I want to second this thread and I'll share some feedback as to why.
The whole point of the matchmaker, as I initially understood and had heard in the dev fireside chats, was to reduce the waiting time in lobbies before a game starts (and of course, doing so by adding a fancy algorithm and some animation that I've got to wait on BEFORE I wait in lobby). Adding the match timer is supposed to do the same thing. But there's a problem here.
What is the actual point of the lobby? Isn't it to set up our ships and our equipment, coordinate between captains, and strategize? After all, this is a strategic team-based game and when we haven't taken the time to stop and think about what we're doing AS A TEAM the game is significantly more frustrating to play. This is why we don't crew form as a single ship and then immediately queue the matchmaker to quick-join us as single ships, let alone quick join as we knew from many patches ago. And that's without even going into the benefits of hanging out in a lobby for abut 5-10 just socializing. That's how you make friends. And when you make friends, you learn each other's strategies, strongpoints and weakpoints in ways you don't when you're just flying solo with a bunch of randoms and thrown into a match in 200 seconds.
Now, I understand why you want to quicken that average lobby wait. It's still the #1 reason for negative feedback on steam, isn't it? I'm actually a little surprised it's not bugs, but ok. But here's the conundrum you have to face now: by lowering time spent in lobbies, you're necessarily negatively impacting the quality of the game. And this is something that I'm seeing quite visibly as someone who's played this game for about a year and a half: The quality of matches are significantly worse since matchmaking than before. My enemy's crews are usually disorganized, my enemies captains are disorganized, and teammates are disorganized. All with a consistency that I wasn't used to with the old system (even though it DID happen with the old system, but it was a lot easier to pile a bunch of experienced players into a lobby and just keep playing without having the worry about that god-forsaken queue dumping me back into a match with people of little experience.)
So, the whole point of having this criticism placed here is to remind ourselves what this game is. It is NOT Call of Duty, Counter Strike, Team Fortress 2, or the like. It is NOT a game where you can just jump in without giving a shit. (well, you can leave the shits at home if you like, but you really just can't jump in like that.
) And by trying to adjust the game to market it towards the FPS crowd, which is by and large the folks who are clamoring for "READY UP GUYS!" we're really undermining what makes the game so worthwhile for those of us who've had it for ages and keep coming back every night. Thus, I think if you actually attach some qualitative feedback to each of the matches, you'll find that even though matches are more balanced than they were previously, the game just isn't being played as well as it had previously, especially for those of us who've been around for a while.
Try it. See what you find.
