How to Fix Long Matchmaking Wait Times

Long matchmaking waits are over-strict criteria against the available pool. Relaxing over time fixes it. Here is how.

How to fix it

1. Relax criteria over time

Start with tight skill and region requirements and widen them the longer a player waits. Holding rigid criteria against a small pool makes waits unbounded; gradual relaxation trades a little match quality for a found match.

2. Expand skill and region range

Broaden the acceptable skill band and include nearby regions as the wait grows, so players are not stuck waiting for a perfect match that may never form off-peak.

3. Backfill and consider bots

Backfill matches in progress and, where appropriate, fill with bots so players get into a game rather than waiting indefinitely. Balance this against competitive integrity for ranked modes.

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.