I love the "Closed Crew" feature. This is something I've been waiting on for weeks. I solo a lot when other people aren't available to play and when a friend gets online I either have to sell off what I have at the the nearest outpost and start all over with an unstocked boat or make them wait on me to finish a voyage and THEN start all over with an unstocked boat. I would love for friends to be able to join me in progress. I would also love the ability to go from a sloop to a galleon without leaving the game.
I was thrilled when this patch was released but that was very short-lived. Functionality had to be pulled back out because of Allmondbeard errors. I got disconnected 4 times in three hours and lost a ton of loot, not to mention all the setup time involved to grind Merchant Alliance. Honestly, I wasn't really that happy and at this point I won't invest time in playing until the issues are resolved because it's just time wasted and gold and rep lost.
The worst part about this was that hours went by before there was any kind of statement from Rare, despite countless forum posts, tweets, discord posts, etc. I'm sure you follow your own social media and I know you have a community response team but they need to do better about posting across ALL social media platforms, not just twitter or discord. It's not really that hard to copy and paste the same statement across platforms, it literally takes seconds. Also, you have everyone's email address, you could send out a quick email as well.
I appreciate that Rare is trying to fix this and I love this game. Please try do a little better about getting the word out across all social media platforms. A simple statement "We at Rare are aware of the issues that players are currently facing in Sea of Thieves and we're currently working to understand what the problem is and come up with a solution." would go a long way to stop people from getting so angry because there is no cohesive message across platforms. Just my two cents.