Custom Games: Loading up, auto-balancing, and much more...

I've got several things I'd like to see added to custom games. The first is quick access to your inventory without having to leave the custom game screen. The player should be able to make changes to their loadout from here without the changes staying after returning to normal games, and your ships reset to your original loadouts when you leave the custom game lobby. This inventory should be a very simple one made specifically for changing your loadout in custom games and does not need to be able to upgrade, evolve, scrap, increase storage, or view resources. It should have unlimited storage so that you can unequip your items more easily (no way to put things in this inventory anyway). It's a simple feature to make switching loadouts during custom games much easier, and it goes hand in hand with my next suggestion...

Add an option in the custom game lobby that auto-balances everyone's equipment. Enabling this should find the average of everyone's ship levels and item levels/rarities and make that the standard for everyone. The new inventory for custom games should have your gear at the "balanced levels" with your ships also sharing the same level, simply moving items that no longer fit on your ship into the inventory.

Another neat tool that would greatly enhance custom games is the ability to search for existing custom lobbies. Currently, tapping the custom battle icon instantly throws you into a custom lobby, making you the host. Instead, it should prompt the player with 2 options: Create Lobby and Join Lobby. Selecting Create would simply do what it currently does. Selecting Join would open a window showing all open custom games, and players can request entry to any of these lobbies. Each game listed should show the amount of players in the lobby and a brief rundown of the game's rules (more on rules later) so they know what they're looking at before blindly joining.

I've heard a couple of suggestions to add a custom lobby chat, which would be great with this feature so players can talk together about what kind of game they want to play. It'd be even better if the custom lobby chat was split into 2 groups, All Chat and Team Chat. Having a split chat system like this allows teammates to devise a strategy without leaking the information to the enemy team, and the new inventory window allows you to make changes to your loadouts easily. Currently you can see what your enemies' and teammates' loadouts are when you tap on their icons. This feature can stay intact, but shouldn't display the changes made in the custom game inventory.

Finally, with the easy-access inventory in the custom game lobby, we can add one more cool feature: rules. I know, rules are boring, but making the rules is different. There could be a bunch of fun options like making everybody speeders or only allowing torpedoes. The custom game inventory could help with this by providing the necessary items to play with. This means that in a torpedoes only game, for example, if I had no torpedoes at all, the custom lobby would provide me with all of the torpedoes at the average level (only for this game). Restricted items are simply unequipped and grayed out in the inventory. Other ideas would be giving ships stat boosts, like giving everyone max speed, agility, etc. And let's not forget the more simplistic options, such as adjusting the game's duration, toggling capture, or maybe even free-for-all.

Guys, I could think of a million more things but these things have to come first. Our custom games are very limited with how "custom" they could actually be. We need options. We need accessibility. We need communication. All of these things could be achieved with just these additions, and I'd go nuts over an update like this. Let me know what you all think below!

P.S. I'm adding an extra poll option for whether or not access to the Rules feature should be VIP exclusive. Players with VIP could still make their own custom battles using the new Rules feature and invite non-VIP players. The reason I'm pitching this idea is that all of the other features alone would greatly improve custom games. Making this sole feature VIP exclusive would mean that paying monthly also unlocks massive potential for awesome (or silly) custom battles.

 

I agree with chat and join and create
Also if we could have the power to make a third team that would be super awesome...
Three team.. who will hit who first, who will team up only to betray later.so cool isnt it?

 

Lol nobody seems to like the auto-balancing idea even though it'd help us play against our lower level friends without either being too op or stocking up on weak items. It's optional, and only affects that one custom game, I feel like it's just as good of an idea.