This would make event management and handling a lot less stressful knowing there's a cap of staff slots that can always be safely available should a staff member lose connection to the instance for one reason or another.

To build on this and provide a slightly alternative take..

VRChat has no real support for events at present. Presently Performers and staff take up valuable slots for attendees. This means that:

Effectively, the current system limits potential quality of events and attendee safety because there is no way to prioritize staff members.

To remedy this, there should be a way to designate a “Staff Group” for an instance that allows for somewhere around 18 members of event staff (18 would well-suit some of the actor/staff-heavy events perfectly, esp. those that need actors, media teams, security, administrative organizers, and technical support) to join and leave the instance in their own separate slots/queue (E.g. 80 attendees, 18 staff, totaling a maximum of 98 people). This would allow for events to maximize attendee engagement and attendee safety, as well as to provide them the ability to handle technical issues without events being derailed.

I’d see this playing out where:

To note: This is different from priority queueing in that this is not for potential monetization. This is for attendee engagement, safety, and the allowance of smooth event operations which is core to the event community at large.

This is also something that would pair well with a feature that allows for event/instance creators to specify world population limits.

Users who disconnect involuntarily should have a grace period (5minutes ?) to rejoin the world they were in previously, even at the cost of overpopulation.

Some apps like VRCX allows to rejoin the same lobby after a crash; but if the lobby already is full, you'll end up in a new, different lobby... and you gotta wait for the queue again.

There are already VIP spots in lobby queues being sold for real money... i don't think it should be a stretch to let ANY users who waited and earn their spot to reconnect if they didn't disconnect on their own actions (aka, they crashed...).

This is especially important for performers (like myself) and group moderators (most of my friends).

Considering the history of crashing and Griefing; you can guess that's its a still problematic still to this day, too. The burden falls on said group moderators to scramble a solution to get the performer back in the lobby ASAP, sometimes at the expense of kicking someone already present (with whatever trust ranking score, and time lost consequences).

it's kinda shitty but it still does happens.

not even later than last week i saw a whole lobby dropped connection at once.

This is an extremely important feature.

We recognize that VRChat Groups are the most suitable system for hosting events, with many of them utilizing group instances.

The feature for performers and staff to reliably join these instances is highly desired, as it often helps reduce the burden of event management.

The current instance join queue system does not allow for immediate return when an event performer from a full instance times out due to trouble.

Also, in the case of a late join, the specification is that they cannot return until someone drops out of the instance.

We think this is a little insufficient for active use at an event.

In order to use the group instance more actively, we think it is necessary to have the right to force people to join.

Thank you for your consideration.

Same thing here: https://feedback.vrchat.com/feature-requests/p/tiered-priority-queue-for-large-events

We consider this a very important feature!

I have encountered a situation before where I could not join a staff member in a full instance.

I think this is definitely one of the features that VRChat needs!

This feature is very important for actors and event staff.