I'd love seeing an in-game group finder before setting sail (and to have it at your disposal mid-game as well), where you can have a dropdown or checklist table with filters for content to choose as a rule. Whatever really, use your imagination and feel free to add more suggestions.
Based on a principle of what World of Warcraft and other MMOs have (specific raid, classes, item level, etc.) Here, that could be for selecting specific factions, or type of content (like FotD, HG, etc), or both (or even more stuff) at the same time:
- The more filters, the better, as you can be as specific as you want to be. You pick them and get placed in a queue.
- People who pick and choose the same one(s) as you get grouped up with you. However, an acceptable downside of this would be - the more filters you pick, naturally the longer it may take to assemble the crew. The "risk" is on you there. For such extreme cases, Discord actually might be a better idea.
- If somebody leaves, you may queue the crew again to search for someone to fill-in the spot (again, with filters you've picked), while normally playing the game, so you do not have to just stay in the queue again while waiting to fill the spot (again, an idea taken straight from WoW).
It may not solve all the issues of the Open Crew. There is still a chance someone changes their mind and leaves, and you have to fill the spot. There's still a chance someone may join in just to troll. But I think it would be still better than randomly joining and abandoning people, and sometimes in loops for 2 hours.
I see this as just a QoL improvement for the already existing Open Crew.
There is Discord, yes, but if it could help at least a little, it might be good having this as a part of the game as an additional option, for people who rely on the Open Crew, and not use Discord. Especially for people with mildly limited-time sessions (2-4 hours). But it could still be very useful for people planning long sessions, and short ones (if luck is on your side to quickly find people).
