Locked out of the Duty Finder.

[polyphonica]

I don't really know everything of what you just said but it all sounds way more complicated than simply giving the strike to the person who withdraws / waits out the whole 45 seconds

It is more complicated, because otherwise it can be abused by just telling your friends in the party to withdraw on your behalf, thus multiplying the amount of strikes a given person effectively gets ("punishment splitting"). Being in a party would thus be a way of bypassing the strike rule. But, since people don't like the whole party getting the penalty, your main alternatives are either that the person who withdraws gets booted so that everyone else gets in (thus no group penalty needed), or you give the group some other sort of disincentive (like a group penalty that's separate from the individual penalty, or some other penalty for the party leader that encourages them to ensure their party is ready before queuing).

The whole thing is you don't want to punish honest people for someone else's mistakes, while also not allowing dishonest people to use whatever system you come up with to bypass the rules and inconvenience others. The current implementation arguably leans too strongly to the latter side.

Auto-withdraw from your party if you withdraw from a queue that the rest of your party accepts might not be a bad idea, but it seems like it would still be a queue failure. Someone withdrew and so you didn't have a full party formed. DF would keep trying to fill the open spot, the same as if they'd queued individually and withdrawn. The difference would be that the rest of the party isn't knocked out of the queue at the same time, (which is a problem regardless of whether there are additional penalties involved or not).

The key to making that work would be that you'd start the instance with gaps to be filled, as happens for Frontlines now. Obviously there'd have to be a limit to how many withdrawals it could overcome though. In theory, you could probably make it so that within the first minute of an instance starting, those don't count as "partial queues", thus allowing those spaces to be filled really quickly by anyone waiting (assuming they're in the right role).