As for blocking everyone except friends, that's what a private game is for.
I don't fully support that idea, it was just something that came to my mind. However, that's not exactly that way. A private game is private for all teams and ships, while what I wanted to say is that only your ship is private.
that would kill the atmosphere of the community in an instant
That is a really good point. Most of us probably won't use it too much, but others would do.
not to mention provide a powerful griefing tool. Set yourself to only allow friends to join your crew, steal crew captain slots, never hit ready. With a group of friends you could quite possiblly shut down down most of the games available and confuse people into thinking the whole game's stopped working, tricking them into never playing again.
o.O? You do need a really great amount of friends xD You need more than just 1 ship to stop the counter if the other pilots hit ready. And if enter the game, pay for it with other friends, why would they just grief around?? To stop 2 matches you need 3 more friends, and being able to enter while there is 2 slots (in a 2vs2 match) as commander!
And AFAIK griefers troll alone, mostly because he they don't understand that this game is cooperative. If they are cooperative enough to get that many friends to grief that way, man, I take off my hat
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I'm starting to think that the best option is the votekick thing.
You play with a griefer, the rest of the crew suffers him, he gets banned.
You are in another ship and the captain on the other ship just goes to the end of the world and doesn't play, you, your crew, and his crew votekick him.
As someone said before in this thread, this can be used to troll. But it's a lot more difficult to to grief: you need to convince enough people to votekick with you, while without having votekick you just need to stay still in your ship.
I do really believe that this is a nice solution, and if it doesn't work the way we expect and has some hack that we haven't thought of, devs could just disable it.
Any other ideas? Do you like/dislike my votekick solution?