Getting Started
Get started with Matchmaking quickly and explore example scenarios for various genres.
See Matchmaker In-Depth for detailed explanations and more tips on customization.
Our matchmaking philosophy is driven by player perspective, with core principles of matchmaking:
social integration (such as friends and lobbies),
balance between match speed (time to play) and match quality (balanced player attributes),
high availability, process observability, and user-friendly error handling.
✔️ Preparation
Testing our Matchmaker is entirely free, no credit card required.
Free Tier allows up to 3 hours of runtime on our shared test cluster, after each restart.
This tutorial assumes you have already:
uploaded and configured your server application on Edgegap,
Getting Started - Servers (Unity),
Getting Started - Servers (Unreal Engine),
successfully connected from a game client to your server on Edgegap.
For now, we’ll give you a quick tour of core Matchmaker features using Postman - a handy tool for testing APIs, free for individuals.
Matchmaking Architecture
Understanding matchmaking architecture is easy:
Our matchmaker reference architecture involves several flows of data:
Deployments API is used to deploy, scale, and manage your Dedicated Servers by Matchmaker,
Netcode Transports are used to communicate between Game Clients and Dedicated Servers (Edgegap is not involved),
This guide will focus on Matchmaking API and Backfill API.
After release, your matchmaker will need to run 24/7 to ensure players across the world can join servers.
🍀 Simple Example
Start with a simple example and test the core matchmaking player flow:
1. Set Up on Free Tier
☑️ Once you’ve registered for your free Edgegap account navigate to the Matchmaker dashboard page.
☑️ Click on Create Matchmaker first, then input:
matchmaker name - for your own reference, e.g.
quickstart-dev,upload our Simple Example JSON configuration.
🍀 Simple Example (Minimal Recommended Configuration):
Make sure to change the application name and version to match your Apps and Versions.
☑️ If no validation errors appear, hit Create and Start and wait for the process to complete. This will result in a new free cluster starting, with your Simple Example matchmaker.
✅ You may now proceed to the next step.
2. Explore Configuration
🔥
majorversions include breaking changes and require integration review,🌟
minorversions include substantial backwards-compatible improvements,🩹
patchversions include bug fixes and minor improvements.
Some deployments may result in Errors. We attempt to resolve this by retrying deployment up to max_deployment_retry_count times automatically (without client confirmation).
To ensure that unexpected client crashes or abandoned tickets do not linger and take up your matchmaker resources, tickets will be cancelled after ticket_expiration_period causing their status to change to CANCELLED and then permanently deleted after ticket_removal_period .
name of your choosing, e.g. -
match size,rule type, also known as operator, e.g. -
player_count,and lastly operator attributes, e.g.
team_countorteam_size.
Player Count Rule
This is a special rule defining how many players need to match to initiate assignment:
team_countrefers to number of teams, 1 team may be used for cooperative or free-for-all modes,team_sizerefers to the number of players per team.
Our simple example demonstrates a cooperative game with 2 players.
Player Count rule is required and may only be defined once in your initial configuration rules.
Latencies Rule
Use this rule to provide the lowest possible ping for all players. Once clients measure and submit their round-trip time (ping) against all available beacons, matchmaking will only consider matches within a specific difference in ping values, measured against Ping Beacons. This presents a “soft” solution to splitting your player base, enabling matching with neighboring regions, especially improving match speed for less populated regions.
Use max_latency to prevent matching against players located far away.
Latencies rule may only be defined once in your initial configuration rules.
✅ You may now proceed to the next step.
Our example beacons rule above with "difference": 50, "max_latency": 200 initially:
Alice and Bob will match, since Beijing is discarded (>200) and the rest is within | A-B | < 50:
Alice {Montreal: 12.3, Newark: 45.6, Dallas: 59.9, Beijing: 264.4}; and
Bob {Montreal: 27.3, Newark: 32.4, Dallas: 23.1, Beijing: 252.2}.
Charlie and Dave will not match, since | C-D | > 50 for Dallas Beacon:
Alice {Montreal: 5.7 Newark: 44.2, Dallas: 59.5, Beijing: 263.2}; and
Bob {Montreal: 57.8, Newark: 32.0, Dallas: 24.2, Beijing: 272.3}.
3. Review Instance Details
☑️ Review details of your new matchmaker in our dashboard once it’s initialized:
Status indicates service health, may be ONLINE, OFFLINE, or ERROR.
Identifier helps Edgegap staff find your matchmaker quickly if you need help troubleshooting.
Started at can be useful to track down the latest update time.
Size corresponds to one of our Pricing Tiers.
API URL will be used by Game Clients and Game Servers to communicate with your matchmaker.
Swagger URL is a handy openAPI specification GUI we provide to explore API schema.
Auth Token is a unique secret token used by Game Clients and Game Server for authentication.
Edgegap staff will never ask for your tokens. Regenerate your token if you suspect a security breach.
To test your new matchmaker using the API, you will need the Swagger URL, API URL and Auth Token.
✅ You may now proceed to the next step.
To update your matchmaker rules in development, you will need to edit your configuration and restart it.
4. Test Tickets API
Please wait for up to 5 minutes after (re)starting your matchmaker to allow DNS propagation to complete.
☑️ First, open your Swagger URL to inspect your openAPI schema in the swagger GUI:
☑️ Click on Authorize 🔒, paste your Auth Token, and confirm by clicking on Authorize.
☑️ Scroll down to Ticket API - POST /tickets, expand and click Try it out.
attributesinclude values for your matchmaker rules, in this case for thelatenciesrule,rule
player_countis the only rule which doesn’t require any attributes in player tickets.
