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How to Fix Call of Duty Matchmaking: Parties, Chat, Adding Friends, Disconnecting, and Custom Game Lag


How to Fix Party Problems in Call of Duty
Credit: Activision

In modern Call of Duty games, playing online often comes with a bunch of random bugs and issues you'll have from time to time. The most common ones include being able to add people as friends, struggling to join parties or having people join your party, getting disconnected from your party, not hearing your teammates or them not hearing you, and dealing with lag in custom games. Not to worry, because we have solutions for each and every issue, so in this article, we'll explain everything you need to know about how to fix Call of Duty matchmaking.

How to Fix Party Problems in Call of Duty

The most common problems out there involve not being able to connect to a party or having your friends unable to join your party. It's not exactly clear why this issue crops up whenever it does, but there are a few ways to get around it. If there're multiple people in the party, sometimes joining on a different person in the party works, but not always. If that doesn't work, the best thing you can do if you're having trouble joining is to restart your game and try joining again.

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This usually fixes the problem, but sometimes the person hosting the party needs to restart their game as well. Though, you might be able to get around this, depending on how many people are in the party, by forming a new party with a different host. If nothing seems to be working, the foolproof way to fix these kinds of connection issues is to have every player involved restart their game and try to form a party again as normal.

How to Fix Not Being Able to Add Friends in Call of Duty

Something you'll notice when playing is that when you add a friend, rather counterintuitively they won't just appear on your friends list after they accept your request. This can quickly become frustrating if you're just trying to pick somebody up and continue queuing. First off, across all platforms, if you restart your game, you'll immediately see them appear on your friends list. And if you wait, maybe 5 or 10 minutes, they also will appear on your friends list.

Another tactic you can take advantage of is by using platform-specific invites. If you play on PlayStation or Xbox, using the default friends and invite system built into the console is usually a lot more reliable and effective and can avoid a lot of the traditional issues you run into using Activision's friend system.

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Lastly, there's a rather unorthodox thing you can do if you're just trying to join up on somebody you met, for example in-game. As long as the person you're trying to join has their party settings set to open such that anybody can join them, you can find them in your recent players and join them from there, all without having to formally add them as a friend at all.

How to Fix Getting Disconnected From a Party in Call of Duty

When playing, you might happen into a situation where you get a notification that people in your party have left your party while they still remain in your particular lobby or game as usual. This is a bug that most often happens after loading in or out of a game or lobby. Usually, it's best to reform the party and requeue immediately to avoid further problems later on.

However, if you're trying to join a party and you keep getting disconnected, it's usually not advised for you to restart your game. Usually, this means there's an issue with the host, so they're better off restarting their game or your party is better off switching hosts. This is because if someone with an unstable connection is hosting, this can itself cause issues where queue times will skyrocket and sometimes even fail to find games at all.

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How to Fix Not Hearing Teammates in Call of Duty

This is a strange bug. Randomly, it seems, you'll suddenly stop hearing a particular party member, or you'll unfortunately be the party member that suddenly can't be heard by someone. Fortunately, while strange, this problem will resolve itself if you simply wait for a little and continue on. Seemingly, there's a better chance of it fixing itself after loading, whether it's into a game or out of a game.

It's pretty random in how long the issue will last, so if you're sick of it and want to solve it instantly, you and the person that can't hear you need to both restart their games and rejoin the party. This almost always fixes the problem. If it doesn't you can try forming your party again with a different host. While fixes are always reliable, this problem is always temporary.

How to Fix Lag in Custom Games in Call of Duty

The thing you have to understand about custom games is that they aren't hosted on the same dedicated servers as normal multiplayer. Custom games in Call of Duty are peer-to-peer (or P2P) like Call of Duty games of old, so the connection will be based on how good your connection is to the players in the game, not to a central server. This means the host of a custom game will always enjoy the strongest connection and thus get the greatest advantage.

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In general, the strategy to avoid this is to make someone geographically somewhere centrally located the host, or at the very least it means you should avoid, for example, having the one European guy in the party be host when there's a party full of Americans. That kind of thing. Unfortunately, outside of switching around hosts and being careful who you run custom games with, there isn't a foolproof way to eliminate custom game lag.

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