Hey Time Travelers,
As we keep acting on your feedback and rolling out new improvements, we want to give you a heads up on a meaningful change to matchmaking in Out of Time.
Quick Play (and location/difficulty specific queues) are being replaced by a new system called Squad Finder.
Its goal is simple: help you find the right squad at the right difficulty.
Why the Change?
Quick Play is very good at one thing: getting players into runs fast. But that speed came with some tradeoffs:
Squads with… let’s call them “creative” power level gaps
Difficulty preferences aren’t respected strongly enough - we didn’t even ask!
With individual location/difficulty queues, we spread players out too much, which made it harder to consistently match players together so players would frequently end up in runs solo
What we’ve heard is pretty clear.
Players are fine with randomness in location. They’re not fine with randomness in difficulty. We missed the mark on matchmaking, and Squad Finder is built to fix that.
What’s Different?
You now queue by difficulty, not by zone. You’ll choose one of the following:
All Available (allows players to match in any difficulty they’ve unlocked)
Normal
Hard
Shattered 1 - 5
Shattered 6 - 10
Shattered 11 - 20
You can select one option at a time, and matchmaking will only pair you with players looking for the same difficulty.
No More Auto-Launching
Once matchmaking finds players:
Everyone stays in town
You get a notification when the squad is formed
One player becomes the Squad Leader
The Squad Leader chooses where the squad goes next
No surprise launches. No accidental runs.
You decide when and where to jump.
The World Map will now make it clearer for your whole group:
Which zones are unlocked
Whether everyone can enter at the selected difficulty
No more guessing before you select a location or difficulty.
What About New Players?
New players won’t see Squad Finder right away.
First runs are directed into Private Games to acclimate new players to a full run.
After completing their first run, Squad Finder is introduced through the tutorial
This gives new Time Travelers a chance to learn the basics before jumping into matchmaking.
What’s Next?
This is phase one.
This is a foundational change aimed at improving match quality based directly on your feedback. As always, we’ll be watching how it performs in the wild and adjusting as needed.
Let us know how Squad Finder feels once it’s live.
We’ll see you out there!
– The Out of Time Team