I put some thought into this and I do think this idea of being able to hop into a lobby and play custom games really could work. It would have some issues, but I think I have found a small way for some quality control with a voting system. I created a video that goes into a little more detail. Check it out and leave your thoughts about anything I may be over looking.
Thanks
Matchmaking is needed for testing grounds. More people making cool maps and gametypes again as their creations actually get played by a population sample. For example MLG has done this with their Halo III & Reach playlists for their live competition gametypes. It never went far enough and thus missed opportunity after opportunity.
A rule of thumb is people vote for gametypes over maps. This type of matchmaking does exist in practice at Ensemble Studios Online. A game browser does exist, but you can finely tailor-make your search with specific notches/teamsize/map/civs/gametype/country/rank threshold. Note that Reach has options in search for latency/good connection/language for individual playlists and arena wasn’t exactly a success.
The problem with Reach & Halo IV’s system is that it uses “first-past-the-post” style voting. This keeps things simple, but many inherent problems.
“To a greater extent than many other electoral methods, the first-past-the-post system encourages tactical voting. Voters have an incentive to vote for one of the two candidates they predict are most likely to win, even if they would prefer another of the candidates to win, because a vote for any other candidate will likely be “wasted” and have no impact on the final result.”
I do believe a better method for gametype and map selection in Halo would be a simplified version of instant-runoff voting wherein each option is ranked in order of preference of the user. This is nothing new - Unreal has this for their weapons pickup. Same concept The Core users who fill out their preferences will always count. The user who does not care enough what he plays to fill out preferences will simply not be counted during gametype selection.
I do believe custom games version of matchmaking like you’ve explained can run behind the matchmaking curtains, with same method, and with time make the game more enjoyable. It does take effort on 343i’s end to actually implement the communities’ gametypes and maps though. (The statistics could be posted in weekly bulletins.)
I’ve tweeted BS Angel and Bravo I’ll let you know if I get a response.
This would take a bit of work to get all the details worked out so it works well. However I think what I explained is a good jumping off point for 343 to use if they did decide to implement it into Halo 5.
Thanks for tweeting to BSAngel and Bravo!