First, thanks for your time and the very detailed answer !!!
I think you summed it up perfectly: there are several workarounds for something that "should be simple", but none of them are truly optimal, and every option comes with its own drawbacks.
Either you’re restricted to specific rotating playlists, or you rely on Portal servers that might stay empty the whole session because they’re a bit niche for random players to join, or you end up dealing with platform-specific bugs, inconsistent join-game behavior, and other odd issues…
The last technique you described is pretty much what we’re using right now as well.
We have a first squad of four start matchmaking, and as soon as they find a game, everyone else rushes to join via EA friends before the server fills up. Then we repeat this again and again until we finally all make it in, and depending on the game mode, especially the ones with smaller team sizes, it can take a lot of attempts or even be impossible.
And of course, once the match ends, we’re forced back to the lobby and have to restart the whole process from zero, which gets tiring really quickly.
As a software developer myself, I know that features that sound simple on paper can hide real implementation challenges behind the scenes, but I still trust the EA devs to eventually deliver a cleaner, more reliable solution for larger friend groups.
Yeah I hope EA makes a better solution for larger player groups. They have said they are investigating or working on a better solution but they haven't said yet exactly what it is or when we'd see it. Back when EA made Star Wars Battlefront 2, they let around 8 people party up in the main lobby and they just split the 8 people into two squads of 4 when they loaded into the game. They also made it so that the friends in the other squad had a different color than your regular teammates. It was a pretty decent solution. So clearly EA/Dice was able to do that back then. At minimum, they could do that again.
That's exactly what we need ! Hope they will be able to implement it in BF6. Thanks !
