Open Crew Overhaul (SERVER HUB)

Nice as it sounds, pretty much making a room with a lot of pirates with or without open mic. Standing in a waiting area, hoping to get picked to join said crew.
Typical dodgeball scene: Pick the popular kid and dont pick the others. Leaving those who dont meet your requirements waiting around for "hours" hoping someone allows them to join, Even if they meet all the requirements.

If he thinks it looks good, then he can accept my request to join. If it's an unlocked crew, then I would immediately load into their server once I click Join.

Unlocked crews is pretty much randoms joining (which we have) so who is gonna ever have unlocked crews?

@burnbacon you don't stand around waiting to get picked. I'm not sure where you got that idea? It's a SOCIAL hub to just vibe and chat with others and you can look for a crew in the meantime using the crew browser tables. Heck, you could join just to talk to people and then go solo. Just have an open mind sometimes.
You join crews that you want by utilizing the lists, or if you're waiting for someone, you can hang out and talk to randoms and see what others are up to. Their is no "picking" unless it's a locked crew (which doesn't even have to be implemented at first, but), it would be for people that are doing things specific like High Level Hourglass that might want someone on their crew with a similar high level and not to be entirely new.. So, like if someone is creating the open crew with their ship, if they put the tags as *general, *tall tales, *Voyages, maybe they wouldn't get to lock the ship. It's all semantics at this point. Who cares about the locked versus unlocked, when we first should be talking about a server hub/crew browsing mechanic. All the nitty gritty ideas can come after the foundation is built.

@thamb0 When the Arena was a thing, they had the Seadog Tavern as the social hub waiting for the match to begin. They ended up having to cut off all voice communication due to how toxic people were in it.

While do like the idea, its much easier to monitor people’s behavior in Discord Groups than in game.

@reverend-toast I am fully aware. Hence why people would be able to mute and report individual players in game. Something they could not do back during Arena. Just because some people were toxic doesn't' mean we should gatekeep everyone else. Some players are going to be toxic in any game you make. It shouldn't stop the devs from making a community hub again. Otherwise, what's the point? Might as well just not allow any voip in SoT for fear of people being toxic. If you don't like listening to people, then all you have to do is "mute all" and you can still go use the crew finding tables as I discussed or jump around the obstacle course or maybe play a game of cards at one of the tables.

@thamb0 You could mute them though, and you can continue to mute the toxic folks… however while you may encounter a toxic crew in the seas, a community hub brings everyone in close proximity and it undoubtedly will slowly devolve into become the nightmare of “MAKE ME A SANDWICH” that corrupted the Arena.

Having over 20+ people in close proximity in Voice Chat will always be insane… and while it can happen in game (We sunk a Galleon a few years back that had 3 galleon crews working on it) having a mode that is just that many people talking really would drive most people mad.

@reverend-toast so just mute all the people in close proximity if that's what you prefer. Why gatekeep others who might enjoy having all those people in close proximity just because you don't like it? I feel like instead of looking for ways to make this work, people are focusing on why it didn't work in Arena. But we have the knowledge and tools to make it work. PLENTY of other games do it successfully. No reason SoT can't do it.

@thamb0 I think the thing most of us classic players want, is for the resources and efforts to be made on the Actual Adventure, and not add something that promotes toxicity and is easily covered by the existing SOT Discord.

@reverend-toast I guess I'm not a classic player? IMO this would help the actual adventure mode immensely. A social hub for people to interact with people before setting off on a session. Being able to manually search for open crews to expediate the process of finding a crew trying to focus on similar objectives, i.e. grinding tall tales, doing Athena voyages, fishing, etc. If you do not prefer to go to the social hub, then you do not need to join a session that way. This is just another tool Rare could look at incorporating into the game. I do not agree with you that this would "promote toxicity" and it's not easily covered by the SOT Discord when I would wager 95% of players or more do not utilize that Discord.
Regardless, I have heard many many people advocate for something like this, so maybe someday in the distant future it will happen.
Cheers.

@olde-grim-jack thank you! Trying to share an idea on here is so brutal sometimes, because you get the same people trying to shoot everything down. SO so many multiplayer games have server hubs like this thread has talked about, and for some reason Rare just can't figure out how to make one themselves. They have so many other games to get inspiration and tips from. For a game that prides itself on "community" they do practically nothing to promote the community having areas to actually get together and build off of each other, like you were saying: put up recruitment ads, adventure crews, etc. This game needs a server hub over anything else at this point imo, because almost all of the new solo PS5 players are going to get in way behind the curve, see how far ahead in experience and skill most of the players are and either give up or play every so often. Yes, some will stick it out, but I assure you that a large majority of solo players who find the open crew mechanic as tedious as most of us do would in fact stay if we had server hubs for them to find crews/guilds willing to take them into the fold. Players should not have to enter an official Discord or website to find guilds. Having that as a tool is nice, but whomever says that's the end all be all are gatekeeping so hard and are literally going down with the ship oblivious that it's sinking.

@olde-grim-jack Right… but having a single room with VOIP activated for everyone in it, can be insane.

But really, the big thing is adding a social/community hub will take away resources from expanding the actual game, so I don’t know about you, but Discord is pretty easy to navigate, and there are lots of other methods of finding players to play with, and I would rather get more in the game, then something that the majority of players will only utilize till they find a good group and stick with them.

@reverend-toast bro, why do you have such a problem with voip? I feel like you think every server hub is going to be a MW2 lobby. I've done FoTD with 16 players and I never once thought, wow this is unbearable to hear all these people next to me. I've also played tons of games with massive lobbies and never once had a problem. Like even when PUBG had 100 players in the loading lobby where everyone was toxic, you just mute, and that's WORST case scenario with 100 people!! Rare needs to get up off their rumps and seriously start looking at a server hub for people to gather at. That is what the data shows. 58% of ps5 players have already left the game. Why? Most say it's because the game is too difficult to pick up and learn as new players entering a sea of experienced players. They want others to talk to and learn from. When you're a swabbie and can see salty sea dogs up close and talk to them, their is a chance players will get inspired to keep grinding for those cosmetics, find new players to make friends with and then want to log in each day, or maybe they will just enjoy jumping on to bank stand at the server hub bar. RARE NEEDS to start making ideas and testing this.
Also, here is an idea. Rare can take resources from the Emporium team and have them work on the server hub. Do we really need yet another reskin in the Emporium? At this point the game is almost a joke where the only real content coming in consistently is microtransactions. When I see game studios producing weekly content with less than a quarter of the dev team, it really makes me scratch my head. Why is Rare working with both hands tied behind their backs? You talk about this idea somehow taking away from the resources to expanding the game, but we haven't seen anything like that in years.

@olde-grim-jack it has always made me scratch my head why RARE practically refuses to make anything like a server hub or place for people to meet and browse crews. Any game that pushes Discord as the answer to any question is already wrong for 90% of the player base. As the years go on, I'm no longer surprised why everyone I know has been hanging this game up.