In a special report posted by Ubisoft North America on YouTube, we now know that The Division 2 will eventually have matchmaking, but only when devs can be sure that it won't cause unneccessary frustration.
When The Division 2's first raid, Operation Dark Hours, came out last week, it was met with a lot of hype and anticipation. After all, not only is Dark Hours the first raid in The Division 2, but it's also the first ever raid in the The Division franchise. However, the hype was met with some unsettling news, especially for folks who don't really have friends to play games with - there would be no raid matchmaking.
Operation Dark Hours is designed to be a challenging mission for up to eight players. Without matchmaking, players either have to have a group of seven friends handy, or go crazy trying to find a pre-made group online (usually on the game's subreddit). While it doesn't sound that bad, it does beg the question of 'why?' After all, The Division 2 does have matchmaking for several other activities, so it's not like it's beyond Ubisoft's technological capabilities. Fortunately, devs have answered that question in the Special Report following Operation Dark Hours' release.
According to The Division 2's Community Manager Haming Bode, "It's intended that there will be no matchmaking at launch of the raid, but the team are working on finding a more dedicated solution to make that a meaningful way to find a group in the game."
Despite the controversial nature of the decision, the devs do have a point. While we're disappointed that a proper matchmaking system wasn't already in place at the time of the raid, we're more than happy to wait until it does. After all, unlike other team-oriented activities in The Division 2, Operation Dark Hours is a full-fledged raid filled with challenging content that will make or break a team. To complete Dark Hours, players need to be matched according to their abilities, their skills, their loadouts, and their individual experience levels, and it seems the current matchmaking system in The Division 2 isn't sophisticated enough to manage that.
If the simple matchmaking system was employed for Operation Dark Hours, players would find themselves in teams that were unbalanced, that had too many of one thing and not enough of another thing, and that would lead to frustration with the matchmaking system. In order to avoid that, public matchmaking for Operation Dark Hours was withheld, but at least now we know that developers are working hard to getting matchmaking system out that won't piss off any of its dedicated fans.
