Quick answer: Match parties as a unit using the group's combined rating, keep them together through placement, and balance teams around whole parties.
Friends want to play together, not get split up. Party-aware matchmaking keeps them together. Here is how.
How to fix it
1. Match as a unit
Treat a party as a single ticket with a combined rating rather than independent players.
2. Keep parties intact
Place the whole party on the same team and match so they always play together.
3. Balance around parties
Account for party size and combined skill when balancing teams so a stacked party does not steamroll.
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 backend 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.
Ship the fix, watch the signature disappear from the next build. That's how you know it's really gone.