I disagree. Just because more than 50% was ready really meant nothing if one ship had issues getting set up, in pub games of course.
Of course that is true too, but I rarely had issues when it came to asking my allies or even the enemy team to unready for a second, nor did I ever have trouble unreadying myself when my allies asked me to. That way the entire enemy team could show they are ready while the own team was not. And yes, impatient people will probably leave the lobby, but they always will.
So far the current lobby timer, which force starts your match no matter what, solves no issues that were there before, but instead creates new ones. The best it does is probably teaching, dare I say, spoiled competitive players that pug lobbies cannot always be as pleasent as the orginized competitive ones.
Well, it does solve the community issue of lobbies taking a day and age to start, if not ideally because of the instances where a game starts and you have two buff engies (happened to me, that was interesting).
I seriously doubt though that forced timers are going to go away. Captains abused the power they had (we are all guilty at some point) to hold a lobby up because someone had greased ammo and not heavy, or similar circumstances. It just murdered lobby start times. Sometimes it takes a bad game to make someone realize they are wrong (also had that last night).
Calling for forced timers to be removed, I believe, is wasted time. Trying to make them work better (add time, a new mechanic for when people shift in/out of the lobby) is the way forward. Like the fact when over 50%, but not 100% of the teams are ready, the timer goes to 30 seconds. For random games, that's not great. Maybe being ready should only work if 100% of people are in fact ready. Otherwise its just a visual to show impatient people that their ship is in fact ready to go.
