How many times have you been stuck to a lobby for 30 minutes because you get 14/16 players and the few people that stay in the match to wait for these last 2 players leave every 5 making you wait even longer?
Not very often. People leave, but most stay long enough until the lobby is full and once the lobby is full it only takes so long for both teams to be ready (unless there is a troll).
You guys are saying that it will kill your ability to find custom matches to play with your competitive friends, well let me ask you this:
How is it different to matchmaking? All the difference is that right now, you have a list of matches to choose from and the biggest thing is join an already running match. With matchmaking it will be almost the same apart from your choice of a specific lobby. You will still have the ability to leave a certain lobby you know, and you will have the ability to re-queue and find another 1. You only won't be able to choose which 1 in the first place and to join running matches. But as it stands even with match list - Before you join the lobby, you don't know who is playing in that lobby.
If matchmaking will put me into a lobby that I want to leave immediately and then have myself re-queuing for who knows how long, then matchmaking has failed if only once. For this case I would propose a preview function, which lets you see the lobby before you decide to either join it or not. If re-queing is going to be happen rather often, you might wanna speed the process up.
Re-queuing itself could turn out to be a rather tiresome process, because you have to wait with nothing else left to do. And you don't even know if there is a lobby around your skill-level, so it could be very likely that you are going to be put in a lobby with much more or much less experienced players. If in your situation you think this is bad you have to wait again for another lobby.
I do believe that if matchmaking going to go through, it will not be a problem to make lobbies that you left to be in a lower priority in your next queue - That way you won't be joining the same match over and over after leaving.
Probably, but is this a guarantee?
I think that this system will do 1 big thing - That is filling a lobby with people in less than 30 seconds. The captains would be the ones to decide when to start the match any ways, so if you want to socialize, or wait for a certain player to leave - You'll still be able to do it....
Except you won't. There will be a timer that will force start the match, no matter who is ready or not. Of course the match starts rather quickly once the lobby is full and captains can add more time, but if things go really bad then the timer forces a captain/team to play when they are not ready or it forces one or many to leave the lobby.
Hell even if you want a specific player to join your game - It is still possible because they haven't removed "Spectator" slots. So your friend can join as a spectator and then swap slots with anyone in the active ships.
If this is the only way to spectate and the only reason why spectator slots exist, then I question how valuable spectating is to MUSE.
I do aggree that matchmaking can make the game a whole lot better, just by filling up lobbies much quicker, but the lack of other features (joining mid-match, spectating at will) and must of even more other featueres (add everybody to friends, else face the re-queing!
This is just speculating though, who knows if you really have to add everybody as friend.) and certain questionable features (the timer of doom, changing enemies after each match instead of staying in the same lobby) make me prefer match list more.
I do not care if I have to wait 10 minutes more for my match then, if I am going to play this game, I make sure I have a lot of free time going on since a match in this game can vary from between 5-10 minutes or even take an entire hour.
