Back in Vermintide 2, we had a very effective method that balanced putting together a squad with random players without running out of player’s patience. I think the design of the loading in (or sometimes out) of players into Tal’s Horn keep, but then having to have everyone run to the bridge of shadows to begin the mission when they were ready worked really well.
The advantages of this approach was that the players had full control over when they wanted to begin the mission, could discuss team comparison or builds, and also could leave the instance if they wished. They could even discuss switching the selected mission or their class after already being paired with other players. This system was vastly superior to the current pre-mission loading screen in Darktide. In Darktide you have anywhere from 0-60 seconds to wait for other random players to be matched with you, and, in my experience, maybe 50%+ of the time you will be matched with no one and enter the mission alone. We also miss out on the ability to change class/career if we wish. Less than 60 seconds to synergize our load out (especially if someone needs a light source for a lights out mission) or feat selection with others is also far too little. You cant even tell the ranged weapon of another player at the moment since only melee is shown. Even if they removed the time limit, having a fairly boring character screen is much less engaging than being able to run around an area of the Morningstar, possibly trying out weapons or maybe just goofing off like we could in Vermintide while we waited for another player to join our instance or for someone to ready up after they get their build in order.
I think these problems could be solved by introducing a sort of storm hawk hangar Bay Area that you would enter after selecting a mission. As others select the same mission, up to three other players can be loaded into the same hangar bay instance that also has your storm hawk waiting for takeoff. Possibly this area could have maybe a shooting range or combat servitors to test melee/ranged weapons, if we want to get fancy (like the practice dummies from Vermintide). When the players are ready, you each run into the storm hawk (similar to how we extract from missions), just like how we used to run into the Bridge of Shadows in Vermintide 2. Things could be added into the hangar Bay Area to make it less boring, such as NPCs with some sort of interaction, or maybe statistics terminals that show statistics (maybe completed penances or equipped items) about you and your teammates, with of course Masozi or other NPCs giving you some banter as you wait. It would also make sense to have your weapons on you and maybe be able to even jump in this area. The area doesn’t need to be super complex, and possibly Fatshark could use assets that we know exist from cutscenes of the hangar bay.
I think this would improve player experience tremendously.