☑️ Click Execute and review the response to your player ticket request:
idis your unique matchmaking ticket ID, save this to check on your ticket later,group_idis a unique group ID issued to every ticket, a solo player is represented as a group of 1,each team can contain multiple groups, not exceeding the configured team size,
player_ipis the resolved public IP address of the player, regardless of the identification method,assignmentis set tonullto indicate the ticket has not been matched or assigned to a server,created_atprovides information about when the player ticket was created for game UI usage,
☑️ Create a second ticket by hitting Execute again, so our two players match and a server is started.
☑️ Collapse POST /tickets and open GET /tickets/{ticketId}, then click Try it out.
☑️ Input ticket ID from the response in previous step and click Execute.
☑️ Review the updated assignment for your player ticket:
status changed to
MATCH_FOUNDfirst, while keepingassignmentset tonullto indicate players have matched and a server is being assigned,
☑️ Click Execute again to check on your ticket, and review the updated assignment for your ticket:
status changed to
HOST_ASSIGNEDwithassignmentcontaining details of the assigned server.
☑️ Inspect your new deployment in our dashboard:
notice each deployment is tagged with all ticket IDs and profile for added traceability.
☑️ Try connecting from your game client to the assigned server.
The external port of your Deployment on Edgegap cloud will be chosen at random, so that a potential attacker (hacker) is slowed down and detected before they can cause damage.
If you’re experiencing high latency, your netcode integration may be configured to simulate network latency. Disable VPN when testing for more realistic conditions and receive a low-latency deployment.
☑️ Once you verify you’re able to connect to your Deployment without issues and are done testing, Stop your Deployment to free up capacity in your account for the next build.
✅ You may now proceed to the next step.
Find the openAPI specification for testing at {matchmaker-url}/swagger/v1/swagger.json.
5. Game Integration
As indicated by Matchmaking Architecture above, Matchmaker integrates:
with Dedicated Server, to:
process player preferences passed through their tickets,
☑️ In Game Client, ensure you’re handling non-retryable errors:
HTTP 404 Not Found- ticket has been deleted,HTTP 500 Internal Server Error- temporary service outage.
☑️ In Game Server, process player preferences and initial server context. API usage is not required:
Read Injected Environment Variables (Matchmaker) to retrieve initial players’ matchmaking data.
Read Injected Environment Variables (App Versions) for version parameters, settings, and secrets.
Read Injected Environment Variables (Deployment) for deployment information, IP, location, etc...
Get variable values using GetEnvironmentVariable in C# or GetEnvironmentVariable in C++.
☑️ Once players connect, Game Server and Game Clients start a loading scene to perform synchronization steps (e.g. selecting and loading a map/scene/level). We recommend a full fledged 3D scene, a lobby-like social UI, or a loading screen with a progress bar, to indicate initialization is progressing.
☑️ Once Game Clients fully loaded, players load/travel to the main gameplay scene.
no players join the match,
all players have left the match,
match concludes correctly.
🙌 Congratulations, you’ve completed Matchmaking integration! To learn more, keep reading.
🏁 Advanced Example
🎾 Custom Lobby
Add custom-lobby-example profile in addition to your other profiles to support custom lobbies.
⚔️ Competitive Games
Competitive games focus on players competing against each other to achieve victory, whether as individuals (free for all) or teams. Matchmaking is crucial to ensure fair and balanced matches by pairing players or teams of similar skill levels. Maintain the pace of the game by quickly finding opponents with low latency to ensure fair competition.
You may define multiple teams with 1 or more players each, e.g.:
1v1 fighting game, with team count of 2 and team size of 1, require 2 players per game.
5v5 FPS, with team count of 2 and team size of 5, require 10 players per game.
5v5 MOBA, with team count of 2 and team size of 5, require 10 players per game.
10 player free-for-all, with team count of 1 and team size of 10, require 10 players per game.
20x3 battle royale, with team count of 20 and team size of 3, require 60 players per game.
restrict rank within a difference between two players for more casual games,
restrict rank difference to only allow opponents with the same rank for ranked games,
let players provide their map preferences and choose a map suitable for everyone,
restrict matchmaking latency to a maximum threshold to prevent matching players far away,
restrict matchmaking latency to a maximum difference to maximize ping fairness,
Start with the ideal conditions, and expand restrictions to ensure quick matches:
slowly relax latency restrictions over time to find more players,
slowly increase allowed rank difference to find more players,
increase time between expansions for the highest ranks (challengers), as less players are available.
Create tickets with a higher rank for promotion matches, to match with tougher opponents.
Define separate cheater profiles to ensure that flagged cheaters or players with high amount of moderation reports do not negatively impact experience of healthy player segments.
🤝 Cooperative Games
With team count 1 and team size 4, require 4 players per game (all players are on the same team).
let players provide their map preferences and choose a map suitable for everyone,
let players choose a particular game difficulty to suit everybody’s skill level,
restrict player level difference to align players with a similar degree of game progression,
allow higher latency to prefer faster matches with better granular player preferences,
Start with the ideal conditions, and expand restrictions to ensure quick matches:
relax latency restrictions over time to find more players,
slowly decrease team size to require less players and start the game sooner,
optionally, you may have the server fill empty slots with AI teammates,
slowly increase allowed player level difference to find more players,
Using multiple profiles to separate casual game modes, competitive game modes, and top-tier challenger players allows you to customize rules and expansions for each type of player separately.
🎈 Social Games
With team count 1 and team size 50, require 50 players per game (all players are on the same team).
let players provide their game mode preferences and choose a mode suitable for everyone,
allow higher latency to prefer faster matches with more players,
Expand restrictions to ensure quick matches:
quickly relax latency restrictions to find more players,
slowly decrease team size to require less players and start the game sooner,
optionally, you may have the server fill empty slots with AI players,
this will allow players to join existing matches over new ones to maximize social interaction.
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🎈 Social Game Example