Star Wars Battlefront's Matchmaking Is A Mess

While playing the PC version of Star Wars Battlefront, I’ve experienced all sorts of ridiculous matchmaking mishaps. It seems like I’m far from alone.

Since I posted my review, I’ve encountered some seriously mind-boggling matchmaking moments. Usually, this involves lopsided teams (high-level players with snazzy gear vs lowbies who aim worse than your average Stormtrooper), but as server populations have decreased since launch, players like DisneyLines have found themselves floating aimlessly in the game’s purgatory-white match finder. Observe:

And that’s in one of the game’s marquee modes, Walker Assault. I’ve experienced moments like these, too—as have, apparently, quite a few other players.

Now, there are still thousands of players online at any given moment—plenty to build a match in relatively short order. For whatever reason, though, Battlefront’s matchmaking sometimes stalls out, especially when the new Jakku map is involved.

Then there are the Strange Moments. Sometimes in modes like Heroes vs Villains—where a small team of classic Star Wars heroes (and regular players) clashes with a small team of villains (and regular players)—the game will get confused when players leave matches and, say, give one team multiple special characters (Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Darth Vader, etc) while the other will get a couple rank-and-file foot soldiers. The result? Slaughter.

One time when I was playing, the game even managed to flub matchmaking such that there were only two people in a Heroes vs Villains match: me and one other guy. Mystifyingly, it put us on the same team. What happened next was pure hilarity: a round would begin, we’d charge into battle, and then seconds later, the game would sound the bombastic trumpets of victory and tell us we’d won. Without doing anything. Because there was nobody to fight. It was so bizarre.

To DICE’s credit, they’ve finally said that they’re looking into fixing these issues. But also, the game’s been out for nearly a month. Why the hell is it taking so long? This is a problem with a fundamental element of the game, a very real disturbance in the Force.

Here’s hoping they patch it up—or overhaul the whole system—soon. Or hey, you know what would be nice? A manual server browser. What ever happened to those? Remember when we were all kids, browsing servers to our hearts’ content—molding games as we pleased, like so much Play-Doh? We were so innocent back then, so beautiful.

To contact the author of this post, write to nathan.grayson@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @vahn16.