Commander auto-promotion

[krait]

When the existing commander leaves (and their auto-reconnect option times out), I propose that the first person on helm gets auto-promoted to commander (and the commander slot would be once again filled when viewed from the lobby). I've had a few annoying cases where players jump into the commander slot, and steal the helm -- most recently it was a powdermonkey, who clearly had not picked up any skill yet, stole the helm in the middle of a tied-score fight against a then-disadvantaged enemy, and logged out as soon as our team lost the battle.

[N-Sunderland]

Changes to Quick Join are going to limit this problem soon, but it would definitely be nice if this could happen too.

[Pickle]

Fully agree.. as long as the original Captain can jump back into the slot under the resume option.

[krait]

Changes to Quick Join are going to limit this problem soon, but it would definitely be nice if this could happen too.

To be clear, my problem wasn't so much that somebody jumped in as commander, but that because they were commander, they were able to force me off the helm (even if they weren't pilot-classed). Since I wasn't officially commander, I wasn't able to communicate with allied commanders anyway -- I just want to have some way to limit this kind of rudeness/bad-teamspiritedness (which in this case, easily cost our team the battle).

Another way of going about it would be to prevent anyone but a pilot (whether or not they're the commander) from being able to force someone off the helm, and preventing any pilot from forcing a higher level pilot off the helm (while preventing anyone from forcing the original commander-pilot off the helm). Of course, this is all more complicated than auto-promotion.