What Modern Fighting Game Lobbies Truly Lack

And no, it’s not about simply adding a queue system

One of the biggest complaints people have about Guilty Gear Strive, more than anything, is the lobby system. I’ve been writing about it for over a year now (since having played the CBT and both OBTs) and at this point the subject has been beaten to death. Server log-in time and bugs aside, the 2.5D voxel aesthetic never sat well with the playerbase, especially considering the more elaborate chibi avatars from Xrd Rev2, Granblue Fantasy Versus, and Dragon Ball FighterZ. (Arc System Works is on record as saying the current presentation was cheaper to make while still allowing for elaborate avatar representation.) Many reviews and critiques have argued against avatar lobbies in favor of simple queues or text-based lobbies.

I’ve explained before the advantages of having large avatar-based lobbies, but to keep it brief: Having large hubs where players can find other people to match with and chat with them can keep communities thriving and even allow for longer and more frequent sets. In private lobbies, it’s also a great way to facilitate both all-play and winners-stays rotations with multiple people. Giving players things to do while waiting for matches (training mode or other singleplayer content, spending points on bonuses, and avatar interactions) is also a great way to keep them in the lobby. Beyond that, there’s also genuinely good lobby design tools like generating a lobby invite that works for everyone, even if you don’t have them added on Steam or PSN.

MBTL’s lobby system, on the surface level, seems very much inspired by ASW’s lobby solution for Blazblue Centralfiction.

Melty Blood Type Lumina launched boasting rollback netcode. While the online is solid enough for me to be able to play most opponents regardless of distance, I’ve run into a few matches where network instability resulted in major rollbacks coupled with intense audio artifacting (replaying and overlapping sounds from before and after the rollback.) On top of that, there’s no actual ping indicator, just a bar logo before the match. (GGST doesn’t have quality indicators until you get into a match either, but ASW has at least promised these features.) The fact that you can’t clearly see ping or how much you’re rolling back can make playing a good match a guessing game, even if rollback itself keeps 95% of your matches stable. Allegedly, letting the game buffer a bit during the round start intros smooths some things out.

There’s also the fact that, at least on Steam, MBTL retains Under Night’s bizarre region-restricted matchmaking, meaning that players are restricted to only being able to queue against others who share a Steam download region with you (the country, not the exact city server location.) In GGST, if I’m not finding matches in my region, as unlikely as that may seem, I can just hop to a more populated region and probably still find stable connections. Moreover, my international friends can at least see my private lobbies in search results. The whole point of rollback is so that these international matches can be facilitated in the first place, so restricting matchmaking by Steam download region feels incredibly redundant and outdated.

I don’t know what other games, if any, have restrictions like this, but a setting like this on winners-stays lobbies that ensures that everyone gets to play against more than one person is a blessing.

All that weird stuff aside, MBTL lobbies don’t even have basic amenities like all-play or text chat (only a list of preset messages) which is really frustrating when trying to sort out eight-man rotations. There is a very welcome feature that allows you to toggle how long the current king of the hill is allowed to stay on the cabinet, but it still means that up to six people are stuck waiting for a very long time to play, with spectate and training mode being your only options. All-play rotation style should be the gold standard for fighting game lobby systems- you should retain your players by allowing them to play more often than they’re made to wait for a match. The long wait times even affect you outside of the lobbies. While MBTL’s ranked mode does offer training mode matchmaking, you can’t select it from training mode, and whether you’re waiting while practicing or not, you can get timed out when you wait too long for a match… for some reason.

While I want- and expect- the quality of life of a new title to get better over time, my main frustration is that this game came hot on the heels of GGST, a game where everyone was complaining about the lobby system. To be clear, GGST’s lobby system has most of the quality of life features that MBTL doesn’t have, with the only notable exception being the connection quality indicators before a match. The only major downsides are bugs (which have been acknowledged with a roadmap to subsequent patches) and the voxel aesthetic (where taste is subjective.) Beyond that, GGST’s lobbies are perfect for fostering a community around the game while also letting players find matches quickly and play for however long they want without having to wait around.

Just adding simple features like training mode matchmaking improves the quality of a queue system by a ton.

GGPO+R’s new beta lobby system offers some solutions, but it’s not quite what I want. Replacing both ranked and casual queues with a menu that shows a list of available players is nice, since it reduces the waiting time in a similar way that GGST’s avatar lobbies do. Private lobbies also work the same way, with an optional toggle for winners-stays rotations if players prefer. More importantly, you can simply generate a Steam lobby invite URL and then copy-paste it wherever you want- a godsend for lobbies with friends, a stream chat, and TOs alike.

