How to Fix a Matchmaking Ticket Stuck in Searching Forever

Players who wait in queue and never get a match are usually hitting rules that are too strict for the live population. A matchmaker should loosen its constraints as wait time grows. Here is how to add relaxation.

How to fix it

1. Add waiting-time relaxation

Define match rules that expand acceptable ranges as ticket age increases, for example +-50 skill in the first 10 seconds, +-150 after 30 seconds. This is built into Unity Matchmaker and OpenMatch via match functions.

2. Allow region fallback

After a threshold, let the ticket match into a neighboring region so a player in a low-population area is not stranded. Cap the added latency so you never match someone into an unplayable ping.

3. Verify the pool is satisfiable

Log the pool a ticket lands in and the population in it. A pool that requires an even team count with an odd online population, or a never-used queue, will never produce a match no matter how long you wait.

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.