually up since the beginning of this year, I have not failed to enter a single CE. Yet in the past week alone, I've failed to enter Castrum 4x. Either we have odds so far high up into the negative exponent values that I should go buy a lottery ticket, or its obvious Castrum ignores Marching Orders.

The one, single scenario where Marching orders cannot get you into a CE is if at least 48 others all have marching orders, or an equivalent buff from completing a Pre-CE skirmish, and even, the odds are small.

Think of it another way: even assuming a max full queue of 72 where the odds of not getting in are at their highest, you have a 66% chance of getting in. If Marching Orders was increasing that %, it would be making Castrum a near-guaranteed entry anyway. For it to mesh with how in interacts with non-Castrum CEs, it would need to be increasing the %chance so much to make both mine & maria's sample size of perfect several hundred+ CE's work, meaning it'd be an almost statistical impossibility you'd see anyone with Marching Orders not get into Castrum 99% of the time, yet that's clearly not the case as maria & I have demonstrated alone, discounting the tons of others that have had it happen to them.

Lots of systems in this game can be solved with simple analysis, math and observation. Also speaking as a programmer, binary systems are way infinitely easier to deal with since its just a single bit flip and a switch statement to check, instead of coding entire systems to do equations and math to achieve the same purpose.

TL: DR, your 5 clusters are being wasted if you buy it for the sole purpose of getting into Castrum.

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Originally Posted by Nafreyu

Yeah, I did a full hour of every C.E as a tank getting Gold rating on each. As a tank, you'll understand enmity puts you at top for completion..

I queued as 18 out of 48, and I didn't get in.

So actually, my spot was stolen because I made sure to be active and participate and be in the first few to register.

That's what this entire post of mine is about.

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Your contribution in other skirmishes and CEs is irrelevant.

The only thing the Castrum queue cares for is that you sign up for it. Once it's initial 6-minute timer goes out, it selects a random 48 from the people who signed up. Your spot wasn't 'stolen'; you just weren't lucky. Yes, this means that the guy afking at spawn has the same equal chance as you do, and now you understand why many people instance hop to fish for Castrums that are coming up soon.

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Originally Posted by van_arn

I really wish we had a DR style queue for Castrum.

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Far too much common sense for this to actually happen.

It looks like it might happen, but it's too big a fix to hotfix, going to take a major patch and testing.

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Originally Posted by ICountFrom0

It looks like it might happen, but it's too big a fix to hotfix, going to take a major patch and testing.

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That's what I expect, or at least hope. The current fix just edited some numbers; setting up a queue from Gangos would, at least, involve some alterations to the script and adding an NPC to sign up with. They'd need to spend time on that.

If they do split it out, it might even get a dedicated pocket instance for the initial queue, like when you first access Delubrum by speaking to Mikoto in the underground ruins that aren't part of the main Bozja zone. Perhaps you'd move to a spot just outside the castrum gates as you prepare for the mission.

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Originally Posted by ICountFrom0

It looks like it might happen, but it's too big a fix to hotfix, going to take a major patch and testing.

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I don't believe they ever changed Baldesion Arsenal's requirements so I honestly don't see anything changing with Castrum.

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Originally Posted by JamieRose

Leaving things like this up to RNGesus is insanely dumb on Squeenix's part, just one of many reasons BSF needs a complete overhaul.

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its not true. I have gotten in every time solo. you queue up, wait for it allow you to enter the instance and just go. I won't stick around for a fate or anything because it sure feels like tis first come first serve with CE. I mean next time you are in look at /say, /yell with the shear number of people lfg

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Originally Posted by Dhayze

I don't believe they ever changed Baldesion Arsenal's requirements so I honestly don't see anything changing with Castrum.

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Yeah, but BA is completely optional content which clearing Castrum is required to continue the relic (quest line). The hotfix surely has helped the current situation but it needs to be changed in the next expansion to keep it possible for newcomers to clear it.

