Diablo 2 had Matchmaking, Diablo 3 had Matchmaking, Diablo 4…not necessary? Oh yes it is! First of all, having players rely on third party software to find and connect with other players, after already implementing solid matchmaking in its two previous titles is just weak. The argument of "just make friends ingame"works in some cases, if you got all the time of the day, but try this when you work a fulltime job, come home and just want to play 2-3 hours of Diablo 4 and run some dungeons. Currently the Situation is like this: You log in, you port to the nearest dungeon. If you are lucky there is 6-10 People standing in front of the dungeon (on a busy day). You message them in Local, in private etc. usually…no answer or just “I am waiting for a friend” or you get an answer in a language you cant understand so thats done too I guess. Then you try to send random invites to people see if some stick. In 90% of cases, they either join your group and leave shortly after, realising you are not their friend or they decline your invitation. Then you go into Local search, there are maybe 20 People on the server, you send messages and invites to all of them, think someone is joining? Ofc not, why would they? I am a random guy they dont know anything about and they probably also dont have time to make friends and rather just drop into the next dungeon without much hassle just like me. The additional 10% XP for party members you play with is just another kick in the face for solo players like me who desperatly want to find a quick group to run a dungeon or rifts with. Why is this not a thing? You give extra xp for playing with friends or randoms, but you give us no working system to find those! You expect every player to message 20 people if they want to join their party everytime they log into the game? I would be writing more than playing the game at this point! Furthermore playing with a group, even if its just randoms has always been more fun than just running solo dungeons for hours. Its nice seeing other peoples spells fly over your screen, seeing the different classes synergize with each other, its cool, enjoyable, fun and gives you a sense of teamwork, which has always been there in the last diablo titles. So why not this one? Right now it feels like an essential part of the game is being left out and with the extra xp you get for playing with others, its just putting more salt on the wound for solo players struggling to find others to play with. As a solo player this makes me and others feel like they are being left out, not recognized or downright ignored. And going through this struggle of finding someone to play with EVERY SINGLE TIME I am logging in something that takes the fun out of the game for me, an additional burden to a otherwise very fun game. If this is not being implemented in the next season I am done with D4, cant run another character solo through the whole game for the 4th game, I just cant.
Totally agree. I’ve completely stopped playing D4 because it’s just too boring without matchmaking for dungeons. This seems like it should have been a no brainer. I’ve gone back to D2R where I can easily find groups of people to play with. It’s silly that a 20+ year old Diablo title has a better multiplayer experience than a brand new Diablo title with a massive budget by comparison. D4 felt more like a single player game to me than D2 does. Sure you randomly run in to people in the game world in D4, but organizing a party of random players is way more time consuming than it should be to the point where I don’t even bother. Also what the heck is up with 4 person limit for parties? 8 person parties are so much more fun in D2R and I just don’t understand the reasoning for taking a step backwards in D3 and now again in D4.
There are so many horribly bad design decisions in D4. Don’t even get me started on the laughable “random” (but very linear and repetitive) dungeon system and the sea of rare items which all look the same that you need to wade through without a loot filter. Uber Uniques which are normally exceedingly rare, but with a targeted farming band-aid slapped on top. An open world design but still using an outdated seasonal ladder model that requires new character creation to participate and splits the player base (instead of being truly innovative and having the game world evolve around all players simultaneously without requiring new characters to participate in new content). The design team is completely asleep at the wheel. Everything seems so slapped together like there wasn’t much care put in to anything. It’s just one poorly designed system after another with layer upon layer of band-aids. They never go back to the drawing board and completely redesign systems to fix them properly.
I never run dungeons but maybe I would if I could click random, play and leave.