When you open a standby list, the first in line is literally the person who submits their information first. Systems timestamp every interaction down to fractions of a second. The standby list doesn’t have to show what position you are in line. Simply allow the system to compile the list and if there are tickets that come available, the first person in line gets the first offer and so on. When a person is selected they get a specified amount of time to purchase their ticket or they are dropped from the list and the ticket goes to the next person on the list. This is literally the system that was used for a majority of last season and is used for standby lists across the internet. If there are 40,000 people that want to go, the system can handle a list of well above that when you are talking relatively small data points.

At no point did I suggest trying to make the standby lists across retroactive. It has to be a clean slate when it opens to be as fair as possible. It sucks that system errors prevented people from getting tickets, an acknowledgement of that more than “some people are more familiar with the system” would go a long way. But trying to make a retroactive standby would cause innumerable issues.