In every party there is a leader, however in Sea of Thieves every crewmember is a special snowflake that can't be less or more than anyone else, this needs to end and I'll explain why.
Ever since the alpha I have questioned why do we always have to be hostage to the matchmaking system, but when the closed crews were introduced my issues diminushed since it was a good temporary patchwork to the bigger issue, although it was not a solution in it of itself. Now I see myself having to return to these issues before the game completess one year, since now we have to once again adress the problem that is matchmaking and why the "open crew" function is still hell.
Stop me if you heard this one before. You are in a sloop and decide to open the crew so you can have another player join as a safety measure incase you disconnect out of the game (because we still don't have a reconnect feature) that way we have a way to keep returning to our session, however the guy that comes in is a complete jerk because he drops your anchor, drops your loot in the ocean, bombs your ship with gunpowder, rams your ship into rocks... and there is nothing you can do because you can't brig people in a two player sloop. You effectively ended your session by having another player do things out of your control. How about that time you were in a brigantine and 2 players join you and decide to lock you in the brig hijacking your playsession? Or when you have 4 players in your galleon but you notice one of them is about to do something stupid but you have to wait 3 votes to get the idiot into the brig... which by then would be too late?
I could go on, but the point is that the brig is a failure in maintaining the order in the crew since there is no effective way to deal with uncooperative random crewmates and worse still is that duos can't even use it. Now you might be thinking "perhaps you shouldn't play open crew", and you are right, as I mentioned before I said that closed crews was effective in resolving most issues crews had, however open crews is still broken, and that is my point, an entire function of the game is completely malfunctional. With that in mind what is my proposal?
Captancy: Players are randomly assiged the role of captain during the matchmaking lobby or you may enter an empty lobby as a captain and start matchmaking. As a captain you have the following privileges:
- You can no longer be brigged.
As the captain you can't be voted into the brig.
- You have the power to place any number of players into the brig.
Simply opening the menu and selecting the player name, you can send it to the brig with a single vote.
- You take priority while handling certain ship functions.
If a player is at the wheel and he isn't the captain, you can shove him off the wheel and control it instead. If a player is handling the sails, you can shove him off the sail and control it instead. Etc...
- You can soft lock the anchor.
You may place a lock in the anchor preventing anyone but you from using it.
- Your voyage vote is the law.
Your vote starting and cancelling a voyage is worth 4 votes.
No one man should have all that power, I hear you say, but I agree, so my suggestion is to keep this function as an open crew exclusivity, closed crews can ignore this function since it's implied that all players can comunicate with one another and can settle their issues with simple comunication. One important note I'd like to add is that if you swap between closed crew and open crew in the menu, you should automatically lose or gain the captain status, so for example you swap from closed to open crew, and you are alone in the ship, you become the captain, if you change back into closed you lose captain status. If there are more than one person in the ship while switching to open crew, one will be randomly assigned captain.
