question

>> I'm working on a game where we would have a gamemode that matchmake about a hundred players together.

PlayFab provides the Match Making feature that can match the players together according to the different queue configurations. And PlayFab stipulates that if the queue uses team configurations, the maximum number of players allowed in the match must be less than or equal to 32, otherwise the value must be less than or equal to 100. So, if you use the team-specific rules for your match, you can match 32 players for one match at most. If you want to match 100 players together, you can only match the players without configuring teams.

You can consider check this documentation -- Matchmaking scenario and configuration examples to search the queue configuration that suits your requirement. If you want to make a Battle Royale style game, this example -- Expansion of number of players over time may be helpful. If you use this example, your game will prefer having a full match to begin with, but over time may be satisfied with fewer and fewer people.

>> Once the game is full, it would distribute all players into several matches where the losers would be eliminated and the winners compete against each other in brackets until a winning team emerges, like a March Madness elimination tournament.

Once you integrate PlayFab Multiplayer Server with PlayFab MatchMaking, PlayFab would help you match the players then allocate servers for every matchmaking. For your case, you can match the players based the queue configuration -- Expansion of number of players over time, to allocate the server to your tournament. Then you need to organize some parallel games on the server manually.

>> Like any game mode, if there is no lobby available when a player wants to play that type of gameplay, a new lobby would be created.

The Match Making process is automated, if all match is in the matched status, it would start the new matchmaking. But when the match is in the matching state, no server will be allocated. PlayFab Match Making doesn’t support lobby. Matched players can only enter the server together.

>> So the difficulty here is about creating matches inside a global matchmade match. Is PlayFab supporting this kind of structure?

As you said, there is not an out-of-box solution to create the matches inside a global matchmaking match. You can try to implement the sub-matches’ allocation logic in your server program manually or allocate the server manually.

If you allocate the server manually, you can make a game lobby. Players can enter the lobby then wait for other people. You can also allocate servers for the custom matchmake. If so, you would need to use the external VM as the allocator server. The sample -- MpsAllocatorSample allows you to easily call some frequently used MPS APIs, like list VMs/servers and allocate (RequestMultiplayerServer). You can refer it to make the allocator server.