Total level difference and we're happy to look into this. How games get started and are played is just as important as how engineering works.
I mean any multiplayer game if you are constantly facing people way outside your skill bracket or waiting hours for a game, you very quickly stop playing.
The three pillars are wait time, balance, and player control. Finding the balance between all of those is something that we will wrestle with and continue to try and improve, so always up for feedback on it.

Pardon my ignorance but what is the average/median difference number indicative of? total levels difference? secret mm number? (in which case you'll have to convince me one exists because lbh it just crams people in games as quick as it can which isnt a bad thing imo) and either way thank you for looking into this

Those numbers are definitely first pass and there is scewing data (more people due to sale, new patch brining back different kinds of people, not the same time frame.)

We grabbed some preliminatry numbers, definitely just a bit of time and I'll show off how many matches in each bracket (open swapping, no swapping, swapping if underdog.)
Hopefully this helps show off the reasoning a bit.

Key-
The last month before 1.4.6 (players were able to swap via spectator): B1.4.6
1.4.6 before hotfix (players were not able swap at all): 1.4.6
After 1.4.6 hotfix (players are able to swap if it doesn't hurt balance): A1.4.6

# of Matches
B1.4.6- 13489
1.4.6- 6076
A1.4.6- 3268

Average Difference
B1.4.6- 5.09
1.4.6- 4.28
A1.4.6- 4.41

Median difference
B1.4.6-3.2
1.4.6- 2.7
A1.4.6- 2.5


Underdog matches
B1.4.6- 42%
1.4.6- 34%
A1.4.6- 33%


Average Wait time
B1.4.6- 337s
1.4.6- 301s
A1.4.6-322s

(side note, just talked to the database manager, with the change we just put in, it will take a week to get the result of that number so it's not scewed)

Hmm,

Interesting points.

So I shot an email to our database manager. I'm going to check out the average balance of matches pre and post slot swapping change and see if it's having a positive effect or not.

Basically I want to remove both our biases and get the fact (which I'll let you know as soon as he digs it out of the database.)

Both these cases you bring up are 100% right, it'd be better to have open slot swapping so that's why I'm going to check and see if it's a rare occurance or common by checking to see if balance was better before we made this change.

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/263838243287269928/1084380243A5CEAB67AD33D1C6AD373C227A4AAF/

Ignoring the stacked/adult lobby it sure would be nice if we could consolidate (which would be very possible due to the maturity of the players involved) to get another ship... which in turn would also severely reduce the odds of getting "random scrubs" and thus lower the stack... but wait... swapping away from an underdog is counterproductive to stacking...

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=693152279

So Jack and Tree wanted to captain the two open ships and suki and dog agreed to go to blue steel's ship leaving three filled ships and one full empty insteal of four partially filled ships... oh wait... as a result the lobby was 10m+ even with nearly 200 people online.

I'll startscreenshotting for you but essnetially 3v3 with two full ships and a (cooperative) captain then the otherside having 2w/e ships and a full crew without a captain... at 2am when you've 76 people online you simply aren't going to find a full crew willing to fly with a lvl 10 (not necessarily bad but still risky) captain. Sure he can swap slot with someone on the other team but then you've still got a lone person on an entire ship so the group of 4 thats searching for a match (but also very unlikely to find it) won't be added to this match. People get frustrated and leave and now you've 59 people online and problems everywhere are compounded... Little johnny decides this game is dead and uninstalsl and plays rocket leage instead

For odd lobbies what do you mean by reform?
Like let me know exactly how you used old slot swap to reform and we'll see what we can do.