If, you aquire 3 sloops of people, 3 of which are all in the same server region, and you vote to matchmake at the same time.... you now can, assuming you can identify your friends. insure that your 3 boats will ALWAYS win last ship standing. this was happening on day 1, a bit... but by day 7 i saw it every other match or so. not always 3 ships, sometimes just 2. this atleast gives 1 ship the chance at being rewarded with SOME rep for their near 10 minute wait. but 2 ships as a team SHOULD unless they are REALLY bad, get 1st and second.... firstly i would like to say this is somewhat self limiting, as i have only seen bad players do it. i was boarded by 6 people all at once, and managed to kill a few while they spawn camped and parked me in the red. if they were any good at all i wouldnt have been able to kill any 6v2... essentially 6v1... but alas... there was no hope. but this behavior is more or less, not in the spirit of last ship standing. its toxic. and will ruin the mode. the end will be, either everyone teams it... and few people use it... or... it gets fixed. its far too easy to do, and it guarantees you xp... big xp... so it will be exploited. unless fixed, eventually in order to compete others will have to adopt this "strat" and it will end up being who gets more ships on their team in. i think the solution would be to greatly randomize matchmaking, but even then it wouldnt be fully stopped and may increase the already long wait times, so im not really sure what to do.
Last Ship Standing Team issues.
this will always be the case. it was guaranteed to happen the longer the event lasts, the less people who are playing legitimately. the hourglass grind is insanely long and this mode just opened the door for more ways to exploit. and if they change it so people cant match with people on their friends lists or in the same guild than people would just leave their guilds and unfriend each other to be able to match. and sadly taking advantage of this probably wouldnt be a bannable offense. yet if you had 2 pcs and just matched normal hourglass against yourself over and over and over they would probably ban you for cheating to gain reputation... even though playing that way wouldnt ruin any other players experience. while what you mention directly ruins peoples experience and makes the game feel awful. imo if someone found a way to cheese any content and it doesnt have an impact on other players sessions? its a pirate game..... sounds fair to me. but they have done pretty well removing all possible exploits for people to be able to grind hourglass via multiple pcs. honestly lowering the grind for commendations and milestones could go a long way to help with this.... it wouldnt fix the road to 1000 problem though. even when easy exploits were available and not being punished the commendations were too long a grind to be worth doing. so doing it "legit" is like torture. the real issue here is the reward structure and goals system with the game. like right now i imagine people playing it normally will find it really hard to get 1st place....
