Like so many other battle royale games, Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodhunt has a number of different playlists to match different players’ preferences and tolerance for cooperation. There are solo, duo, and trio queues, as well as Ranked versions of solo and trio. That’s all well and good, but also like in so many other battle royales, this stratification of the player population is causing Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodhunt to suffer from long matchmaking times. To remedy the situation, developer Sharkmob is instituting game mode rotation, starting today.
As outlined in a June 15 dev blog, this game mode rotation system will have certain playlists become temporarily unavailable on regular basis, forcing all Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodhunt players to play together in whatever game modes are open at any given time. For example, the Ranked solos queue is not available at the moment but will be re-enabled on June 17, replacing another mode. This is a temporary solution, and Sharkmob hopes it will speed up matchmaking for everyone while a more permanent solution is found, or the game’s population grows big enough to support all match queues at the same time.
If you are new to Bloodhunt, you may be wondering what this means about the game’s matchmaking quality, but the reality is that this is an issue in every battle royale on the market. To ensure they are at least somewhat fun and fair, competitive games require players to be grouped not only by server proximity but also by relative skill. This gets tricky when the default lobby size is 45 players as in the case of Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodhunt, and is further complicated by the fact that the game is so skill-intensive that crossplay between PC and PlayStation 5 players is essentially not an option. Controller players are at a noticeable disadvantage, and most of them justifiably opt to not mix with the PC playerbase, which further slows down matchmaking times.
While we hope that Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodhunt solves its matchmaking woes, it’s hard to imagine a reality in which all game modes can be available at the same time. Apex Legends — a battle royale with similar lobby sizes, game modes, and skill ceiling — has more than 45 times as many players as Bloodhunt and yet suffers from very similar issues, with players routinely experiencing long queue times and wonky matchmaking. Having too many game mode options just doesn’t seem to be a good idea for these games.
