Doing the queue/first-come-first-serve thing only makes sense if you expect the number of people arriving at exactly the starting moment to be less than your su

Doing the queue/first-come-first-serve thing only makes sense if you expect the number of people arriving at exactly the starting moment to be less than your supply of tickets. Otherwise what you have is a ticket lottery, except that the "randomization" is being done by ping times rather than anything explicit. If they can't expand the ticket supply by enough to meet demand, then they should probably make an explicit ticket lottery.