Possible to know the amount of players in queue?

Unity Services
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Hi!

With Matchmaker, is it possible for other players queuing, the amount of players already in queue at the moment they queue? That would be useful to say like if there is literally 0 players in the queue, start a match against a bot instead…

Thanks =)

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The short answer is no, this is not available today.
But it’s an interesting request that has many facets:

  • Is it important to know the precise number of players in a Queue or only the condition when there are 0?
  • How long must that condition hold for a game to take action? An instant reading is not going to be very useful – a very healthy player population with good tuning should oscillate around 0 players “in queue”, on average
  • Queues are formed of multiple Pools where the matchmaking actually happens. A counter for a Queue would have to be the sum of those pools, but that number is likely irrelevant to the player; the number of eligible players is what matters.
  • Revealing the size of the player population to players is not desirable for all customers. However an live estimate on matchmaking time might be more broadly useful.

Today, Matchmaker provides relaxation rules and timeouts to handle this situation, including the ability to create a match with a single player if they’ve waited long enough. The server can then fill that match with bots and start backfilling so that humans can replace those bots over time. This is the generally recommended approach based solely on timers. It doesn’t require live statistics to be exposed to game clients.

Nevertheless, if you’d like to refine a feature request, I encourage you to use this form under Matchmaker:
https://unity.com/roadmap/unity-gaming-services/multiplayer

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Hello,

Forst first of all thanks for your reply. Right now I manually keep track of the matchmaking time and after around 30 seconds, I create a match with a bot for my player. My game is a 1v1 online PvP game so I really don’t want, by design, a player to backfill a match with a bot.

I was just thinking that having my players wait 30 seconds before launching a match with a bot would be annoying, but as you said, if my game picks up and people play it, matches will be found. Otherwise I would be very sad haha

I’ll see how it goes like that then :slight_smile:

Thanks!

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