I've played a couple games and notice that now when I join a game we no longer have to wait to start the game so that everyone is loaded but instead have to wait on each individual once the game is started for their computers to catch up to finish generating the planet system. I feel like this is a downgrade. It makes so much more sense for the game once "started" to wait for everyone to finish loading the system, so that once the game really started, it was a seemingly seamless transfer into the game, choose your location, and begin annihilation. Now either I have to wait for each person to finish loading or they have to wait for me. And if anyone is unlucky enough to get stuck long enough, they have a delayed start since the game loaded before they finished loading on their end. So either their commander spawned and they do not know where it is, or it did not spawn at all. In short, I think it's better to wait a few minutes and make sure that everyone has the system loaded so that their is minimal chance that anyone gets left behind, instead of having to wait several minutes on everyone to load, or be unlucky enough to crash or have a delayed start because your pc happened to fail at that particular time. If this has already been discussed I would appreciate if someone would post a link to that topic so that I may read what others had to say before me. If this is the first it has been discussed, then I look forward to reading your opinions. It is my opinion that this feature should be reinstated and should never have been removed. I feel like it was not broken but someone tried to fix it anyway. (I also would like to note that this feature may quite possibly have not been removed and that it may be simply that the host is not restricted by the limitation that everyone has not yet loaded the system, but this limitation should be added as to not prematurely start a game and cause issues, but since I do not work for UBER, I really wouldn't know the difference.)
It's been confirmed several times on the forums and on livecasts that it will be brought back. It was removed temporarily because of the redesigned lobby that can be changed on the fly. Even though we took a step back with the removal of pre-loading, we've taken a few step forwards in overall improvements to the game. We'll get there.
I know for a fact this kinda kills off lower end machines from running games. Even my quite powerful laptop (16 gigs of RAM, dedicated graphics card, 2.6 ghz processor with a 512 gig SSD) can take a few minutes to load a larger system, so for those on older machines its a critical feature to allow them to play. Uber probably knows this so unless they encounter technical issues i can't see it being long until its added back in.
