FYI this is absolutely the worst way to advocate that feature. Negative and entitlement attitudes have never earned us a feature. Constructive criticism, such as "Sins maps are really too random for competitive play, I think we can fix that with this", or "It would be really cool if you could let modders have frigates move like fighters, you already have the code to do that", are much more likely to succeed.

Many "ideal" MP features actually wouldn't work for ICO simply because of how few players there are...ladders and matchmaking and all that great stuff quickly falls apart when you only have 20 or so non-comp stomp people on at a given time...

One issue is the nature of the game itself...a single game easily lasts several hours, so stacked teams and player drops have much greater impacts simply because of the time investment one game requires...

The core problem, however, is the number of people who play online, not ICO itself....while a shitty ICO may (and I stress the word may) have gotten us to the dismal MP numbers we are at today, fixing ICO with added features unfortunately isn't going to bring those people back....the window has come and gone, Starclad has lost a lot of it's PR momentum in regards to this game...the best you can hope for is to maintain the current player base while maintaining a cost-effective model....

At this point, Starclad really is doing what makes the most sense (you have to consider the business aspect) which is:

• Improve stability with ICO (includes getting feedback to reduce the frequency of MDs and DCs) -- this helps both competitive MP play and those doing comp stomps with friends
• Improve general gameplay balance -- this helps both MP and SP (which is where the real player base is)
• Add MP features that require very little or no changes to the actual game engine -- for example, adding "fair" and "competitive" map versions requires no changes to the engine whatsoever but can still make for significant improvements

You already can have frigates move like fighters....that's what corvettes do....there's a Boolean in the frigate's entity file that controls this.....

srsly though; Sel summed it up quite nicely.  It's attrition at this point in the story. 

Improving the existing player base is our only hope, and (unfortunately for some) that means mining the ranks of the semi-competent and quasi-noobish.  The downside to this aspect is they have to be willing to listen and take direction from vets.  This inevitably means getting past what many would consider personal affronts, and many allusions to their Neanderthal heritage (that seems to come naturally in many cases) being leveled at them.

However, in order to take up their own slack to "make the grade" in the multiplayer community, they need to recognize that players who can help them improve are not in a popularity contest.  After all, there are selfish motivations for helping a player improve, the least of which is fostering better competitive games across the board.

Yarlen did say that he'd be working on new MP features in this thread:

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/429378

I don't think we'll see a ranking system until Sins 2 though.

Thanks Yarlen!  And I will say (as has been said before) you guys truly do a much better job than MOST game producers at continuing to improve and balance your game after it hits release.

As far as ICO goes, I really think just being able to see who is in a game/room without having to leave the one you are in would be a huge improvement.  Same with chat.  There are a million different interfaces out there but something that is more "tablet" style with multiple frames would be simple to accomplish.

Outstanding Yarlen! 

As part of your investigation, do you think y'all can look into a "Test Server" button on the log in screen?  Would be lot easier to get folks over there more regularly which could help with bug hunts. 

Changing maps from within the hosted lobby would be huge!  Multiple channel windows too. 

-And while were at it, any chance we might see a list of games going that indicated how long they've been playing, and who's in them?