[2020] Raid Guided Games Experience As A Guide

The Good:

As a guide team, we have been matched instantly with 2 seekers each time. The lowest light level we encountered was 276, the highest was 295.

The system is doing it's job. All 4 people were first timers who had never done a raid before and had an enjoyable experience. Both caught on to the mechanics after a few wipes as well. We set aside 5 hours per raid, the quickest was done in 2 hours while the longest was done in 3. For reference our average time with our main group of runners is 40min-1hour give or take.

The Bad:

The raid guided games needs to be tweaked a bit. The first pair of seekers had the infamous gauntlet death loop and we had to abandon/start a new session entirely. The second pair of seekers got the glitch where after a wipe your orb doesnt appear on the floor and you're stuck spectating at the finale. Once again, we had to abandon and play around with the glitched people leaving/rejoining to fix it.

The issue here isn't the bugs specifically, but the fact that the raid doesn't save checkpoints when done via guided games. If you make it all the way to the end and a gamebreaking bug happens you're left with two options: 1) Pray to the raid gods that it magically gets fixed. 2.) Abandon the guided game and start from scratch. This also creates a problem where if anyone has to leave for any reason, you'll have to abandon the guided game. If a raid ends up taking much longer than expected, I think guides should have the option to be able to rotate clan members in/out.

Our seekers all reported being in the matchmaking for 45mins on average. There's already a post discussing this aspect so I won't talk much on it here, but something has to be changed there to either match faster or allow seekers to do activities such as patrol while waiting in a ticket.

Overall, guided games does its job semi-well. The lack of checkpoints is a strange decision and not being able to swap guide members out is a bit of an inconvienence. However, taking new raid players through was an enjoyable experience for both sides and not nearly as big of a headache as I admittedly thought it would be. With some adjustments and bug fixes, Bungie might actually have hit a winning formula with this system.