Is it time for complete global saturation?
If you’ve been paying attention to the Street Fighter 6 online discourse at all for the past however many months, you probably noticed quite a few players complain about one issue in particular.
That was people only getting matched up against the same small few pool of people for online matches over and over again, which Capcom finally tried to address in the new update for SF6 from this week.
As was stated in the patch notes, SF6 now allows users to change their matchmaking range in game to hopefully find a wider variety of opponents.
This can simply be done in the Search Range option within the Matchmaking tab of Battle Settings and can be set to Limited, Expanded and Worldwide.
I have no motivation to play ranked in Street Fighter 6. I don’t feel like fighting the same 3 players constantly due to low search range. I run sets daily when im on but finding sets can be tricky sometimes. Gonna continue grinding Tekken 8 & play other games in the meantime
— Chakotay (@ElChakotay) February 1, 2024
The game notes it will start searching in your specified range, but will expand if it takes too long to find a viable match.
All of that certainly sounds great, but how does it work in practice?
Well, our own Jon ‘Catalyst’ Grey and myself recently did a bit of testing with all three of the settings with him in the Master rank and me in Gold-Platinum.
The different settings did seem to work for me pretty well since I started noticing more Canadian and Mexican flags from the Midwest when I changed it to Expanded without really impacting wait times.
When switching it to worldwide, however, I did notice I was more likely to wait a bit longer and have matches pop up that were 1–3 bars in connection instead of the usual 4–5 on Limited and Expanded.
As for Catalyst, he felt like changing to Worldwide significantly slowed down the amount of matches he was getting normally and didn’t notice getting matched up with anyone outside of his region.
These are just anecdotal results though from only two players so take that with a grain of salt, but from my observation, it does appear to be working mostly as intended.
That being said, however, changing the search range doesn’t seem all that necessary unless you are one of the players who typically gets matched up with a small pool of opponents.
We’ve mostly heard about this happening to Diamond and Master rank players, but it likely varies by location and connection too.
So if you are having issues, experimenting with the new options may turn out to be a good thing for you.
Just be aware that “worldwide” connections may not hold up as well.