So I reached the first dungeon, and my leveling buddy is stuck in the RNG clickspamfest that is the stupid first solo story instance.
So I made a short video of why the entire LINE thing is doomed to fail.
Here is a random Levi line.
Please note the giant clump of people around the NPC at the end and, importantly, how culling kicks in so severely that you're not going to be able to tell if people are mobbing the NPC if you're a few people back. Conceptually, it's nice, but in reality if you're at the back of The Line you're not going to get progressively closer. The people who benefit are going to be the ones who mob, get in and out unscathed, and have less competition from all the people behaving.
Time to AFK and wait I guess. If they open the floodgates here, the same thing is going to happen fairly shortly after. They should have either had a dungeon prior to the solo instances, to help slow people down, or actually planned for this shit in advance because this is super dumb.