Would it be feasible to add a Pause Queue feature?

[Tohe-Spidhire]

What? Why would you think that is necessary?

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Whenever the first person in the queue is served, skip anyone at the front of the queue who is paused. The first unpaused person becomes the front of the queue.

No, it isn't. Queue position refers to the party that you are in, not individual player.

So if you're DPS with a party in queue position 1, but go afk, that means you get shuffled to other parties further back in the queue because you're giving up your spot to newly arrived DPS.

Did you think you were going to hold back an entire party of players due to your being afk? Nope, you're ejected from the party when someone better comes along, and in short order you are in the furthest-back party, making it equivalent to having dropped from the queue. Therefore, not worth coding.

[Rongway]

No, it isn't. Queue position refers to the party that you are in, not individual player.

This is not a relevant point to the mechanics I've described. #2 player in queue v player in #2 party makes no difference; just don't let anyone who is paused advance to #1.

[Tohe-Spidhire]

This is not a relevant point to the mechanics I've described. #2 player in queue v player in #2 party makes no difference; just don't let anyone who is paused advance to #1.

Long story short, you've oversimplified the party matching that takes place.

If queue-party#1 has everyone except a healer, and queue-party#2 has everyone except a tank, and then a tank shows up, which party do you suppose is going to start *immediately* ?

Regardless, an afk-dps on either of those teams gets shunted onto queue-party#3, which is shorthand for "end of the line." No point having fancy coding when the person should have dropped from the queue.

[Shurrikhan]

Long story short, you've oversimplified the party matching that takes place.

If queue-party#1 has everyone except a healer, and queue-party#2 has everyone except a tank, and then a tank shows up, which party do you suppose is going to start *immediately* ?

Regardless, an afk-dps on either of those teams gets shunted onto queue-party#3, which is shorthand for "end of the line." No point having fancy coding when the person should have dropped from the queue.

All queues numbers visible to a player are already role-specific. If I queue for a trial, healer RQ #1-2 are first party, 3 and 4 the second, etc., etc.

If I pause at position #3, #1 and #2 go in, #4 and #4 become the new #1 and #2, and I'm left waiting for a further party, just as I would have been before pausing.

If I'm healer #3 for a raid and pause, 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, and 7 enter; I remain at queue position 3. I will still join the next raid to pop from the time I unpause (or maximum pause duration expires, etc.). Depending on bottle-necks among other roles, that may be a good 15 minutes later than had I remained at my seat until it popped and I could enter, but if returning to my desk within 45 seconds were possible, I wouldn't have hit pause and taken that risk over the chance of losing my queue entirely. I have substituted a risk of being pushed back to position #21 or so, the true end of the line, with the risk of the queue popping (while I'm unable to respond) to it, thus skipping an entry I could (not) have otherwise taken.

Bottlenecks within a particular role can push the others to maximum effective queue positions well beyond just the next-next entry. I would guess that if we only ever had nearly ideal proportions (i.e. only a run's worth of the least relatively populous role short of the most populous role's runs'-worth of players) queuing for a duty, you would be right, since the difference between position # (In for next entry) and # (In for the entry after next) would be the difference between the front of the line and the end of the line. But that's often not the case, so I'm not sure it's quite so clear-cut.

That said, it may indeed not be worth the trouble to code for a doubly niche benefit. That's largely why my original question was phrased as such, to discuss whether it'd first even be feasible, secondly--worthwhile, and only finally--attractive.

NOTE: I may still be misunderstanding what you've said here. Or, more particularly, I'm not sure I believe that, say, a solo-queued individual player is bound automatically to a particular party until the time that there are sufficient numbers of each role for a party to be matched, as that goes against what I've heard from people who've analyzed this in the past. Any further links or data would be appreciated.