With the upcoming luxury MMO Destiny, fans are now closing a feature gap: Players willing to raid can find friends through an external site.
The MMO shooter Destiny launches with a six-person raid – more will follow through DLCs. Six people – that is a size typical for normal group instances in other games, but in Destiny they are raids. Challenging raids even in two difficulty levels.
No Group Finder in Destiny
However, there is no “matchmaking” or “group finder” system in Destiny – as in other MMOs. With such a system, players registering for an instance in World of Warcraft or WildStar are automatically placed in a group. The system ensures that the classes complement each other, meaning there is a healer and a tank present.
That is not the case in Destiny. Here, you need to have friends on your friends list and can arrange a proper shootout with them in the raid instance on Venus. Perhaps Bungie wants to prevent strangers from turning against each other when things don’t go well. After all, the raids are supposed to be intense.
In a test run, they sent off four teams of six shooter players each to tackle a raid. No team succeeded. One even disbanded, apparently overwhelmed by the MMO requirements, and decided to play more shooters instead.
In Destiny, you need friends to raid, and you can now find them on the Internet
Not everyone is okay with this; not everyone has real-life friends with a PlayStation or Xbox of the same generation, and a Halo love that results in a Destiny purchase. As Forbes reports, fans have now created a remedy for this. On the website thatwizardcamefromthemoon.com, named after the Dinklage voiceover meme, players can find raid friends.
On this page, you enter your class (there are three to start), your time zone, and the console you are playing on. The search on the site is supposed to output suitable players. The site operator reports that three days after the platform’s launch, already 500 Destiny players have registered on the site. And after Forbes, Kotaku, and probably within twelve hours 40 other sites have reported on this, this number should significantly increase in the days leading up to the release.
Perhaps, some speculate, Bungie will eventually integrate some kind of raid finder into the game itself. However, that would devalue the work of the dedicated creators behind That Wizard Came from the Moon.
As an MMO site, it should be noted that the idea of such an external site isn’t entirely new. Communities from other MMOs have found such solutions in the past. Even in World of Warcraft, which is actually well-covered in terms of raid finders, there are external sites where players can find and arrange for more exotic raids.
Update 20.12.: It has now been three and a half months since the release of Destiny, sites have come and gone, and community alternatives to raid finders have emerged. We have revisited the topic “How do I find a group for the raid in Destiny” on mein-mmo: Destiny Raidfinder: How to find German-speaking players for Raid, Nightfall, Weekly.
Destiny is an MMO shooter developed with enormous effort by Bungie. It is set to release on September 9 for PS3 and PS4, as well as for Xbox 360 and Xbox One. A PC version is likely, but not yet confirmed.
