- Milovian
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- Honorable Member
I agree that Bungie should make some sort of DLC that allows some sort of matchmaking or search feature - SOMETHING to allow you to play with people you don't know, not only for Firefight, but also for Campaign and especially multiplayer Custom Games. This should be added to ODST as well as the original Halo 3.
I sadly don't know anybody in real life that has an Xbox and Halo 3. All of my friends on LIVE (which are very few in number) I met in various sorts of matchmaking either in Halo 3 or another Xbox game. Most of the time, there are only 1 or 2 of them online, and they either don't have ODST, or they prefer to play some other game.
It was a very rare event for me to be able to get any of my LIVE friends together to play from any of these non-matchmade game lobbies, but when I did it was a lot more fun than anything else. For a very long time I had no more than 20 custom games on my record because I simply had no one to play with that I already knew. (I did find a guy that is on a little more often, so I have played more custom games since, but he can only play for an hour or less at a time and he doesn't have ODST.)
What should be made is some sort of feature that allows you to choose a game lobby(any lobby) and some default game settings related to that lobby, like map and gametype or whatever is applicable, and they become the host. Other players can use a corresponding join feature to search for hosted games using various criteria, most importantly the lobby type, and they would be shown basic info such as the map and gametype and number of players (perhaps their gamertags too if there is enough visual space). The game settings might be locked after the game is originally hosted, but after the first game ends, all of the players should return to the lobby together, and they could switch lobbies and play with other game settings, just like if the host had manually invited those players from their friends list or recent players list. Ideally, this would not consider skill by default, but there could be settings to restrict the skill level of the game to be near to that of the host (although I'm not sure how that would work since firefight and campaign don't track skill; it would mainly be for custom games). I think Forge should also be included in the list of lobbies that this feature would work for, but the theater and matchmaking playlists could probably be excluded.
If this was implemented, I believe the game would be 3-5 times more enjoyable. Custom games would be a lot more common. It would make it a lot easier to socialize and make friends. This is what Halo 3 has been missing all along.