Penalty for going to the toilet ...

[Reinha]

Queue pausing works fine. At least in WoW.

Imagine you're in a store queued up waiting to pay your stuff. The queue is long and you need the bathroom. In stead of taking your shopping cart to the toilets, you leave it in the queue. As the queue moves forward, your trolley is pushed forward with it. Either you come back before your trolley has reached the cashier, and everything is just as if you never left your spot. Or, your trolley has reached the cashier. In stead of being shoved to the side to wait for your return and requeuing, your trolley remains in first place in the queue and people simply move past it if you have not returned yet.

Let's say 10 people get past you (letter A) in the queue. The queue would normally pop for people in this order: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N... In stead it looks like this: B C D E F G H I J K A L M N... Players L, M, N and onwards will have the exact same queue time as if A never went afk and players B - K have the same queue time as if player A withdrew.

WoW implemented this queuing algorithm alongside with the ability to queue up for multiple things at once. If a queue popped, the other queues would be paused while you did your instance (allowing other queued people to get in past you). When exiting the completed instance, you would quite often get an instant queue pop for the next thing. Yet, I noticed no increase in queue time for the first queue. It was soooo convenient.

The only downside to this would be that the queue doesn't get shorter by the small amount of players who get withdrawn. But like I said, it's not a noticeable amount of time and if multiple queues at once were allowed, chaining all the instances you want to run would be super efficient. This is certainly one of the (many) quality-of-life things I miss from WoW...

[Moqi]

Imagine you're in a store queued up waiting to pay your stuff.

Finally someone with some sense, everybody arguing about how queues work and I'm like... has anyone ever been to a supermarket? If I have a full cart of groceries and the guy behind me only has a bottle of water, I'm gonna let him get in front of me. Guess what I just did? I paused my queue without having to withdraw or having to pause everyone else! It make perfect sense and it's absolutely SE's fault that you can't even go to the toilet without losing your spot. It is unreasonable to expect players to stare at the screen for hours to get in an instance.

[Lexia]

it's absolutely SE's fault that you can't even go to the toilet without losing your spot. It is unreasonable to expect players to stare at the screen for hours to get in an instance.

What content are you doing that takes "hours" to queue for?

[zosia]

What content are you doing that takes "hours" to queue for?

guess we know you don't pvp =p

[Colorful]

snip

You didn't pause your queue, you put someone ahead of you. Pausing your queue would be while you're at the very front of the line but forget to pick something up, and so you tell the clerk you'll be right back but then end up taking several minutes wasting everyone's time, that's pausing your queue. WoW lets you pause your queue in the case of a disconnection, but if you logged back in and the queue had popped while you were logged off, it would kick you from the queue and find someone else.

[Moqi]

Pausing your queue would be while you're at the very front of the line but forget to pick something up, and so you tell the clerk you'll be right back but then end up taking several minutes wasting everyone's time, that's pausing your queue.

No, that would be pausing the entire queue. I am not going to discuss this any further it is such an easy concept I can't believe someone even had to explain it. I can't type from the embarassment.

What content are you doing that takes "hours" to queue for?

Plenty.

[Jamillion]

meaningful contribution...

This is my first MMO but that sounds like a brilliant queuing system, thanks for putting such a well thought out post and explaining the details of how such a system would work. I'm still not sure how it would work in ffxiv since there's a lot of underlying systems in place but I can appreciate how it works in WoW after seeing this

[Vandril]

Queue pausing works fine. At least in WoW.

Imagine you're in a store queued up waiting to pay your stuff. The queue is long and you need the bathroom. In stead of taking your shopping cart to the toilets, you leave it in the queue. As the queue moves forward, your trolley is pushed forward with it. Either you come back before your trolley has reached the cashier, and everything is just as if you never left your spot. Or, your trolley has reached the cashier. In stead of being shoved to the side to wait for your return and requeuing, your trolley remains in first place in the queue and people simply move past it if you have not returned yet.

Let's say 10 people get past you (letter A) in the queue. The queue would normally pop for people in this order: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N... In stead it looks like this: B C D E F G H I J K A L M N... Players L, M, N and onwards will have the exact same queue time as if A never went afk and players B - K have the same queue time as if player A withdrew.

WoW implemented this queuing algorithm alongside with the ability to queue up for multiple things at once. If a queue popped, the other queues would be paused while you did your instance (allowing other queued people to get in past you). When exiting the completed instance, you would quite often get an instant queue pop for the next thing. Yet, I noticed no increase in queue time for the first queue. It was soooo convenient.

The only downside to this would be that the queue doesn't get shorter by the small amount of players who get withdrawn. But like I said, it's not a noticeable amount of time and if multiple queues at once were allowed, chaining all the instances you want to run would be super efficient. This is certainly one of the (many) quality-of-life things I miss from WoW...

OMG, thank you. It was driving me up a wall watching so many people not understanding how a queue pause could work. I was afraid I was going to have to write a long post explaining how queue pausing DOES work, but you managed it much more eloquently than I could have.

This is how queue pausing is done. It has no noticeable detrimental effects and is beneficial to those who are in long queues and need to step away from the PC for a moment. It is a thing, it has been done before, and it can be done here.