Friend join can direct to spectate slot directly if in a lobby, as opposed to one team or another.
-so long as spectator swapping doesn't go away.
spectator swapping is necessary, unless rematch is killed. when rematch happens, sometimes someone will get a phone call, or need a break but will want to jump in later, or want to eat dinner for a round. they'll hop over to spectate, so they can still watch their friends play, and take a lot of badass screenshots while they do what they do. when the phone call/dinner/whatever is over, they'll rejoin their friends, if a slot opens up. and sometimes, when trying to join friends, the system puts you on the wrong team. there's so many reasons to keep spectate swap on, and the whole system would just be frustrating otherwise, if you play with your friends primarily. ease of use has got to be a thing. there's a lot of focus on speed of matchmaking for those that want balanced matches, and there is ZERO focus on speed for the players that play with friends. the players that play with friends are losing out; I am seeing greater struggles and more time spent trying to get together with friends than I ever did with match list, and the changes that keep getting proposed over and over again to enhance matchmaker would make it exponentially worse.
and crew form, yeah it sounds great in theory. but as your clan and friends slowly start to trickle into the game over the course of several hours, it's aggravating to have a match, find a person, crew form, have a match, find another person, crew form again or finally start a custom lobby, open it to matchmaking so it actually fills, find a person, and since the custom lobby was opened to matchmaking, crew form or another custom lobby will need to happen yet again. lobbies of icarus in a new light - a thousand and one clicks to get friends together, over and over again. see latter half of paragraph above - ease of use has got to be a thing.
time, balance, flexibility, right? I don't know if you guys considered this in with the ratio, because it's not just time for matchmaker, it's also time in getting together with friends. the more flexibility goes in favor of balance, the more manual of a process this becomes to join a friend or a group of friends, and so time gets worse for those of us who primarily play with friends...and frustration and stress goes up in a way that I think added time to matchmaker wouldn't (especially if something were added to pass the time while waiting for matchmaker to place you (yes I am still pushing for steampunk duck hunt)).
otherwise, while I am NOT down with penalties for leaving a lobby, since disconnects and such happen, and also currently the matchmaker doesn't filter people on your block list (unless something's changed), but I am down with rewards for sticking in lobbies...but how would it be given? you leave a lobby, not get anything, find a match you like, play it, get thing? I don't know, it doesn't make sense entirely, unless I'm looking at this wrong. can someone explain to me how the reward thing would work?
