After attending Horntail more frequently, the clunkiness of the sign up procedure/NPC has become a lot more apparent. I'm talking about the part after HTPQ but before HT preheads when everyone is in "Entrance to Horntail's Cave: Cave of Life" and all parties group into one expedition by talking to the "Mark of the Squad" NPC. 1) Display the expedition leader when signing up for an expedition. Currently, we have to sign up blindly. Luckily, there IS a visible difference between an open channel and a channel with a leader, and characters can be signed for more than one expedition at a time, so some of this can be avoided. I know this feature was added for Zakum a while back, and I find it very convenient. 2) Allow expedition leaders to disband their own expedition at the sign up NPC and/or automatically disband expeditions after a certain number of hours. Occasionally, someone will create an expedition when they shouldn't have (wrong class first or wrong channel). The expedition leader can close the expedition so no one can sign up, but this does NOT free the channel. Therefore, any time someone does this by accident and then goes about their day or runs HT on another channel, that first channel is unusable for HT unless there is a reset or a GM disposes the map, unless the player comes back later and hosts HT there. I believe this problem still exists at Zakum as well, but fortunately the server is small enough that it is very rare to have all channels locked down at either boss.
To add to this: Allow expedition leaders to remove someone from the expedition and allow the removed person to re-join. There's a difference needed between "banned" and "kicked" or removed. We've had issues where new people, such as bishops or bowmen, sign up immediately thinking it's just like zak and thus become risk becoming seduce targets. There's no way for an expedition leader to remove them to 'fix' the order and it gets really chaotic.
This problem was fixed at Zakum; if nobody is on the sign up map or inside the altar on any given channel, the expedition resets itself. Could this be added to Horntail as well? The only problem that might arise is that groups won't be able to enter the Free Market for Echo after signups anymore, it'd have to be done before the signups, but I think I'm not alone in saying that it's a small price to pay for the ability to 1) reset the order if need be, and 2) fix broken channels so that what happened on Sunday (only one remaining available operable channel) doesn't happen again.
