Latest Update: WoC Drop-in Matchmaking and Dressing Room Errors

by EA_Roger
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Latest Update: WoC Drop-in Matchmaking and Dressing Room Errors

Community Manager (retired)

First off, we would like to thank the community for their patience and assistance with helping us track down these issues. A number of you were helpful in communicating out details and providing screenshots and that has helped us with some initial theories. In question there are 2 main issues, matchmaking issues where we fail to find games, and the other is within the Dressing Room where users would see “Dressing Room Errors” or “Failed to Retrieve Data” errors within the Dressing Room. We have some updates that we would like to share for both issues

Matchmaking:
Over the last 2 weeks, we have heard a number of concerns and seen several posts on the forums and we have been actively reviewing our matchmaking success rates. As you have witnessed, success rates were particularly low in 6v6 and 3v3 Drop-In games, but not for any other game modes. On a nightly basis we have been tweaking matchmaking rules, to help us pinpoint where the issue may lie. This was a slower process than we wanted but we had to change one variable at a time and get data back from the next day’s population actively matchmaking to examine the results. After isolating many variables, we have discovered that the aggregated positional matchmaking, which from a tech side is different from last year, ended up being a contributing factor. An example of what is happening is that 12 users in a Drop-in 6v6 session may be searching for the “Skater” position, matchmaking is gathering those 12 skaters to form a game, then assigning positions within that group, however goalies are not Skaters, therefore, matchmaking would fail to form a session with that group. As a temporary workaround to this issue, we have reduced the “Full Session” requirements from Drop-in 3v3 to 6 players (which was 8) and Drop-in 6v6 to 10 players (which was 12). Doing this prevents the issue from occurring as there will never be a case where we have a full session and no room for a goalie to join. By making this change, goalies will still be able to match into sessions, however when a goalie does make it into a session, there will always have to be 1 ai player (due to the max player limit) until we can make the full solution fix. After these changes, please don’t fear choosing one of the aggregated positions to matchmake with as they will result in a higher chance of finding games.

PS – Since these changes have been made, our matchmaking success rates have increased significantly, so at least you can enjoy drop-in games once again while we work on the full solution fix

One other issue that will be addressed in patch 2, is that there was a timing issue where if a user joined a session as the Dressing Room timer reached the final few seconds, users could end up becoming stuck and lose functionality of their screen. Because of this, we needed to disable the ability to join a session that was already created as we don’t have the ability to restrict the join process during the specific timing window. Disabling the join session, also contributed to the matchmaking wait times and a lack of full sessions which we know many of our users enjoy playing in. For those that are wondering, once the join session is back in place, we will increase the timer in the Dressing Room to allow for more full sessions.


Dressing Room errors:
We have identified the root cause of the error and it was specific to PS4. We are in the midst of testing a work around fix to deploy to the server in hope that the issues are resolved until a proper client fix can be made in an upcoming patch.

NHL_ONL_Producer

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Latest Update: WoC Drop-in Matchmaking and Dressing Room Errors - Oct 5th

Community Manager (retired)

The server fix for the Dressing Room error went out late last night. Has anyone who has had the issue fairly regularly noticed any difference in the past few hours? The fix may not resolve all issues of the error, but we are fairly certain it is the most common error that is occurring for most of the users who are experiencing it.

Please leave feedback regarding the issue if you have any.

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