Station queues and parties

Joining a queue

A player joins a queue for a server group in one of two ways:

• clicking a game selector entry with the Queue for group action
• running /joinqueue <group>, like /joinqueue bedwars

While queued, the player's hotbar changes to the Game Selector, the player visibility toggle and a Leave Queue item. The action bar shows the group, their place in the queue and how long they've waited.

A player can be in one queue at a time. Joining the same queue again leaves it. Joining a different one is refused until they leave the first.

Leaving a queue

Players leave with the Leave Queue hotbar item, /leavequeue, or by clicking the same queue entry again. A queue entry is also removed when the player who queued, or their party leader, leaves the hub.

Parties

Queues use Scaffold's parties (/party). When a player is in a party:

• only the party leader can join or leave a queue
• the whole party is queued together and sees the queue messages
• the whole party is sent to the same server

How a server is picked

About every 2 seconds, each hub checks the queue for its own players, oldest first. For each one, it looks for online servers in the group that are below their limit, and sends the player or party to the one with the fewest players.

A server counts as full at its own player limit or at the queue's cap, whichever is lower. Players sent in the same check count towards a server straight away, so a burst of parties doesn't overfill one server.

The player cap

The default cap is 150 players per server, set by defaultQueueCap in plugins/Station/settings.yml. To use a different cap for one group, add it to the action data of the selector entry:

bedwars:100

Station uses the cap from the first Queue for group entry in the selector for that group. Players who join with /joinqueue get the same cap.

When queues are offline

Queues are stored with Stash. If Stash can't reach Redis, joining a queue replies "Queues are offline right now."