Matchmaker - Continuous Matches

Local Setup
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Hi all, A bit confused on how best to use the Matchmaker utility. Our project will have dedicated games running constantly that users can join and leave at any point, and different dedicated servers with different “worlds” between them.

  1. Is the matchmaker required for putting users into open server slots? Or are we goin in the wrong direction with this logic?
  2. Is it possible to present Nakama with a list of servers it can put players into?

Some additional details:

  • Using Unity for clients and a headless dedicated server.
  • Agones will be used to help orchestrate the dedicated servers (spin up/down as needed etc)
  • Each server will contain 50-100 CCU

Thanks so much in advance for any suggestions here!

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  1. Is the matchmaker required for putting users into open server slots? Or are we goin in the wrong direction with this logic?

@keiranlovett I’m not sure what you mean by open server slots. I would guess its the positions open in your separate headless server binaries instead of the Nakama authoritative multiplayer engine. Is there a reason you want to use the Nakama matchmaker to place users into open server slots on instances that Nakama knows nothing about?

  1. Is it possible to present Nakama with a list of servers it can put players into?

The matchmaker in Nakama is intended to place players together from a pool of users who’re concurrently matchmaking and find the optimal sets to suggest play together. Though we do always optimize for minimal wait times over exact matchmaker request criteria. It does not handle situations where you want to place players onto separate server instances outside of the knowledge of the game server.

I suppose its possible to have your headless server instance represent a “party of users” who are already on the server and advertise itself as a fake user into the matchmaker pool to allow other users to match into it. I don’t know of a game team that has tried this at all so it’s just an idea.

The fleet manager you’re using should already have awareness of the info about what user counts are in what server instances right? Why not use that to place users into the open server slots?