Frontlines queue is broken.

[Aldora]

After waiting this long, the queue finally popped.
I hit confirm - and noticed it was a 24-man campaign.
After the time expired, a red message appeared on my screen saying "Your registration was withdrawn." This happened despite ensuring I hit the confirm button. (I am 100% positive I did not miss this queue as I saw the number of players xx/24).

This has happened on multiple occasions, in both solo queue and while in a party.

Frontlines queues need some serious attention.

- The queue occasionally withdraws, despite all of the party members hitting the "Confirm" button.

The thing is even though that you’ve clicked on Commit, if someone else does not click on Commence before the time runs out or clicks on Decline, you will see the same message that the registration was withdrawn.

- Myself, and 2 FC friends queued up separately 5-10 mins apart on many occasions. Often the person that queued up first, ends up getting a spot last. To test if this was job priority in action (even though it doesn't match parties by jobs/classes, and you can change inside anyway), we all queued up on the same job, and got similar results.

A good portion of the time, the person who queued up first gets a spot after a person who queued up after them.

The Duty finder queue consists of several phases: Reserving an Instance, Forming a party, finding missing members for the party and confirming/commencing the duty.

From what i’ve seen, it has something to do with when, how and how many people are queuing up for the DF.

When it comes to the “how and how many”, chances are that a premade group would have to wait longer in a queue, then someone who is queuing up Solo. Especially if the one who is queuing up solo, is queuing up with a Job which is classified as “In need”. Next to that, the composition of the group that queued up will also influence the queue time. A group consisting of a Tank and a Healer will most likely have a shorter queue then a group consisting of 2 DPS.

If you queue up Solo, it also matters if you select the Join in Progress or not. If you queue up with the Join in Progress marked, while the one who entered the queue before you did not mark the Join in Progress, you will most likely get a group sooner, since

It all depends on how many people of a certain class are queued up in the Duty Finder. There will always be an excess of DPS in the queue, compared to Tanks and Healers.

Next, you have the “when”, part of the queue. If your party is queuing up for a Duty with group of 2 and the Duty finder is still in the “Forming Party/Reserving Instance” and one of your friends joins the enters queue after your party has entered the queue, there is still the possibility that your friend will be paired/matched with a group which entered the queue before you did, filling up that last spot for their party.

- In many instances, the estimated wait time displays less than 20 mins, however myself, and some fellow players (even while solo queued) wait in excess of 40 minutes for a spot. Often we attempt to cancel this queue and retry it (which would in theory put us at the back of the line), yet we get a spot in under 10 minutes.

From my experience, i believe that the “average wait time” is based on the class you queued up with as well as the wait time of the previous player(s) with the same class that queued up for the same content. Let’s say, you queue up as a Dragoon and 3 Dragoons who queued up for Frontlines before you managed to get into Frontlines after 10 minutes. I think that your average wait time is based on those 3 dragoons who entered Frontlines before you, not an average wait time for all classes over a timespan a day.

To test it. When you queue up with your friends, ask what their wait times are. You will most likely hear quite a few different numbers.

- After attempting to "Join in Progress" while a friend's game had 6+ empty slots, I was unable to do so as a BRD, DRG, PLD, MRD, however when I queued as a SCH I got into this game instantly. After entering, I noticed the party I joined already had 3 healers and no tanks. If there is some form of job priority, it is also not functioning correctly.

This is also obvious when we join games that happen to have 4x healers in one party, and no healers in another.

What on earth is going on at the back line? Because whatever priority queue that is being used is not functioning correctly at all. It is glitchy, the wait time is extremely inaccurate and any form of job priority (since it appears that there is "meant" to be one) is not functioning.

While I know queues will naturally take longer during off-peak hours for our data centres, however it seems as if the queue is constantly trying to match people based on job priority. If this is the case, then remove it entirely - as it's not working at all, given that parties can be filled with DPS and Tanks. All it is doing is drawing out the queue times to a much longer wait time then they could be.

If rank priority is also used, then remove it. I am pretty certain a majority of the players would rather see much shorter queue times then a more evenly distributed rank match.

I posted a similar post to his on the bug forum (while including as much of the "template" that was relevant to this issue) yet it was moved to insufficient information. Hopefully one of the comm reps notice this BUG, as that is what this actually is.

I love Frontlines, but these queues are stupid.

But, in all fairness, after writing my comments above i would like to quote this from the Live letter as well:

0:26:37
Q: Similar to how the Duty Finder works for Frontline now, could you make it so that players who press “Commence” enter Syrcus Tower first and then the roles that are lacking are filled afterwards?

A: The queuing system we developed for Frontline was created in a rush, so it would be a bit difficult right now to use it for Crystal Tower. However, we've been working on the much awaited feature that will allow players to enter as a pre-made alliance, and it seems we will be able to implement it as scheduled in patch 2.35. Once we implement this, we'd like to address the Duty Finder in the following patch, and since another update will be made to Crystal Tower we'd like to look into it for that.

In that comment they said that they are going to further address the Duty Finder after Patch 2.35, so they are aware that changes or tweaks need to be implemented.

In my opinion, i would check if the Duty Finder actually matches together groups that do not follow the predetermined party Composition and forms parties consisting of more then 2 healers and no tanks.

Perhaps people are able to change their jobs when they enter Frontlines?

I don’t play Frontlines, so i have no idea if people can change their jobs during a Frontline Duty…

But, especially the 4 healer party, sounds like a bug and you should keep reporting it with as much Info as possible.