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Originally Posted by ICountFrom0

It looks like it might happen, but it's too big a fix to hotfix, going to take a major patch and testing.

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Yeah, definitely.

Leaving aside the weird way in which some of the Bozja stuff seems to be actually implemented under the hood, there's the fact that Delubrum's easier to handle the queue for because you need only 24. (And Delubrum savage has 48 people but doesn't have a queue; you must pre-assemble your group and then go in, as there's no matching.)

So how do you handle Castrum queues? Do you wait for 48 people to be ready, thus a full run? But as it is, you often have runs with only 24 or 28 or whatever people, which are still perfectly viable; down the road when Bozja dies down a bit, this could be a problem, since if you wait for 48 people you could have 47 in queue for an hour waiting for that last person. So you probably end up needing to do something like pop an instance immediately if there are 48 players, but have alternative logic where if there've been 24+ people in queue for more than 10 minutes, you pop an instance with just whoever is in the queue rather than still waiting for 48 total. Or something like that.

Which is logic wildly unlike any other queue/matching and duty instanciation code in the game, so far as I know. On a wild guess, the headache entailed in figuring out how to make that part work is probably the sticking point.

What I honestly wish they'd do in the meantime is a) add a viewable timer on the Southern Front showing how long until Castrum is up (so you don't have an endless stream of people joining and asking "Anyone know how long until Castrum?" every 30 seconds), and b) every time you queue for Castrum and don't get in, you should get an item like 'Castrum siege plans' or something. And if you have 3 of the siege plans (I.e., have queued but not been picked three times), you can trade in those three siege plans for a Marching-Orders-type buff specific to Castrum that guarantees you entrance on the next one you queue for.

That way people can tell how long they'll need to wait for a Castrum instance to pop, and if they get bounced three times they can get a consolation prize of guaranteed entrance on the fourth time. It'd help smooth things over until carving out CLL and making it something you can queue for individually is feasible.

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Originally Posted by Dhayze

I don't believe they ever changed Baldesion Arsenal's requirements so I honestly don't see anything changing with Castrum.

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While the Arsenal is technically a step of the Eureka relics (i.e., the final step), it's also at the very end of a grind that most people weren't going to go through, so there's presumably far less demand for it to be able to be queued into separately.

The Castrum as it stands is is the equivalent of putting the Arsenal at the end of Anemos, and demanding you finish it before being able to move on to Pagos; while that might have spared some people the pain and suffering that was Pagos' map design, it would probably have produced far more outcry.

Think requireing having done things inside the Bozja instance should make one qualify or get first seats regardless if am grouped or not, just promoting the AFK game is not a good thing.

Make CLL as a dr or make bozja instance as an event where skirmishes leads up to CLL from starting of map for all 72 players. Increase the rewards a little bit for the skirmishes leading up to CLL. Then maybe add a reset timer for the whole event to restart again. Running around the whole map doing fates is just ughhh.

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Originally Posted by Packetdancer

So how do you handle Castrum queues? Do you wait for 48 people to be ready, thus a full run? But as it is, you often have runs with only 24 or 28 or whatever people, which are still perfectly viable; down the road when Bozja dies down a bit, this could be a problem, since if you wait for 48 people you could have 47 in queue for an hour waiting for that last person. So you probably end up needing to do something like pop an instance immediately if there are 48 players, but have alternative logic where if there've been 24+ people in queue for more than 10 minutes, you pop an instance with just whoever is in the queue rather than still waiting for 48 total. Or something like that.

Which is logic wildly unlike any other queue/matching and duty instanciation code in the game, so far as I know. On a wild guess, the headache entailed in figuring out how to make that part work is probably the sticking point.

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You don't play triple triad do you?

Open tournaments do exactly what you are asking for. The que ends after 3 minutes, and whomever is in, gets in, then NPC's fill the other slots. This could just as easily be a timer that triggers once 24 people are qued, and any more people who show up in a 5 minute timer get in, anybody else dosen't and it launches. Trick will be to let people KNOW that it hits 24, and then goes timer.