I find it to be a strange decision by Bungie to not include a matchmaking system for Firefight. People like me who have few friends that play Halo are going to be left out in the cold. Anyone have any ideas why they would have done such a thing? I personally hope that they add the functionality in with a patch at some point.

Me too.  I don't have any friends....  
 
I hate forced community!

Samesies.

i was wondering the same thing, maybe they patch it in.

You can find friends here. 

Well, maybe they just don't have the servers up for it yet...

I know we've got a nice thread of people posting up gamertags but I'm speaking more for the likely millions of others who are going to buy this game.

It does seem like a weird oversight, I'm sure they had their reasons however. Still-  ...HOLY SHIT IT'S HERE, WOO-HOO MY COPY JUST CAME!

How many of those people will be up at 4am on a Tuesday? How many just want to play one round then quit?  Eh... Firefight seemed pretty cool.  But this just makes me want to find something else to do.  Like how Gear's Horde Mode didn't have any way to change the difficulty in public matches.  Non of the few friends I have ever played it when I was on. 
 
Not a big deal, easy way around it.  Just seems lazy.  This isn't casual friendly.  Oh well...
 
hurry up bombcast!

Don't know if this ever occured to any of you fellas, but gaming with each other seems like a decent, albeit possibly temporary, solution.

Yeah, it's kinda strange, but honestly, Gears 2 horde matchmaking can get really annoying.
 
People leave whenever the feel like it, and then you've lost a teammate. I'd rather not be matchmaked with some kid who's gonna constantly yell at the rest of the team for dying and whatnot, or some twelve year old who's upset that other people keep taking the sniper rifle.
 
It's really not fun playing those kind of games with strangers, especially in games that you're going to have to deal with these other dudes for quite a while.
 
You're going to want, and need to communicate with these other people about where enemies are and it can get very difficult when you do this with randoms, there's no accountability for leaving. You're friends aren't going to abandon you on purpose like the randoms will.
 
I sort of agree that the option should probably be there, but it would probably end up soiling the experience.
 
Not to mention, that a lot of people who are still playing Halo 3, or are just Halo fans, are generally people with friends who will play with them.

" Yeah, it's kinda strange, but honestly, Gears 2 horde matchmaking can get really annoying.  People leave whenever the feel like it, and then you've lost a teammate. I'd rather not be matchmaked with some kid who's gonna constantly yell at the rest of the team for dying and whatnot, or some twelve year old who's upset that other people keep taking the sniper rifle.  It's really not fun playing those kind of games with strangers, especially in games that you're going to have to deal with these other dudes for quite a while.  You're going to want, and need to communicate with these other people about where enemies are and it can get very difficult when you do this with randoms, there's no accountability for leaving. You're friends aren't going to abandon you on purpose like the randoms will.  I sort of agree that the option should probably be there, but it would probably end up soiling the experience.  Not to mention, that a lot of people who are still playing Halo 3, or are just Halo fans, are generally people with friends who will play with them. "

I personally would rather be able to play with the chance that someone will be immature and quit than not be able to play at all because most of the time I can't find anyone on my friends list.

I believe it's because it uses campaign tech 

The Halo 3 engine doesn't support matchmaking for co-op and it uses the same version of this. It would have taken too much time for the small team at Bungie to rework this. (so it's said anyway)

Firefight is built on top of the existing Campaign networking and while it probably would have been possible to do it anyway, I think, with the limited timescope, team size and the fact that most of the Engineers probably were already over at Reach and the New IP busting out the engines for those, they just couldn't make the adjustments. 
 
It seems like a given though, that if (or rather, when) Firefight appears in Reach, there will be Matchmaking.

Yeah the lack of matchmaking in firefight was a horrible choice, only further compounded by the fact the vidmaster achievements are always 4 player live. Like seriously I'm the only one of my friends who has ODST and possibly the only one who will. Local co-op is all that being done on my ODST copy. Like seriously Bungie screw you guys for making things impossible because my friends don't like Halo and I do.

It's because they just wanted your money.

" Yeah the lack of matchmaking in firefight was a horrible choice, only further compounded by the fact the vidmaster achievements are always 4 player live. Like seriously I'm the only one of my friends who has ODST and possibly the only one who will. Local co-op is all that being done on my ODST copy. Like seriously Bungie screw you guys for making things impossible because my friends don't like Halo and I do. "

" @SUBL1ME said:

" Yeah the lack of matchmaking in firefight was a horrible choice, only further compounded by the fact the vidmaster achievements are always 4 player live. Like seriously I'm the only one of my friends who has ODST and possibly the only one who will. Local co-op is all that being done on my ODST copy. Like seriously Bungie screw you guys for making things impossible because my friends don't like Halo and I do. "

So, because 3 of your friends don't have ODST, that makes the challenges impossible? Not quite. "