@Jamesmor said in The audacity of not being able to friend and play with friends on different ships.:
to add a person from a different server is not possible to do with each server structure, games that have that feature normally use a different system that works in a separated server to do it like Blizzard did with Battle.net, so for Sega add this feature in PSO2 they gonna need to create a entire new system for that and considering they gonna need to do that with Sega ID, Xbox account and Steam account it will be a monumental work to make it happen
If this is in regards to the idea of being able to match with players from other ships it is possible via the "Universal Ship" which is currently exclusive to the Challenge Mode and Battle Arena portions of the game. I would absolutely love to see the matchmaking mechanic become extended (or at least normal game content) by either having it be something in its own Universal Ship or to allow players to simply match-make across ships to easily help populate content others ships would struggle to match with.
This functionality is already-in-game and if you were curious about multi-platform connectivity the Japanese version of the game already solved this by having the SEGA ID take precedence and that any other platforms (Nintendo Switch accounts for PSO2 Cloud access, PlayStation Network for PLayStation Vita and PlayStation 4 connections, and other methods for NetCafe access and the likes) will eventually be tied to a SEGA ID. In the global version we are simply tied to either a Steam Account or Microsoft Account (or both if you tie them together) as our "SEGA ID" is a pre-generated string starting with "PN" and numbers afterwards.
I do not believe it is as farfetched as you make it out to be considering that the Steam and Microsoft Store versions (and by extension the Xbox versions) are all tied to the same servers as one another in a way that the Japanese version isn't fully committed to that I recall. In the Japanese version each platform (at least to my memory) had exclusive blocks they could access (such as the "PlayStation 4" blocks or the "PlayStation Vita" blocks) because of some platforms having unique settings. For instance, the PlayStation Vita block was stuck on its own blocks because content (like the number of enemies) was toned down significantly to keep performance being tolerable. The PC and PlayStation 4 players can join this but the Nintendo Switch players could not and to my knowledge the PlayStation players could not visit the Nintendo Switch blocks either. In the global version we are able to play with players from either supported platform without any particular segregation.