I’ve noticed a lot of frustration regarding Queue times in the Community and i realized that a significant portion of the Spires matchmaking process is spent waiting without the player actually being able to do anything.
Current Matchmaking Flow:
Start Queue
Find Team Queue (2–3 min)
Shop (1–2 min)
Player leaves
Find Team Queue (2–3 min)
Shop (1–2 min)
Find Match Queue (2 min)
Total time:
Without a leaver: ~5–7 minutes
With a leaver: ~8–12 minutes
A large part of this time is simply spent waiting for teammates before entering the shop. Instead, why not allow players to access the shop immediately while matchmaking is searching for teammates?
Suggested Flow
Start Queue
Shop + Find Team Queue (simultaneously, 1–3 min)
Find Match Queue (2 min)
When searching for Teammates, players should be spawned into the Shop Room immediately and once teammates are found, they could simply respawn into the same shop instance together. Since most players would already have equipped their gear during this matchmaking period, they would likely only need to hit Ready or adjust their Items based on Team Composition, making the process much faster.
This change would:
Reduce overall queue times by overlapping two waiting periods.
Eliminate the feeling of “waiting to wait.”
Make matchmaking feel more interactive instead of leaving players idle.
Help soften the frustration when someone leaves, since players can continue preparing while a new teammate is being found.
By allowing players to prepare their loadout during the teammate search, the total time before entering a match could potentially drop from 5–7 minutes to around 3–5 minutes, while also making the entire matchmaking experience feel much smoother.
My friend and i had the same idea when we were queued.
Once a match is over players should immidiatly get transported to the prematch shop.
Grouped players together. If 2 players are grouped like me and my friend give the option to bring along the third player if he accepts.
The key issue with this concept to me is that availability of items in the Shrine also depends on your teammates’ behavior. For example, if I’m waiting and buy Dahla Crown, and then match with you who also bought Dahla Crown, who wins? And we don’t want to limit matchmaking based on selected items, as it gets very hairy very quickly. We also don’t want to compromise the core concept of not having repeated Eternal items on a team.
Items could be reset when teammates are found, but that would pretty much kill the advantage of shopping early anyway. Separately from overlaps, strategizing purchases based on teammates is definitely something encouraged - I like to fill something tanky if both teammates went more into DPS, or go DPS if we have some support builds, etc. You lose that chance if you’re just building solo.
Definitely looking at ways to make these flows smoother though!
@rook It seems like both solutions for Spires matchmaking come with their own downsides unfortunately.
It would be great if there are ways found to speed up / improve the matchmaking flow.
Spending 2–3 minutes staring at the post-match screen after every match breaks the momentum and makes it harder to continue playing.
This is not an issue for premade groups since they get sent back into the room immediately (which feels great), but solo players have to go through this “double waiting” process after every match. Over multiple runs, that downtime adds up and becomes increasingly frustrating.
I tried to think of solutions with compensation systems and other workarounds, being able to “adjust” your role based on team comp would still be possible, but ultimately the issue with overlapping items could also become frustrating if it happens too frequently and comes with its own set of issues..