A Matchmaking 'glow up' I'd love to see

[kapn655321]

There are a few objective factors I look for when picking a public mission.

• Mission type.
• Faction.
• Enemy level.
• Tileset.
• Drop Tables.

There are a few subjective factors I look for, too.

• Whether people tend to speed run/meta,
• casually stroll through,
• or meticulously explore and do bonus objectives.

Here's the idea:
Allow players, through sliding scales and check lists, to indicate their preferred gameplay and it's pacing.

If we could find missions and squads through search term parameters and preferences, I suspect it would help considerably in not only populating missions overall, but improving satisfaction with public games.

Example:
I'm in the mood to do a defense, mobile defense, railjack, or excavation, and not other missions. Only those 4 types. Select these preferences through a matchmaking search to list available nodes. Now I have those to pick from, but I find I don't really want to fight corrupted enemies, so check those off the list. Also my kit/mood is more casual today, so I don't want to be doing anything too demanding. Narrow search between level 0-45, and indicate that I would enjoy something more casual or explorative, but nothing like a high-meta or rapid pace. Come to think of it, I'd like to farm a particular drop. Select that, and get a listing of missions with drop conditions.. whether it's an enemy, rotation, etc. that drops it.

From there, matchmaking could offer results for open squads, prioritized by strength of match. Not entirely unlike dating site matching algorithms.

This would make for a vastly easier user experience whether we're looking vaguely or specifically to have a type of experience or objective. Compare that to combing through node by node to check if they're populated, possibly stumbling into a bad fit and abandoning mission. This gives players their own mechanism of reducing chances of encountering parties that are so counter in approach to make people regret joining public. Being able to specifically join a casual friendly group, a methodical lone wolf stealth crawl, or a meta friendly group means no matter which you like or dislike, you had some influence over what you had.

Not to mention, it's a point of feedback from users to DE on what aspects of missions attract or deter players, and what small observable differences could improve either specificity or universality of mission/playstyle appeal.

[Uhkretor]

2 hours ago, kapn655321 said:

Here's the idea:
Allow players, through sliding scales and check lists, to indicate their preferred gameplay and it's pacing.

If we could find missions and squads through search term parameters and preferences, I suspect it would help considerably in not only populating missions overall, but improving satisfaction with public games.

Just because of that, many people would benefit from this and reduce overall toxicity.

 

I can only wonder why this is not a thing already.