Games

I do have to generally agree, however this is also easily the weakest part of the game. The game doesn't hand hold you through explaining everything with full screen explanations like some games, and there's a lot going on with the map screen to notice the difficulty and matchmaking functions when you first jump into the game. However, it is right there. The first couple missions it steers you towards are so simple and short you definitely don't need teammates to complete, and from my experience they basically assume you won't have any. After you play a couple short missions alone, it makes sense you'd look at more in the interface, it's not rocket science.

However, the high number of loading screens and animations to get into and out of a party simply to make it "look" nice is absurd. An animation of the ship jumping to a planet, then an animation of you coming out of a pod onto the ship, then if you are kicked an animation of you doing the exact same thing back to your ship, taking 30-60 seconds to run through. Animating it all for a single ship to deploy from, versus a standard matchmaking room is just a waste of time for matchmaking. It looks cool and for friends is awesome, but to just play the game, it's a massive waste of time. This is made even more annoying with players kicking people from their teams for any number of reasons so all of those nice looking loads just waste that time and the kicked player then needs to walk all the way back through their ship to get to the map and try again. This is the most annoying part of getting kicked honestly.

I think part of this is also a good chunk of the community either not knowing how, or not utilizing the party privacy functionality. So people aren't putting themselves into things like friends-only or closed parties when they don't want to play with randoms. And then there's always the toxic players kicking people simply for not playing the meta.

A party leader kicking players within a couple minutes of joining a party should negatively affect that player in some form to ensure people use the privacy system correctly and help stop some of this meta toxicity. Like an inability to call stratagems for some time in mission (and it not counting until actually playing, so they can't just sit on the ship to wait it out). They already have the in game propaganda system setup, declare the player anti-democratic or something to make in game punishment seamless with the lore.