Grouping With Friends?

[cort1c]

Hello. We have a requirement wherein a predetermined group of people (friends for example) need to be placed into the same instance of a particular room. I've looked around and have thought of a couple of ways to do it but the relevant posts I found were quite old so I was wondering if there was a newer, more idiomatic/recommended way of solving this problem?

As for the ways I thought of:

1. A designated player acts as "host" and creates the game (via client.create). That player then sends the returned room ID to everyone else (maybe over Discord) who types it in and joins (via client.joinById). It could also be password protected.
2. Same as before but instead of joining by ID, we could display some kind of available room list (via LobbyRoom) with a user friendly name for each room. Then the host could tell everyone else they should join (for example) "cort1c's battle room!".
3. Some flavor of using filterBy along with criteria (e.g. password) that uniquely identifies the room.

One other question that might be related is about the server-side Matchmaker API. What's the general use case for this? How would a player normally interact with it? Would joining them into a generic room that supported some kind of interaction with the API? Not even sure if there's a real advantage to using it over the normal client API so just thinking out loud.

Thanks!