Ticket locking allows optimal work separation between agents. By having ticket X locked to agent A1, OTRS effectively prevents agents A2..N from wasting any time with ticket X, since it's currently handled by A1. It also allows agents to easily see which tickets are not handled at all or in a non-timely manner by presenting them with a list of just the tickets that are unlocked.

OTRS also has a method to prevent the ticket remaining locked to A1 beyond a specified duration. This helps prevent a situation where handling ticket X would take a long time, during which A1 becomes unavailable or forgets about ticket X. This would lead to ticket X remaining hidden from other agents since it's locked to A1.

This feature is called ticket auto unlock. The auto unlock time is configured per queue and the ticket must be in one of the states defined in SysConfig for config "Ticket::UnlockStateType" in order for OTRS to actually unlock it automatically.

Thus, you could configure your OTRS system with a very low auto unlock time (10 minutes?) so that in practice it wouldn't matter if agents would lock tickets because your OTRS would switch them back to unlocked very quickly.