Just throwing this out there. Give players a limited option to pause queues. Let players once every 30 minutes during queue hit a pause button that would pause your queue for 3 minutes. AFter this point you would be put where you left off and unable to pause again for another 30 minutes.
How many times have you been queued for something and the moment you afk a moment for a drink, doorbell, bio, etc your queue pops and you lose it. Not only is this frustrating for you but also for the people who got put back at the front of the queue because you were gone.
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How exactly would that work? Are we pausing everyone’s queue? How do we know how many other tanks or healers there are going to be to make sure a DPS is put back in a correct spot?
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No just your position in queue. Just like if your ready for a dungeon and 1 dps declines you get put at the front again. If your 50 out and hit the pause button people who were behind you go ahead of you but you don’t reset to the bottom of the queue again like if you were to decline or miss the invite. At any point in time players are in a queue we just don’t know where at. People would go around you while your AFK still.
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But then we bump other people who have been waiting when we come back?
I think it would work to pause as much as you want. Just let the line keep going behind the paused individuals and place them back in queue at whatever spot they were in when they paused 
I don’t see the issue as long as we keep having separate queues (lines) for each role.
Yes, precisely! We would have been in front of them anyways though, and I find it worse to make them wait to shuffle into an AFK’d out queue. I find this proposed idea great!
It pushes others back when you’ve got hundreds unpausing and coming back.
I imagine that at any given time, there would be a similar amount of people pausing as there are unpausing (perhaps even more, we would need a 10 min pause limit or something to avoid line camping) so I think in the net, it would be okay.
Not necessarily. If someone queues up and their queue is 15 minutes and then a boatload of people unpause their queue, suddenly that person who was waiting 15 minutes is now waiting a half hour.
It’s technically possible, sure, but unlikely. And if those people can’t pause, the queue will be 30 minutes anyways, possibly more because of all the minute-long queues which result in one dps dropping out due to being AFK.
But to watch your queue shoot up like that isn’t a positive experience. And I can only imagine how many people will pause queues.
Maybe I’m just pessimistic and know how people will react to it.
Remember that the queue time is only an estimate, and an averaged one at that. Ultimately, it depends on the ratio of tanks:healers:dps that are available, and you could have an instant queue if tons of tanks/healers suddenly queued at once (which is also possible, but unlikely). Your queue time could also go down significantly (although the estimate would not show this) if many people in front of you paused at once (again, unlikely).
I imagine that with enough people, the amount of people pausing their queue would average out with the amount of people resuming their queue.