Payday 3 servers continue to be a mess, even after matchmaking fixes
The launch of Payday 3 has not been the most stable, even after things were seemingly about to get better.
Payday 3 officially launched last Thursday, September 21, following an early access period for owners of the Silver and Gold editions of the game. While server stability during the early access launch was rocky, things took a turn for the worse when the floodgates opened on the full launch day.
From the next day onwards, matchmaking services started suffering from severe outages. Matchmaking is essential for a co-op game like Payday 3, and that's especially true if you don't have a full group of friends to create a full party.
Later that day, matchmaking was down across all platforms, which ruined Friday night for many players who thought they'd be playing the heisting simulator to kick off the weekend. The official Payday account on Twitter spent much of the day issuing updates, though most of them weren't good.
Eventually, things improved, and players were able to play again. Then, matchmaking issues started popping up yet again later that day, and they were once again so widespread that they affected all platforms.
Things started to recover, though only for a couple of hours, before services got interrupted once again. It got to the point that no one was able to create a lobby. The issues persisted throughout the weekend, and it made a lot of players drop the game entirely.
The most recent update, issued about five hours ago, confirmed that matchmaking services have resumed, and that the team is working on stabilising things so Payday 3 doesn't run into the same problems in the future.
It's worth noting that Payday 3 is a day-one Game Pass release on PC, and Xbox Series X/S. It's also available on Steam, as well as PS5 - with cross-play support on all platforms. It's a massive undertaking for what remains a small team by triple-A standards, but that hasn't stopped all the launch issues from souring players on the game.
Payday 3's Steam user review rating currently sits at 'Mostly Negative', with 67% of the nearly 24,000 reviews being negative. As you might have guessed, most of them lament the server issues and disconnects.