I currently feel that the matchmaking in this game has one major problem. The one problem I have is that I cant set my ship to private. I don't think we should allow 1 person queue for a galleon or have 3 to 4 people queue for a sloop but I think that we should allow 2-3 people queue for a Galleon and make it so that no one else can join their crew unless invited, same goes for a sloop. This could prevent people from being immediately voted into the brig because if they are not wanted on the ship it would have been set to private. It would also be useful because if you want your friend to join but they won't be on till later it will prevent people from taking their spot. These are all just my thoughts and I know nothing about game design so I would appreciate it if people shared their ideas below.
Private Crew?
The developers said, in a Livestream a week or less before launch, that they would be looking into adding Private crew options to the game shortly after launch. They talked about giving the ability to change the crew setting, on the fly from within the game, from Private to Public so if you later wanted to open your crew up to random matchmaking you could.
But yes, I think this needs to be a high priority. We had a situation last night where 3 of us were ready to play, but our 4th wouldn't be ready for about 90 minutes. So 3 of us launched in a 3 person galleon (which is an awesome option to have, by the way!) and sailed around doing voyages. Then our 4th wanted to join and messaged us that he was ready. Unfortunately, we had just started an Order of Souls voyage and didn't want to lose it. So we asked him to wait a few minutes. But then we ended up being chased and attacked by another galleon and had to fight them off and evade for a while. Then we got attacked by the kraken and got away. Then we finally had to do a running drop-off of the little treasure we had and give up on the active voyage (the other galleon wouldn't leave us alone to give us time to kill 4 Skeleton Captains).
All of that was fun, though! But it meant that our friend had to wait another 40 minutes or so while we did all that AND he missed out on all the fun of going through that adventure with us. If we had the private crew option, we would've launched in a 4 person galleon and just kept the 4th slot reserved for him so we could bring him in whenever he was ready. And with that option we would never have to worry about abandoning a voyage in order to back out and start a new crew on a properly sized ship for the crew of friends we have ready at the time.
So I do hope this feature is made a high priority after the launch issues have been resolved.
