Penalty for watching cutscene

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

It would be lovely if they could change the queue system to automatically pause a player's status in the queue when in a cutscene and resume it when they're done. For example, I'm 15th in line for a place in a party and start a cutscene. My progress in the queue is paused so that I remain 15th in the queue during the cutscene while others behind me progress in the queue. Once the cutscene's done, my queue progress resumes as normal. That way we don't get a penalty, are able to remain in the queue without going all the way back to the end, and the people behind us are able to move up in line as normal.

That's great if it's one person. What if it's 3000 people?

Suddenly the queue has this huge chunk it needs to ignore, then x amount of time later, suddenly those players are unpaused, and if it was matching people but not full yet, it may rearrange people's queues, split parties it was forming, etc.


I think this is a bigger nightmare to code and qa than people think.

[Illmaeran]

I think this is a bigger nightmare to code and qa than people think.

I don't doubt that it could be a significant hurdle and potentially impractical to implement; I'm not a programmer and am ignorant of these things. Even so, it would be a nice option to have if possible. If not, then we just continue with the way things have been, right?

[LioJen]

Why pause the player queue instead of just... pausing the cutscene? It can resume where you left off when the duty is exited

[Iscah]

It's inconsiderate to ask everyone else to wait 30 minutes for you to finish your cut scenes.

That's not what the OP is saying. They queued for 30 minutes and at the 30th minute they happened to be in a cutscene when it finally came up.

[MellowMink]

It would be lovely if they could change the queue system to automatically pause a player's status in the queue when in a cutscene and resume it when they're done. For example, I'm 15th in line for a place in a party and start a cutscene. My progress in the queue is paused so that I remain 15th in the queue during the cutscene while others behind me progress in the queue. Once the cutscene's done, my queue progress resumes as normal. That way we don't get a penalty, are able to remain in the queue without going all the way back to the end, and the people behind us are able to move up in line as normal.

This seems like a much more reasonable solution to me.

[Alxyzntlct]

While playing through the entire MSQ for the first time, I hit similar issues as OP and although in a few different ways, I feel there's room for improvement with how DF queues pop up and options players have (although in general I think the system is pretty good).

Regarding that first, while it can be a touch frustrating having a queue pop during a cutscene, it's not that big of a deal to me. If I'm really into a cutscene, then I'll take the penalty (I believe they reset daily?) and just try to be more careful. Otherwise, I'll take the queue and simply re-watch the cutscene when I get back (I enjoy the stories, so that never really bothers me).

However, that leads to 2 critical issues I've encountered beyond the above that's absolutely maddening to me:
#1 - When I'm in a cutscene, and the game won't let me accept a queue
It's insane, but it's absolutely happened at least 3 times while I was going through MSQ. Once during Heavensward, and twice during Stormblood. It was during really long cutscenes, and even though I was ok with re-watching them after whatever DF had popped, the game literally wouldn't let me accept the queue. I had to eat the penalty, which sucked. In these circumstances, I had to do essentially what OP was concerned about, having to idly stand about while waiting for a queue to pop, which isn't fun (note again that this was while I was leveling and going through the story, so I wasn't in a good spot to really explore any alternative game modes like professions, hunts, etc.)

#2 - Accepting a queue mid-cutscene and expecting to come back to re-watch a cutscene, but discovering that it had already "completed"
This one is also super frustrating, because again, I really like the story. So accepting a queue thinking I would get to re-watch a cutscene when I got back only to discover that it had "completed" and I was out of luck was disconcerting. This only happened twice, and thankfully I was able to look up the videos online (neither were in the replay menu), but it was bizarre encountering that when so many other worked differently.

I've flagged all of the above as bugs to SE already so they should be aware. Just wanted to denote that there's myriad issues with how the queues interact with cutscenes and again, there's room for improvement.

Also, I really like Illmaeran's idea! Would be really nice if queue's could be paused during cutscenes, but as another pointed out, I can see how that would be a sizable challenge to code.

[AnotherPerson]

It would be lovely if they could change the queue system to automatically pause a player's status in the queue when in a cutscene and resume it when they're done. For example, I'm 15th in line for a place in a party and start a cutscene. My progress in the queue is paused so that I remain 15th in the queue during the cutscene while others behind me progress in the queue. Once the cutscene's done, my queue progress resumes as normal. That way we don't get a penalty, are able to remain in the queue without going all the way back to the end, and the people behind us are able to move up in line as normal.

