Dragon Ball FighterZ’s multiplayer lobbies bum out users on all platforms

Dragon Ball FighterZ may delight players with action brimming with fan service and crackling anime visuals, but just getting into a match in its multiplayer experience is bumming many of them out. And it’s not just those in the PC community, either.

Windows PC users on Twitter, Reddit and forums seem to be the most affected by overcrowded multiplayer lobbies, but players on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One also report aggravations with them. Console users are also expressing problems with the way Dragon Ball FighterZ brings them into lobbies, how it doesn’t have an easy way to invite friends and misfires when they try to create a Ring Match, which is a private bout.

Bandai Namco’s U.S. Twitter account acknowledged problems with the Ring Match feature back on Saturday. There’s been no word since. Ring Matches, perhaps because of the visual aesthetic of a Dragon Ball FighterZ lobby (it’s a visual representation of a room, with players milling about), effectively require the user to create a room-within-a-room to stage a private fight.

A thread on ResetEra reported problems with Ring Matches beginning right after launch on Friday. Multiple users reported getting a “no room found” error when trying to set one up.

“On Xbox, I tried for 4 hours last night to play with a friend from work. We were stupid excited for the game,” added a user in the Dragon Ball FighterZ subreddit, which has pinned a forum thread on server and lobby performance to the front page. “He bought the $100 version of the game, and I bought the regular version since I’ve never been a fan of fighting games. We couldn’t get into a single game together.”

Even if it did work properly, the process of a Ring Match or playing with a friend is encumbered by additional steps. This includes the creation of the ring, and then sharing the code that allows a player into it with that friend, doing so by party chat or some other method outside of the game.

It also requires them both to be in the same lobby in the first place. Granted, Dragon Ball FighterZ enables that by allowing users to choose the region and lobby where they want to matchmake — but that is required every time they go to multiplayer, which are extra steps many find aggravating.

“Was it really that hard to do a lobby with an invite system?” said another user in the ResetEra thread. “It seems so bizarre for [Arc System Works, the game’s developer] to omit such a thing when they’ve made so many competent fighters beforehand.”

Other complaints:

ResetEra

Reddit

Reddit

Dragon Ball FighterZ peaked at more than 44,000 concurrent users on Steam shortly after it unlocked on Friday. Saturday and Sunday’s peaks were lower, but the numbers are high for a fighting game on that platform.

In a statement to Polygon, Bandai Namco seemed to imply that the large population at launch caught developers off guard, and was at least partly the source of the problems.

“The launch of Dragon Ball Fighter Z has been nothing short of phenomenal in regards to support from Dragon Ball and fighting game fans,” the statement said. “However, a side effect of this massive support has been online-play difficulties that could not have been anticipated without the actual launch of the game taking place.”

Polygon asked for some guidance to players on when these issues may be resolved, and how many of them even can be resolved or are simply innate to the multiplayer environment of Dragon Ball FighterZ. Bandai Namco said only that the publisher and the development team are in constant communication, and work continues on improving the online experience, with a promise to share more news as it becomes available.