For the past week South African Servers have had a bug on all close quarter matches where while waiting in lobby for the match to begin, it says populating with bots but the match never starts. It's extremely frustrating and I sure hope it will be sorted out soon. There's lots of complaints on the South Africa Battlefield Facebook group but unfortunately as our player base is small our issues don't get tended to.
i see the complaints but some people in the comments dont quite understand what we mean. they think its a time or player count problem but its simply a bot problem. they dont populate the server after it said “populating with bots” for 10 mins. its frustrating
So after latest update, Issue still occurring?
Issue:
Matchmaking lobbies stuck at 12/16 players — bots not filling, game never starts (post-update issue)
Description:
Since the most recent Battlefield 6 update, Team Deathmatch lobbies frequently get stuck at 12 / 16 players and stop populating entirely. The match either sits in the pre-match state indefinitely or starts with partial teams and never fills the rest with either players or bots.
This issue has been persistent for several days and appears to have worsened after the latest backend maintenance rolled out last week. It’s not just a temporary delay - the lobbies become permanently stuck at 12/16 and require the player to back out and re-queue to find a functioning match.
Steps to Reproduce:
Expected Result:
Lobby should fill to 16 players or automatically backfill remaining slots with AI soldiers, allowing the match to start in a reasonable timeframe.
Actual Result:
Lobby remains stuck at 12/16 max or less with no progress. No bots fill, and match never starts.
Additional Details:
Platform: PC (Steam) / Console
Region: South Africa (assuming this should affect other smaller regions as well)
Cross-play: Enabled/Disabled
Mode: Team Deathmatch (core playlist)/CQB
Repro Frequency: Extremely High (~ 95%)
Last Verified: October 2025
Notes: This issue may relate to recent matchmaking adjustments and backend tuning (XP-farm suppression and bot-fill threshold changes). Multiple players in smaller regions are reporting identical symptoms - partial lobbies stuck at 12/16 and inconsistent bot-backfill behaviour.
Impact:
This issue makes smaller-mode matchmaking effectively unplayable in certain regions, forcing players to abandon lobbies and restart matchmaking loops repeatedly.
Please escalate this for investigation - it seems to affect multiple smaller-region player pools and may indicate a regression in the lobby-merge or AI-backfill logic introduced post-patch.
Thanks for your time and effort on this. Happy to provide logs or session timestamps if needed.
cc EA_Leeuw
Just let us matchmake in other regions like other games. Bots are not the solution
It's a double-edged sword. Switching to another region will absolutely impact ping and latency.
no please dont do that🙏🏼😭its gonna kill the servers in SA, just give them time
This is happening on my series x and reported this issue to Xbox also , my region New Zealand and in most game modes such as rush and team death match … this is super frustrating and waste of my gaming time !!!! Also cross play is off
