PUT MATCH MY CLUB SIZE IN THE GAME

But that is what so many people are telling you - the slightly longer wait IS worth it. Especially when your matchmaking is working as fast as it is for skaters. Thats the part im trying to explain to you. 

As a Skater, if the option is 5 sec mm to play against a full lobby, or waiting an extra 30-45 secs, im taking the extended wait every single time. Even if it takes 2-5 mins, Id rather wait then constantly match in 5 secs against full lobbies. Also, if you are saying it prioritizes the same room size then expands after it cant be found, then this also needs to be investigated bc that is not happening at all. If i find a game in 2-5 secs and its 5 people, then it didnt do a very good job trying to match my club size lol. (same applies to our goalie conversation, if the option is wait 4-5mins or not play at all, i think the choice is obvious)

I would. be inclined to drop this conversation if it wasnt so widely talked about online. As a community manager i encourage you to investigate social media, reddit, these forums further. Matchmaking is being discussed everywhere, and is probably the most discussed topic aside from how bad BaP feels atm.

Also, from one dev side to another, telling your community "well it works for us" as a member of the team that built the game, only makes people more frustrated. 

You nailed it exactly, give the players the choice they had for years and years.  I usually just play 3's with my buddy and are constantly matched up with 3 humans which we don't want to play as we would be at a huge disadvantage as the CPU is terrible compared to another person so we back out over and over and over again until we match up with just 2 people.  There was no reason to remove it, no one asked for it to be removed but their are plenty of people who requested it back in NHL 25 and now in NHL 26.  It's a players choice to use it or not when it was in the game, you actually had to enable it in the matchmaking settings before searching.  Please bring it back, the excuse from last year that it was too hard to put back in NHL 25 is not good enough anymore.  It's a simple toggle that during the search if you don't find the a team with the same amount of players you are not connected to each other and it continues searching either until you find a match up with the same amount of players or it times out then you try again. 

Yeah just another year of them NOT LISTENING to the fan base that plays the game. If I have a full 5 we find more 2 - 4's but if I have 2 -4's we find a full 5. ea taking away features and not fixing other issues is classic ea and at this point nobody should be surprised. 

This. Our club is 5-6's. If we pull anything less than 4 we back out. Not having match room size option does not mean you get games faster. We'll back out on every 2's and 3's until we get humans.  Most clubs do that. Might as well have match room size like they used to. 

Matching up against a full team has never personally bothered my buddy and I since it's usually a "too many cooks in the kitchen" type of scenario but I never quite understood why a full team wouldn't be foaming at the mouth to play against 2 or 3 people considering how easily exploitable the AI is (outside of a team with an abundance of pride), but I digress...

I think this is to just force people into trying drop-ins for whatever reason but meh. Sometimes you just want a perfectly even playing field, maybe you wanna gamble drop-ins, i don't know. Regardless, it's better to have options and not need them that it is to really want them and not have 'em. 

TTZ_Dipsy wrote:

I think this is to just force people into trying drop-ins for whatever reason but meh.

To me, it screams of a situation where the devs were given a mandate that no search should take longer than two minutes and the solution was to strip away everything they could that would limit the pool of available matches, regardless of if it results in players actually getting into games faster.   I've seen things like this way too many times over the course of my career.  Give a software team a metric to reach in the hopes it will solve a perceived problem and they'll hit that metric whether it solves the actual problem or not.

I could of course be wrong, but if walks and quacks like a duck.....