When using matching, choose friends first.

[NBY]

Sometimes friends are online and not playing, but to get into a game with them I'd have to start my own table and cross my fingers that they notice I'm there and at an empty table.  That, or I pop into their game and spectate to talk with them and set up getting into their next game with them.

Could the algorithm be tweaked so the first choice of matching goes to the list of friends first, then random other players?  I like playing new people, but I made strangers into friends because I had fun playing with them already.

[santamonica811]

Very nice suggestion.  I hope it's implemented.

[dane]

Scary timing - a couple of days ago a similar idea occurred to me ('great minds think alike' or 'fools never differ', but which?  :) ).  I'd been intending to go even further and suggest adding the option to wait for friends so that one could request such a match and then sit back and wait, possibly for quite some time, until a friend requested a match.

[LastFootnote]

I strongly agree with this idea.

Also I'd love to somehow be able to tell in-game whether the person I'm playing with is a "friend". I friend basically anybody I have positive interactions with in the chat, so I don't always remember all of them.

[AdamH]

I feel like this could work for unrated games and should definitely be a thing. For rated games, however, I think there's potential for abuse. Being able to choose who you queue into makes it very easy to create a smurf account and beat up on it to game the leaderboard.

[markus]

I feel like this could work for unrated games and should definitely be a thing. For rated games, however, I think there's potential for abuse. Being able to choose who you queue into makes it very easy to create a smurf account and beat up on it to game the leaderboard.

You can play rated games against whoever particular you want by creating a table.

[AdamH]

I feel like this could work for unrated games and should definitely be a thing. For rated games, however, I think there's potential for abuse. Being able to choose who you queue into makes it very easy to create a smurf account and beat up on it to game the leaderboard.

You can play rated games against whoever particular you want by creating a table.

Eww

[Cave-O-Sapien]

Would a private table option solve this in a more general way?