If you are a newbie and are getting trounced, so what? Have fun doing it. The only way to get better is to beat other peoples strategies, and the only way to learn that is to keep trying until you do. You also have the type of player that is very familiar with RTS games. Even if the game says noobs only, he may think 'well I only have been playing this game for 2 days so I qualify' and join up. I also think the person on the receiving end of such a beating shouldnt take it so hard. Its
DraygoKorvan
xfire works just fine with SoaSE, and has the same features.
Ill provide insight into the crashes: I find the freezing always happens during the autosave process. The freezing I am talking about here is when someone basically DC's and the game wont continue until they actually leave, you can operate the UI just fine but the simulation itself is frozen. For those that are having issues try disabling the autosave. Its not a crash per say (the program itself is running 'fine') but it stops the game from continueing.
Squid such systems are too unreliable. You could easily get a group of friends to all rate each other highly, or rate one particular person down, the bigger group of friends you have the more such power you have in that type of system. You are better off not having a system like that at all.