Let me start off by saying that overall I really enjoy this game. It's fun to play, it's visually beautiful, and I keep wanting to come back and play more. BUT, the endgame activities can be very frustrating due to one simple decision by the devs. No matchmaking for the higher level, potentially more fun, aspects of game, where all the best gear drops.
Having to track down a team of people on you "friends" list, who may or may not be online at the same time, or trying to find randoms in a forum, takes a lot of the fun out of it. On top of that, not everyone has, or even wants, a big list of friends to begin with, and compiling a big list of randoms from the forums amounts to the same thing as matchmaking anyway, except we have to do the work ourselves, which is crap in my opinion. Not many of my real life friends are gamers, and I don't want a big list of strangers on my account who can message me.
I think it is great to be able to create your own private fireteams and play with friends, but I don't feel like we should be forced to do that to even ACCESS parts of the game. The matchmaking system is all set up and ready to go, so why not offer it for the rest of the game, so everyone can enjoy the full game that we are paying so much money for. I just paid for an expansion, but I can't even play a lot of right now.
I can appreciate what the devs are trying to do with the social media aspect of things, and I think it is a cool thing to have the option to do, but not to detriment of the gameplay itself, which should be the more important part. It's like we're being forced to link up with our facebook and twitter accounts to play a raid. Right now I just want to play a raid. If I want to chat with my friends, I'll go log on to facebook and not on my Playstation. I'm on my Playstation because I want to play, not network.
p.s. After browsing thru the forums, this seems like popular and reasonable request Bungie.
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Bump for optional matchmaking