Is there a hidden SOS Beacon function while still on the ship?
Is there a hidden SOS Beacon function while still on the ship?
Much of the time if I hit the quickplay option, it dumps me into a ship, pretty much at the same exact time as 2 or 3 other players. I don't have great sampling here, but it seems like the players are lvl 70+ who know how to do this. Is there some SOS Beacon or equivalent that I'm missing?
Maybe the matchmaking system prefers empty lobbies still on the ship over in-progress games if there aren’t any SOSs going
I guess that's possible. I'll have to try it sometime (whenever I'm good enough to lead a team).
I do know that if you deploy an SOS beacon on mission, it doesn't give you the SOS beacon to redeploy until you quit the game. To me this implies that your "SOS status" is set to On as soon as you deploy a beacon, until you stop playing (or maybe join someone else's game.) If that is the case it would make sense that you could still be flagged as SOS On between missions.
Is it dumping you on a ship with a mission selected and Hellpods ready to board, or just idle?
I can't say with 100% certainty, but I seem to think that the mission was already selected. I'll see if I can get a video capture of next time it happens.
It's hard to tell, because the game doesn't really give the player visibility to a list of available lobbies, so you kinda just gotta trust that the matchmaking system is doing what it's supposed to be doing.
In theory, you should only be sent to a player's ship if there are no active SOS beacons or otherwise in-progress missions on your selected planet/difficulty combo, because that should be considered the lowest priority for matchmaking.