It's time we discuss game server matchmaking in CHEL [ Edited ]

[Viktors89]

Central europe teams have a big issue with game server matchamking in CHEL. This has been an on-going issue for a whole year now. We were hoping to get this solved by NHL 21 but the only thing we got was a server location for private matches which solves only a (very) small portion of the problem.

Currently all central europe teams can only play agains them. The pool is not as big as north europe teams or NA teams. Therefore we end up playing the same teams again and again. Furthermore, the top skilled central europe teams have a big skill gap which usually ends up on boring games for them and the opposition (many times the other team ends up quitting in the pre-game lobby). This started happening when the new servers where introduced (which we appreciate btw). 

Doing some experimentation it seems that club location doesn't matter one bit, but what matters are the players on the lobby.

Say my club wants to play a game against a club in Northern Europe servers and all my players are from central europe locations. The only way would be to have Relaxed search and that another Northern team also has the Relaxed search. This hardly ever happens since they prefer to play against other northern teams (bigger pool of teams + less ping, I would do the same). Therefore I'm stuck playing only central europe teams.

HOWEVER, if for this specific game 4 northern europe located players joined my club session and the other 2 are from central europe location and I use the Exact search it will find me north europe teams to play against. In other words, the server matchmaking will find a game in the location where your team players in average will have the smaller ping. This in theory sounds like the efficient implementation but for the reasons stated above it affects quite an amount of players (I assume this also happens in NA with the different servers). 

I propose this solution:

Let us select which server we want to play against in public games. We are responsible for playing against teams in which we will have a bigger ping disadvantatge. This would be the easiest solution to implement and would make our game experience more fun playing against more teams.