Preference for auto-joining games on start when Spectating

I'd happily donate £25 to the "pot" if someone could implement this request, which I am certain many would benefit from.

Implement a preference to control whether you auto-join games on start when Spectating.

I like to be in "Teams All Welcome" as Spectator, so when the pot is ready and there is a decent number of players I can switch to Playing and ready to go.

But when in the Spectating list and a game starts you get auto-joined to it... which is not always desirable and in fact can be very annoying if you don't actually want to Spectate the game, but rather are Spectating the lobby...

Mockup of the preference:



This preference would only work when in Spectating list and its state should be persisted between sessions.

I can't imagine this would be hard to implement... could anyone make it happen and i'll donate to the game as a thank you for the convenience.

The UI mockup above looks workable to me in all these aspects, and there's few other features I can think of that would be more relevant to have in the lobby spectating view to use that UI space on. Do you have specific objections to the proposal, or any way to make it more likely for someone to implement it?

(In the interest of keeping the default UI as uncluttered as possible, adding a Lobby setting to control the visibility of the checkbox is probably wise since this is a behavior that should only really be of interest to seasoned players already. The pain point of the game auto launching when sitting in the lobby definitely exists for a subset of these players.)

Maybe a more productive approach is to encourage experienced users to run the lobby locally and apply their own changes to it? This is what some of the developers do already and similar to modding the game itself, and sidesteps the need to get changes merged back upstream. Someone could even distribute a Chobby with all the settings anybody ever found worthwhile to implement as an expert option.

The one drawback is having to manually download updates to the lobby once in a while, but Chobby receives relatively few major updates, and the kind of target user should be comfortable with manual software updates every few months. But this would allow to add greater functionality with a faster turnaround without adding any extra UI burden in the main lobby, and would be valuable if there's more than a few similar features that have been requested.