iOwned suggests: Bungie, what about doing this. Say I made a game, and theres people looking for a unranked game. Why not toss them in my custom game?
There are two primary reasons why we dont toss them in your custom game. First, this is simply not the way our matchmaking system was designed. We do not have a way to search for or advertise custom games, and adding one would not be an easy feat. This might not seem very credible because other games implement game browsers, but it really is the case. Halo 2 does an extraordinary number of things for you automatically behind the scenes, everything from judging connection quality to choosing hosts. It was engineered from the ground up to support the existing playlist matchmaking system and all its incredible complexity. Designing and engineering custom game browser functionality that played nicely with the existing matchmaking and that handled the large number of Halo 2 players gracefully would be a big job.
The second reason we dont advertise your custom games to the public is because we like our matchmaking system and we want it to be successful. Thats why we focused our development resources on it. Success is directly affected by how many people are using it. The larger your pool of potential opponents the better quality games we can find for you. Better hosts, better connectivity, more similar skill levels, and so on. Technical issues aside, if we were to give you a custom game browser a large number of people would use it simply because its comfortable and familiar, thus reducing the pool of potential matches.
All that said, as time goes on we will be providing you with more options in the form of new playlists, as well as tuning the games in the existing playlists to better suit the most common preferences. In fact, you can expect the first playlist update very soon, and its going to be a good one.