I often find it is hard to get into an arcade game (except at peak times) due to there being too few people in the waiting lobbies, or there being no servers available at all. This can put people off playing, as there appears to be no available servers filling up, despite there being many players already in-game.
If they decide to join a waiting lobby it is likely that they'll completely miss the short opportunity to actually join a game with enough players (when that one ends and appears in server selection), which results in too few players being distributed over too many games to start any:
Therefore I propose everyone is given the ability to join already in-game servers (as a spectator) from the server selection menu, whilst obviously still being able to join a waiting game if that looks like the faster option to them.
Positives:
- Players can get into a populated game cycle sooner as they don't have to wait for enough new players to join to fill up a waiting lobby.
- If a player is disconnected, it is easier to find the game they were in so don't lose their trophies on the leaderboard.
- Similarly, players could be warped straight in via party invite by friends who are in-game, so they can join the fun sooner and reserve their place for the next game (there should still be a limit of 12 players per server, including spectators).
- An effect of allowing people to join large, in-game servers is that there will be fewer games, each with more players, so for the solo gamemodes, players will get fewer wins on average.
- Some people may abuse the ability to quickly join and leave many different servers, so spamming as well as stalking would be easier for them to do.
It would be great to hear what people think of this suggestion; feedback is greatly appreciated!