Never Make Your Players Have to "Find the Fun"

[Purrfectstorm]

In all probability, the impact that having no lockouts would have on queue times would be fairly small, as queue times are far more impacted by data center populations and overall role distributions than they are by the fact that people can only get 450 Esoterics per week. The weekly tome lockout was originally 300 per week, and queue times didn't lessen by any noticable margins when they increased it to 450, nor did they noticeably improve when the cap was 900 tomes of Poetics toward the end of ARR.

You're judging the impact on 300 vs 450, which is only 2 ex roulettes. So obviously the impact will be small. When the limit is 450 vs. infinite, one would expect a MUCH bigger impact. Look at what happened when SE added this new relic quest - queue times for Alexander normal increased tenfold. We can't act like incentives for running content doesn't make a big difference as outside of helping the occasional person people aren't running the content for any other reason.

[Alahra]

You're judging the impact on 300 vs 450, which is only 2 ex roulettes. So obviously the impact will be small. When the limit is 450 vs. infinite, one would expect a MUCH bigger impact. Look at what happened when SE added this new relic quest - queue times for Alexander normal increased tenfold. We can't act like incentives for running content doesn't make a big difference as outside of helping the occasional person people aren't running the content for any other reason.

Back when the tome cap was 300 and increased to 450, you could only get at most, 40 tomestones per run (and more typically, 30, since WP was preferred to AK), which is a difference of 4-5 runs, not 2. Even doubling the tome cap didn't noticeably impact queue times, though—it's unlikely that making it infinite would do so either. And even if it did, it would only temporarily increase queue times, because, as I mentioned later, players who got all the tomes they need would eventually stop doing the content entirely, as they already do for Hunts, the unlocked tomestone, and EX Primals once they've gotten what they need.

It's not that removing lockouts wouldn't have any impact, it's that the impact would largely get lost because lockouts are one of the smallest contributing factors to queue time length, with role distribution, player population, and time of day having far greater effects.