The system is still not without its issues, however. Combining the ranked and casual ‘queues’ into a single room disincentivizes ranked play entirely, as nearly everyone in the room prefers casual sets and casuals are unable to match against ranked players. There’s also no toggle for longer sets in private lobbies- your only choices are best of three or infinite rematch, and the latter defaults to best of three if there’s one or more non-spectators in the room. Since rotation in the all-play lobbies is also at-will rather than how it works in GGST or games like Skullgirls, it means that some people can still potentially be waiting a while if there’s an odd number of players, or even be left out entirely if no one wants to match with them. This is compounded by the fact that winners-stays lobbies can still have up to eight people in them- the same problem that MBTL has.

Being able to see everyone online and just pick them out for a match rather than wait for the queue to deliver them to you increases the overall amount of matches played, especially with rollback and instant rematch.

In summary, good fighting game matchmaking systems tend to have:

• Rollback, obviously. (Edit: A reader pointed out to me that the way MBTL handles its input delay settings is indeed very odd- you can toggle it in settings from the main menu, while idling in a player lobby, but not in the Network menu or before a match in ranked. Most rollback games either keep the input delay fixed, like GGST, Killer Instinct, or NRS games, or they let you toggle it before a match, like GGPO+R, Skullgirls, and Them’s Fightin’ Herds. MBTL’s input delay toggle setting is thus designed poorly in the UI.)
• I never went into crossplay here, because I’ve discussed it before and it’s complicated. But increasing the playerbase’s size by connecting every platform helps a lot too.
• The ability to filter out- and accept- matches from outside of your region, with high ping, or with players using Wi-Fi. I use this phrasing because, again, MBTL filters out players outside of your region, which is really strange. Indicators for all of these filters should also be prominently displayed on the profile when matchmaking, and the ping indicator should be an actual ping indicator rather than a logo suggesting some approximation.
• There should be something to do while waiting for a match besides spectating. Even games that don’t want to have avatar lobbies should at least let you do training mode, singleplayer content, or simply chatting.
• Private lobbies should have a bunch of different features, like round count, set count, rotation types, etc. that can be tweaked to the players’ liking, but all-play rotations are a must.
• As services like Discord supplement or replace Steam/PSN friends lists, options that allow you to invite people that you don’t have added to your launcher/game network should be included. These should not be in lieu of regular invite features, however.
• Every game will have different solutions to this, but ideally your players should not be waiting extraordinarily long in a populated queue for a match. If you can see that there are people online, being able to go directly to that match rather than waiting for the system to pair you up saves a lot of time.

It should be noted that things like generating a search ID or a Steam lobby link are different than setting up a password that locks the room. In fact, passwords can exist alongside such ID systems to prevent unwanted matches that happen to stumble in anyway.

I’m having a blast playing MBTL- it’s extremely refreshing to return to a French Bread game after missing Under Night for so long. But it’s really inconvenient when, say, I want to open up a lobby and get rotations going with more than five people, whether it’s a late-night grind session or I want to stream, and then everyone has to wait a long time for their turn to play rather than getting a bunch of sets in all at once. I also have a hard time joining other open lobbies, because people don’t know how to make them private yet, so I get kicked because people don’t want an additional body in the rotation. I end up going to ranked to play, but the queue takes a long time to pop and sometimes I even get timed out while waiting anyway. Moreover, the lack of being able to see who’s waiting for a match and the inability to chat with opponents makes everything feel less intimate or community-oriented.

I know very well that some people would rather just wait in a line, be served an opponent, play a quick set, and then move on. For me, at least, the ‘community’ aspect of the fighting game community is very important, and I like that avatar lobbies let me meet other players, chat with them, ask them questions or complement them, and that I can even recognize players. While it’s never going to be 1:1 with an arcade or local event experience, I appreciate that ASW tried to make it close. The pixel graphics in MBTL are cute in the same way, but they also hide the lack of missing features and don’t actually facilitate the same type of options that GGST has. Ideally, most of these issues are rectified in future versions of MBTL- although, with the lobby system being mostly identical to what UNICLR offers, I would have expected them to implement such improvements prior to launch. If GGST’s server connection issues get cleaned up substantially and their promised features are added, I wouldn’t be surprised if I wholly enjoyed that game’s lobby system more than MBTL’s.