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You mean you want to pause the games that are in progress? The events are created by people finishing their games and queuing for the next pair. You could limit total participants but only if you know the limit ahead of time. Nothing else makes sense.

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Is there any requirement that all games start at the same time? If not I guess you could limit the amount of games that can be outstanding at any one time.

No, after the first game they don't start at the same time but the point of an arena is you get a new game as soon as the one you are playing finishes. The number of points you can earn is limited if you can't start another game right away so players would hate that system. It would be much better to limit total participants because at any given time nearly everyone should be playing.

I see, but in case I think this is less about finding an optimal solution and more about the general best practice of not having any unbounded queues in your application. Having to wait would have been annoying, definitely, but it would have surely been preferrable to the outage.

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