Potential bug?

[Lelouis]

We've just hit 18 million players
Was queueing as DPS
https://imgur.com/a/jVy7Vmg

[icy_]

what level is that Dancer you're queuing with? I've had this happen to me a bunch of times, so I suspect two possibilities:

• (behind the scenes) a high-level alliance raid is in need, and the job you're queuing on is under that requirement, in level or gear
• the content is not unlocked. This is prob not the case for you, since in your sshot you can see you've finished all of MSQ, and guessing you've unlocked all alliance raids too

[MistakeNot]

We've just hit 18 million players
Was queueing as DPS
https://imgur.com/a/jVy7Vmg

18 million registered accounts. That is not the same as 18 million active players.
At the wrong time of day queues can be long, even when you queue as Adventurer in Need.

[Iscah]

what level is that Dancer you're queuing with? I've had this happen to me a bunch of times, so I suspect two possibilities:

• (behind the scenes) a high-level alliance raid is in need, and the job you're queuing on is under that requirement, in level or gear
• the content is not unlocked. This is prob not the case for you, since in your sshot you can see you've finished all of MSQ, and guessing you've unlocked all alliance raids too

This. It seems that the "role in need" message actually has an unstated level requirement - so if it's trying to gather players for a higher-level duty than you can access, you get put into a queue with everyone else who also signed up with the right role but insufficient level.

It's already an issue for tanks sometimes, and why healers often get an instant roulette queue when tank is in need (because you got paired with one of the 'backlog' tanks).

DPS being in need would create a big rush of people signing up, and everyone who did so with insufficient level now has to wait until enough tanks and healers sign up to complete the alliance.

(That said, I rarely see quite that much of a wait, unless it's at a time when not many people are queuing. But perhaps the player balance and degree of high-duty-avoidance is different on JP servers. The roulette still gives me CT raids nine times out of ten though.)

[BloodRubyXII]

at 4am I get DPS in need to, but it's not going to pop because well... it's 4am.

[WrenElessedil]

what level is that Dancer you're queuing with? I've had this happen to me a bunch of times, so I suspect two possibilities:

• (behind the scenes) a high-level alliance raid is in need, and the job you're queuing on is under that requirement, in level or gear
• the content is not unlocked. This is prob not the case for you, since in your sshot you can see you've finished all of MSQ, and guessing you've unlocked all alliance raids too

I've seen this happen often when queueing as DPS adventurer in need, and that's with all the raids unlocked and at level 70+. It never actually takes the 30+ minutes it initially claims, though- usually it's under 10 minutes. It just seems to be unable to calculate the time properly sometimes.

[Hasrat]

I think it's more that the time estimate is based on the longest a player of that role has been waiting in queue. For DPS in Alliance raids, there can be a lot waiting, so the system expects all DPS to wait about the same amount of time, even though once there's enough, they all get through at once.

[Iscah]

I think it's more that the time estimate is based on the longest a player of that role has been waiting in queue. For DPS in Alliance raids, there can be a lot waiting, so the system expects all DPS to wait about the same amount of time, even though once there's enough, they all get through at once.

Yeah, that too. Whether it's based on longest or average wait, the earliest people in the queue could have been waiting for ages, but you're DPS #14 and another person joins two minutes later.

It's also why you'll get "less than five minutes" estimates on queues (like specific dungeons) that are actually completely dead and you're the only person waiting... so it feeds your own wait time back to you as the average.

[Iscah]

Adding re. how the wait time is calculated, it also seems that it only updates every few minutes. I'm waiting in a PotD queue of 3/4 people - presumably the other two are from the party I just did the previous set of floors with, so our wait time is equal and the average wait time is just our own. It seems to be recalculated every three minutes.