Castrum Queue and the overflow lottery

[Riyshn]

and the fact that the other marching orders are a 100% guarantee you get into the CE

-...-

Even in my personal experience, I have never failed to get into a single non-Castrum CE even once with marching orders up across around a hundred or two of CE's

Good for you, except you can't prove a negative. Meanwhile, I have had exactly that happen, so it is possible. And since the hotfix when queues have been overflowing I've gotten into all but 2 of ~20 CLL attempts, all with Priority. RNG gonna RNG, and confirmation bias doesn't change that.

The point is we don't know. The closest thing we have to official word either way is the initial patch notes when the system was introduced, which just says "Critical Engagements". And CLL is a CE, at least according to basically all the UI elements we have access to.

[Catwho]

Is this an alliance raid? (Didn’t know there are 48-man ones!) That happens to me sometimes. It will tell me there are 10/15 Dps queuing and I’m in the #1 position on the queue. Then suddenly everyone disappears and I’m suddenly 1/15 DPS. Just have to be patient, I typically only wait for a few minutes. Maybe queuing during prime time will help?

This particular one is not an alliance raid, but something more akin to a FATE that only pops once an hour. If you miss it, you miss it, and your options are to try for another instance, or wait another hour. Either way, you're gonna be rolling the dice again.

Regarding the Marching Orders: If more than 48+ people have on priority, then it goes back to pure RNG again. We've had half a party get excluded in one of our group runs, despite having on marching orders, simply because there were almost 60 people queued up for it.

The entire thing should be pulled out to Duty Finder like Delibrum was, but I imagine it was not something they could fix in a 2 week sprint once it became obvious how few people wanted to clear it. Now they caused the opposite problem, turning it into the most popular content in Bozja.

If anything, the best compromise for now could be to give double priority access to anyone who hasn't cleared it yet, when EVERYONE has priority access in the queue.

Hopefully by 5.5 they'll have a more permanent solution that doesn't leave people in the cold.

[oblivion238]

Citation needed.

Literally the ONLY thing we know for sure about Priority is that the entire party has to have it for it to work. ANYTHING ELSE is speculation.

You say it doesn't work? You're working from the assumption that it's purely a pass/fail mechanic, where people with the buff will always get in before people without. Where is your source for this assumption? It could easily be something like "roll twice, take the higher number" or "roll + 50", either of which would sometimes make it look like the buff didn't work, but does still give you better odds of getting in.

The buff is not consumed when used for CLL, whereas it is consumed with every other CE.

[Riyshn]

The buff is not consumed when used for CLL, whereas it is consumed with every other CE.

The purchased priority buff? It's not consumed by anything. You buy it, and it lasts the full hour. The CE-specific buffs last until ~5 seconds before the start of the fight, whether you actually queue for the CE or not.

[oblivion238]

The purchased priority buff? It's not consumed by anything. You buy it, and it lasts the full hour. The CE-specific buffs last until ~5 seconds before the start of the fight, whether you actually queue for the CE or not.

I must be mistaken then, regardless, I've also gotten into CLL without the buff.

[Feronar]

They should convert Castrum Lacus Litore to a queued raid, like Delubrum Reginae. This duty-within-a-duty thing is needlessly awkward and clunky.

[Iscah]

But what if they wanted to?

Allowing all 72 participants to join in for Castrum would be setting it up to fail even more so than the current situation.

It's highly unlikely that everyone in the zone is prepared to join in, even if the instance is full - but the battle would be set up around the expectation that all those people could be participating.

It's like the previous issue that people could only scrape half a team together and they couldn't handle the geared-for-48 mechanics. That problem is already likely to resurface once the excitement dies down, so having it instead geared for 72 would only make it far worse.

[Riyshn]

That's actually not likely to be an issue with CLL. It already scales enemy HP based on population.

[Dhayze]

Is this an alliance raid? (Didn’t know there are 48-man ones!) That happens to me sometimes. It will tell me there are 10/15 Dps queuing and I’m in the #1 position on the queue. Then suddenly everyone disappears and I’m suddenly 1/15 DPS. Just have to be patient, I typically only wait for a few minutes. Maybe queuing during prime time will help?

This is separate from the Duty Finder. This is Castrum Lacus Litore which is locked behind the Bozjan Southern Front. CLL is required for part of the ShB relic which means that a lot of people are forced to do Bozja.

The problem is that once you're in a Bozja instance, CLL probably isn't going to be available right away unless you're really lucky. If it's a new instance, it'll be exactly 1 hour before the Castrum queue starts. CLL itself has a max of 48 players out of the 72 total players in the instance (as long as they are above Rank 10). So you could end up waiting an entire hour for the queue to start only for it to fill past capacity forcing players out. At this point, you could either wait another hour in this instance, or try to get a different instance and hope the Castrum queue is a bit sooner. The worst part is you could wait another hour and get kicked out of the queue again. This could potentially lead to you waiting several hours just to clear one run of CLL.

It wasn't this bad before. Until the recent hotfix that buffed the rewards from it, it was rare to get more than 20-30 people to queue for Castrum. but now that it speeds up one of the relic steps considerably, instances constantly fill up and everyone that's able to is queuing for Castrum.

[Iscah]

That's actually not likely to be an issue with CLL. It already scales enemy HP based on population.

I thought people have said that it doesn't? Or possibly it has the problem of the other skirmishes where it's based on previous participation so a small group after a large group is out of luck.

Still, even if the difficulty scales, a small group is going to rattle around an arena built to be packed with 72 players, and mechanics requiring a certain amount of players to do a thing are harder. There's also probably less margin for error and more chance of a wipe simply because there are less people around.