It is no longer possible to join ANYONE not categorized as a “Friend” via the Xbox Live service. This applies to all Steam players as well as Xbox players. Steam players have to hit Windows + G (Which is something 99% of them hardly use I imagine), then “Follow” each other, and then SOMETIME after it takes its sweet time updating that status, the players can join each other. Previously, in the MCC UI, you could just select yourself, search a player under “Find Players” and join them. now that “Friends Only” is the only option and it is “Fixed”, this is not possible. After some research, looks like there hasn’t been an “Open” option on MCC for literally YEARS, (since it came out in 2014) but because “Friends Only” functioned the same way, nobody seemed to notice. Using LFG’s for matchmaking, campaign, or customs is an absolute nightmare of a time. PLEASE LOOK INTO THIS.
343 please see this. Described above has caused a ton of frustration for discord’s that host custom games. Sure there is the server browser now, but the experience is completely different and limited.
“Using LFG’s for matchmaking, campaign, or customs is an absolute nightmare of a time.” is an accurate statement.
I used to play customs almost every day, but now I need to add people to my list I don’t want there. Then the join doesn’t even work 70% of the time.
This frustration mentioned above is shared by 90% of a halo community I’m in. Please see this.
Big
With the rocky history MCC has, this is just more icing on the frustration cake in my eyes. I have tried since 2016 to overlook many flaws that MCC has, and the PC launch did nothing to help alleviate any concerns i had with the title.
Now, playing with other people, unless you happened to already be set up to play with those specific people, is a prohibitively tedious and downright obnoxious process for many active players, i can’t imagine how NEW players to MCC must feel.
I myself spend most of my time in Forge, designing fun, silly, usually small, slayer maps, with the anticipation of using them in the upcoming CGB. Forge, now, is ALSO plagued by an issue that existed back in Season 3; the inability to overwrite a map save without making an entirely new file first. But that’s a different side of the frustration icing for a different topic.
If easily hosting a game isn’t possible, many players simply will not do it, and will turn to games where they can actually friggin’ play them without frustration involved in simply setting up the game to play in the first place.
I want to love MCC so much more than I currently do. I want it to be the definitive multi-generational Halo experience.
But it’s not. Despite my blind nostalgic love for it pulling me back into it, I will only keep forging for just so long before I give up on it, or move on. Again.
While not having the numbers obviously, speaking from the HaloCustoms community alone, we have a very large player base that is custom games focused. With well over 20,000 members who all have been negatively impacted by this “Fix” I feel right in saying that a significant portion of the player base is being affected. From the day MCC launched on PC up until the release of season 7, we had two privacy options, Invite-only and Friends Only. The firends Only setting worked just like the previous iteration on console, and every other standalone Halo title’s Open setting did, allowing you to freely join another’s lobby. With the release of season 7, you seem to have “fixed” the friend’s only privacy setting whilst not adding in the “open” setting. Speaking specifically as someone who hosts custom game lobbies daily and for a significant portion of the day, this change has made a giant impact on the community and my ability to host lobbies. Having to stop in the middle of whichever custom game we are playing, open up the Xbox Game Bar, search for the person wanting to join, add them and then wait for them to add me back, then wait an ever-changing amount of time for the system to update and reflect the change just for a new person to be able to join the lobby is asinine. Now take that same process I just described but multiply it by 100. I regularly host lobbies for upwards of 5 hours at a time, and the lobby roster is always changing. So having to stop 10 times in the course of one single custom game is ridiculous. It impacts the flow of the game because I have to stop playing and do this. It affects everyone. It’s killing off the community that I am extremely passionate about, please, either revert whatever change you did to the Friends Only option or give us the Open setting. This affects matchmaking, Firefight, Custom Games, any type of lobby.
This is a core feature that’s been around for many many years and I understand functionalities can break but this is really important for us as this makes it easy for everyone to join lobbies for all game modes and especially custom games. This is causing so much fustration in all communities including the HaloCustoms discord I’m apart of where everyday we play custom games. Ever since this issue, there are less people playing custom games because of the hassle of joining. We’re also having less new people joining in the fun because of how fustrating it is.
I understand that we now have a custom games browser however the lack of features such as search, favourite, filters and limited choice of games make it almost pointless to use and on top of that players who are in our voice chat and are waiting to join are unable to because there are randoms joining the game which we then have to boot them out of the game. Everybody is having a bad time including the people we have to boot.
All I want is to revert back to the process of joining people just like how it was before Season 7 and to have it fixed ASAP. It would suck having to wait until Season 8 which is months away.
Please can you guys fix this?
Joining lobbies is something that MCC has always had problems with. As more of a solo player, I hadn’t realised how bad it was to join someone’s game until I had to friend them, realise that MCC doesn’t let you join game half the time, follow people with the Xbox app to try and get that to work instead, and end up relying on Steam’s own feature instead. While that works for me, I feel sorry for the people that don’t have the game on steam and have to use the Xbox app and system to play with their friends. There needs to be a lot more done to help better connect the entire MCC community if they really want the game to feel like a true cross-platform game that can be played with everyone.
PLS 343 we are begging you to look into this issue.
I cannot stress enough how big of a problem this is. You’re killing a part of your fan base.
Make sure you send a support ticket, perhaps referencing this thread as well as explaining it.
Would be nice if we had some sort of acknowledgement from the devs 
> 2533274797661806;9:
> Make sure you send a support ticket, perhaps referencing this thread as well as explaining it.
We’ve been doing that for a while now but we keep getting generic responses
Yeah you will, those are just the automated ones. But when tickets pile up, open or closed, on a subject, developers are deigned to read them as there’s clearly a pattern there. 
> 2533274982321423;10:
> Would be nice if we had some sort of acknowledgement from the devs
We actually did get a straight answer from Sosix. He said the devs are aware and are working on a fix, and basically the more support tickets they receive the higher a priority it becomes.
So with that being said, please submit tickets if you’re affected by this issue.
its almost been 2 months now. Have this ever been fixed by 343?
> 2533274841420034;15:
> its almost been 2 months now. Have this ever been fixed by 343?
The only solid word I can give is that it will not be fixed in Season 7. I’m hoping that something will change when Season 8 releases.
I think, THINK, that the Season 7 hotfix changed things slightly so it was less of a hassle (you have to send an invite to someone on your friends list in order to get them in) but it is still the same hurdle that it was when Season 7 launched.