Matchmaking for raids is a specifically and non-trivially bad idea. What you want is an in-game LFG board/group finding tool that enables players with similar predispositions to form a team for any kind of content. Blind matchmaking for content requiring the amount of coordination needed in raids would be an absolute disaster, and turn off swaths of new players from participating in the best content the game has to offer.
Why would the content suffer? What are you on about? It would be the same Raid with optional matchmaking functionally.
If you don't want to put the time into thinking this through fully, it's your prerogative. But hear me out for a minute when I say that I
have, and it isn't a good idea. I spend a large amount of my time running brand new or early-phase players through the first raid and will be starting to offer newbie runs of the second shortly. I know exactly what is required of a group composed of any combination of player types, most relevantly a group that contains either all new players entering for the first time, or a group with some veterans and some very new players.
It wouldn't work well, and it would serve to create the appearance that the raids were poorly designed.
Blind matchmaking exists right now in the game for all strikes outside of the Weekly ones, as well as team-based PvP.
Groups formed in this manner rarely communicate (despite the addition of dedicated in-game voice channels for this purpose during launch). For a strike- which can be soloed without much trouble- this is not a particularly distressing issue, though you can imagine that a pre-made team against a random team in PvP will produce the expected outcome.
Raids require an order of magnitude more communication than strikes. This is the case even if one or more people in the raid
knows all the encounters already by heart and can explain them, but the unplayable chaos that would result from a non-communicative team that was comprised of all
new players absolutely negates any positive benefits that would result from its inclusion.
Furthermore, the blind matchmade activities that exist in game currently also see frequent AFKers. This could be legitimate, something coming up in real life that needed to be attended to, or malicious, someone looking to piggyback credit without any effort. Again, for strikes and PvP this isn't much of a dealbreaker. You can just push forward without the AFK player and succeed in a strike; an AFK player might be the root of a loss in a PvP match, but a premade team would be likely to steamroll a random team regardless. In a raid, especially with a team including new players hoping to have a good experience, this would go a considerable distance toward ruining it. Stagnating groups that did not immediately disband but contained one or more players that weren't willing to put in the requisite effort (or even communicate if legitimately held up) would result in the fractional fireteams throwing themselves against a rock wall over and over again without making any progress, getting frustrated and likely abandoning the
concept of the raid, rather than just discrediting the individual group.
A raid that includes new players needs to take certain considerations for them. There's no method by which to provide these considerations with blind matchmaking. The response to this is usually that it should be matchmaking with some kind of filtering and prerequisites such as already having beaten the raid or needing to have a mic or slotting only into certain checkpoints. But these are convoluted half-solutions that do box out certain players for whom getting into groups should still be a viable option, and none of them even provide the full functionality that a simple grouping board would.
You post for a group, with a description of what you want to do and how, and other people who are interested in doing what you're doing can join it. No more than that is needed, and this would work for the raid, weekly strikes, story missions, special bounty tasks, and so on.
I mean, it's a solution sometimes, but not all the time. Sometimes I just want to pick up the game and play a little bit. I can't do that if I have to try and coordinate with people on a message board... especially since I've lurked there a bit and haven't really seen someone at level 5 or 6 looking for people to group with. Not saying no one would, it's just rare enough that I don't think it would fit my purpose.
But I haven't seen you post at all
There aren't many groups forming for level 5 or 6 content simply because you aren't level 6 for very long, and nothing comes close to requiring a fireteam at that point. But that's not to say people wouldn't help if you were having trouble and you asked! Please don't hesitate to come hang out in the OT and feel free to ask questions.
