How to Fix Blocking a Player Not Hiding Their Chat or Keeping Them Out of Your Matches

If blocking a player still lets their chat through and keeps matching you with them, the block is just a local flag. Persisting blocks on the server and enforcing them in chat delivery and matchmaking makes blocking actually work.

How to fix it

1. Persist blocks server-side

Store the block relationship on the server so it applies across devices and sessions, not just on the client where it was created.

2. Filter chat and voice on delivery

Drop messages and voice from blocked players before they reach the recipient, rather than relying on the client to hide content it already received.

3. Feed blocks into matchmaking

Pass the block list to the matchmaker as a soft avoid so it does not place blocked players together when the population allows, relaxing only if it would block a match entirely.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.