I'm pretty certain that's not how the queue works. It's sorta like being in a Supermarket but there's multiple checkout lines, and you choose one to queue in.

You may be 15th in line for a party, but that's 15th in line for whatever group you're queueing for. There's way more people queueing into a duty than what the number your queue says. The queue takes into account of people doing Roulette as well as people manually selecting the content they're choosing for the entire datacenter, but splits them off and sections them individually to speed things up. The number of people groups formed is then based on the upper limit of the number of instances that can be opened at once and the number of people who are queueing at any point in time.

That's why you could be #1 on the queue list, but not receive a pop instantly when another person queues in (because they popped another group instead) unless they're specifically queueing for the same content you are doing. Alternatively, we don't know the exact amount of programming going behind the scenes, but they'll most likely merge groups too if the duties are compatible after a certain period when they empty out or get cleared. All the player sees is the "Queue placement", but not the group they're being assigned to.

[PlushyprincessMusa]

Well I mean there could be some leyway like no penality if your q time is over 45mins. (Ya some ppl including myself have had qs for over an hour.
Its also inconsiderate to penalize for doing something else in game because your q is well over an hour so you assume your safe.

Just make the thing not give the player a penality for not entering whike watching a cutscene.
To add to op it is dumb things in the golden saucer like air force one makes u leave q

[GeminiReed]

I'm pretty certain that's not how the queue works. It's sorta like being in a Supermarket but there's multiple checkout lines, and you choose one to queue in.

You may be 15th in line for a party, but that's 15th in line for whatever group you're queueing for. ...

What? No.

For a given duty there's a line of tanks, a line of healers, and a line of dps (that wraps around two city blocks). When you get to the head of the line you join whatever duty was selected. But it's closer to a priority queue than a simple one. People who have directly queued for an instance get priority over those that have queued for any roulettes that cover that duty. Party members all get selected together.

Illmaeran's suggestion would simply alter the priority. As the people ahead of you get selected the person behind you moves in front of you. If there's nobody behind you then you move up. If you're #1 and still in CS then it works as if there's nobody in queue until you exit the CS.

[AnotherPerson]

What? No.

For a given duty there's a line of tanks, a line of healers, and a line of dps (that wraps around two city blocks). When you get to the head of the line you join whatever duty was selected. But it's closer to a priority queue than a simple one. People who have directly queued for an instance get priority over those that have queued for any roulettes that cover that duty. Party members all get selected together.

Illmaeran's suggestion would simply alter the priority. As the people ahead of you get selected the person behind you moves in front of you. If there's nobody behind you then you move up. If you're #1 and still in CS then it works as if there's nobody in queue until you exit the CS.

That's what I thought initially, but you could be DPS #1 in queue and another healer could still queue into Roulette system, which implies your queue should pop next. But... you don't always get your duty popped. Thus, you aren't actually "#1" in the queue, rather in the list of "#1 in queue".

A better example is to look at it is how multiple individuals can be in the DPS solo queue in trials and be "#1 in queue" because each trial takes the next 4 trial roulette players.

Ex: Four DPS queues individually into trial roulette, one DPS queues for a specific trial (say for example, Emanation), another also queues into a specific trial (The Jade Stoa). Farther down the line, 2 DPS queues into Emanation.

In that order, the 4 DPS would be next in line for the next duty to pop, a.k.a. "#1 in queue".

If 1 tank and 2 healers queue into Emanation, the priority to fill via trial roulette then goes to the players who queued into Emanation. Then, it's quite possible to have 3 DPS that queues into Emanation to pop, and 1 of the DPS's queues into trial roulette to pop. The other 3 DPS in trial roulette will still have their queue say "#1 in queue" though, because they're next on the list, but they weren't informed another queue already popped. There's also the thing to consider where you can be "#1 in queue" and then be skipped because you can't qualify or haven't unlocked the trial, which would bring the next list of "#2 in queue" to fill for your spot.

But by that nature, it also stands to show you can have multiple individual players with "#1 in queue", which implies there are multiple groups of "#1 in queue". This makes sense, because you can have a group of 3 DPS who queues up together, but still be "#1 in queue", and another DPS who waits into queue wouldn't be considered as "#4 in queue," but rather "#1 in queue".


Even by this logic, holding your spot could technically be seen as pushing the line forward, but the question is how the priority affects holding the queue when you rejoin, because then all these groups & their priorities would have to be recalculated.