One of the reasons raiding continues to be a sore spot in the MMORPG community is that it’s difficult — if not impossible — to find a good solution to bringing inexperienced players up to speed with veterans without frustrating both groups. It’s an issue with which Destiny 2 is currently grappling without a graceful reply.
Instead of using a traditional raid matchmaking system, Bungie’s answer to the raid grouping conundrum is by using “Guided Games.” These attempt to replicate a mentor-mentee relationship between the masters and novices, but so far it’s not working as planned. Players are being thrown together with others from around the world (raising language barriers), some can’t or won’t use voice chat (which is problematic on consoles), queues are quite long for novices, and experienced raiders feel resentful over having to bring new players up to speed over and over and over again.
Some players have turned to subreddits designed to better match up prospectives, although gear score comes into play more strongly here. It’s also been suggested that the studio offer much better rewards for guides to incentivize experienced players into joining the Guided Games queue. It will be interesting to see how the raiding scene shapes up once PC players and their almighty keyboards join up later this month.
