----------------------------------- Edit: Site is now live - please feel free to check it out at http://www.destinyfireteams.com/. I am still working on it so please let me know if you have any suggestions or feedback. ----------------------------------- I understand Bungie's decision to not allow match making for raids, but it puts me in an awkward spot. I don't have enough friends who will play Destiny at a high enough level to complete raids. So if I want to do raids, I have to find a group online to raid with. I used to be a high level raider in a few various MMOs, and these groups require time commitments (i.e. Every Tuesday at 6pm) to work. In addition, you need oversubscription since people will randomly miss, which means often someone is sitting on the sidelines. The problem is, while I will put WAY more hours into this game then I care to admit, I'm not at a point where I can commit to a group of strangers to be available every particular day at a certain time. The solution I'm proposing is something I've used for sports for decades - Pick Up groups. It's more formal than match making, but less formal than clans or guilds. I am debating making a website to support this functionality, and if people respond here that they'd find value in this tool, I will put it together and have it ready before launch. Here's how I'd imagine it would go. You would sign up and link to your bungie account. If possible, I'd load your character details from bungie.net directly, but if not, you'd be able to put them in. If you wanted to organize a pickup group, you'd create an event that people could sign up for. In the event, you'd post start times, end times, and have functionality to accept players or let players know if all spots have been taken. If I just wanted to play and not organize, I could see all the listings and offer to join a few games. Now comes the time of the event. If everyone shows up, great. If not, the website would have a "floating pool" that individuals could join that would say "I'm available for raids right now but not part of any pickup group." This floating pool could also be used if someone drops out early. The key idea though is to make this better than match making, there needs to be a feedback system. Where possible, I'll try to scrape this data from bungie.net and pull the results of your raiding. But the main idea would be that after the raid, you could leave feedback about your team or your leader. I'm thinking along the lines of attendance / punctuality, skill, and friendliness. Performing well during a pickup would help you get invited to other pickups or picked first off the floating pool. Run a good pickup and more people will want to join yours. Systems like this have allowed me to play competitive sports when I can't commit to a league due to work issues. Friendly, skilled players are invited back while people who show up late, leave early, are rude will find pick up games less welcoming. It creates social bonds as you see the same people playing pickup at same times, just not necessarily every week so you can still participate even with a busy life. Would you guys find value in this type of a system? If so, I'll try to have it up and running here in a few weeks. I can also tell you that I'm taking the whole first week of destiny off work, so I'll be organizing a pickup for raids as soon as I'm leveled and geared enough to go. I can't wait for this game to come out.

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