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I think randomized queues are pretty fair. You give everyone who arrives within a certain time the same chance. This wouldn't be too hard to implement as a system either.

Say ticket sales open at 2pm. From 1:45pm, everyone who gets to the site gets assigned a random queue number. Then from 2pm, users are given access to the ordering system in the order of their queue number. We can even limit throughput with that (e.g. let in n users per minute).

Ticket sites in South Korea already implement queueing systems to control server load. When sales open at 2pm, everyone refreshes the page at exactly that time, but the request is put in a waiting queue. This can be considered randomized in a way (the time someone refreshes the page is somewhat random), but I'd like to see the concept of "advance queue building time" added to that to reduce the stress of "I have to refresh the page exactly at the right moment." Give me a few minutes to get to the queue.



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