The bigger issue is auto-queue. Look, I’m generally of the opinion that making video games is hard, and it’s probanly easy to make decisions with unforeseen consequences, so we should understand and give devs a break. But seriously, who the hell made the boneheaded decision that Forges should auto-queue for the next round? Especially when backing out of matchmaking has been broken since Forsaken hit?

100% agree. The auto-queue would make a little more sense if completing a weapon frame didn't require two trips to Ada for every one trip to the forge. If I could choose a frame, get my kills, get my radiant seeds from the orange bars (the Izanami Forge Warden would just drop them into the abyss about 75% of the time), complete the ignition to get my new, possibly awesome, possibly crap weapon, then choose a new frame, all from the director, I'd spend hours in Forge matchmaking. The way things are set up now, though, I've NEVER wanted to run two forges back-to-back.

I understand that it’s probably because it would be super annoying to get kicked out, have to sit through a loading screen to load back into the area, then go start the Forge again, start matchmaking, load into the Forge again.

This is something I hadn't really thought of. I've gotten pretty spoiled with the SSD, so I don't even think about load times anymore. When I leave a forge activity, I get dropped back into the forge area a few seconds later and, if I wanted to jump back into a forge ignition, I could just hold X (I don't think I even have to move to get the prompt to start the forge) and be back in in just a few more seconds. Are the load times significantly longer with the Xbox's internal drive? I'm not willing to move everything back to the internal HDD to test this :p

The obvious solution is to make Forges selectable from orbit. And I mean that—it’s obvious. The fact that they either didn’t realize or couldn’t fix how stupid this before we ever saw it really makes me question what the hell theyre even doing over there. And it’s very, very rarely that I ever take that track. But this is so completely asinine compared to any other bad decision they’ve made that I just don’t get it.

This would definitely make weapon grinding less tedious, but I actually like that each forge requires us to wander through public spaces that we've been exploring since day 1 to find the entrance to these long-forgotten locations. It would be cool if the activity could be launched from the patrol space or from orbit, but even though I like having to trek to the entrance, I know that if I were given the option I'd drop in from orbit to save time.

-Disciple

I've gotten that a few times in the other two forges, but when I get dropped into Izanami Forge, the player count on the matchmaking screen doesn't change from 1/3 and the other two players never load in. Even in the final seconds of the end-of-mission countdown, it's still just me, hanging out by myself.

It could definitely still be the SSD thing, though. The larger, outdoor area could mean more assets to load than the other two forges, widening the gap in load time between my SSD and a standard HDD. I still think it's odd that the game doesn't prevent the activity from starting until the full fireteam has loaded in like it does with some strikes.

-Disciple

I don't think the SSD is keeping others from loading at all; I have one, and I've never experienced what you're talking about. (Granted, I've only got about 25 runs in the Izanami Forge, so it's possible I just don't have enough data yet.) I DO experience getting there before my teammates, regularly... but they have always (so far) eventually spawned in.