I find this to be a possible issue.
Scenario: 4 people go into crew form. They find a match. One disconnects. They come back in and are invited. However, the team they are on is already stacked to they are placed on the opposing team.
Now that crew either leaves the lobby or plays without their fourth.
Its a silly rule.
This game is based on teamwork as part of a crew. It is hard to argue that the game is generally more fun to be with a familiar captain / crew than an unknown one. The game is taking that away by trying to autonomously balance.
The thing is, with the amount of players on this game at times (drops down to 30 every day and it might peak at 500 on a normal day), it cannot be balanced properly through autonomy. The players have to do it. Most players want to do it.
Nothing is fun about going into a lobby with two premade high level ships against lower level opponents other than playing with familiar people. As captain, its nice to work with a crew that have played many hours together. Likewise, it is nice to work with a co-captain that knows what they are doing. As crew, its nice to work with a captain that will give ample time to shoot or do proper repair cycles before blowing up.
In my experience, when I am part of a two premade, high level ships, or hell, even one, the goal is to try and find matches of equal skill level. So many times have we hunted players down by waiting for their status in the friends tab to swap to "searching" before beginning our own search so that the game would place us all in the same lobby. Sometimes, we watch the end of a match happen in a lobby that is stacked, knowing a rematch would not happen (harder to do now due to the new vote rematch requirement), then make our own lobby, knowing the side that was stacked would go back into crew form and immediately hit their play button again. Thus, through the autonomy of the game system, herd them to our lobby and proceed to have a well balanced match.
Why are we relying on the games autonomy to pull this off. Why is this Play button even a thing when the auto MM does not, can not, properly do its job given the ratio of "less experienced" to "play the game way too much-experienced" players. (those aren't real questions. You don't have to answer them.)
All we need is to get rid of this play button. Create a server browser that promotes autonomy but does not force it. It is not very difficult to guide people in the direction that is intended. What the players of this game need is a simple, intuitive server browser which offers the searcher enough information to make the correct decision on which lobby to join -and- and lobby creation system which gives the creator enough room to customize the lobby to certain specification. (this would also really help with events, btw.)
