I was thinking about the tug-of-war we seem to be having between "balance" and flexibility. This raises of the question of why matches become "stacked". Is it because veterans wants to grind greenhorns into the ground? Is it because all we want is to win, at whatever cost to the poor newbies?
Nope.
It's because we want to play with the people we like. It's because playing with a communicative crew that has some idea what they are doing is what is fun to us. Would we prefer to have opponents of a similar skill bracket that challenge us? Of course, but with matchmaking it's much harder for us to set up a lobby of all higher-levels as we could with the lobby list where people would sort of come and go until matches balanced themselves. Nobody "stacks" to destroy ships of 2 powder monkeys and 2 pilots. We "stack" because we want to have fun. Friend join and crew formation are our last resources to attempt to get a match together of more experienced players. Please, please, please don't take these away from us. We are capable of balancing ourselves provided that your matchmaking system doesn't repeatedly throw extra level 1 pilots into crew slots on our ships.
