We have a use case where players launch the game and immediately go to a "social hub" game server instance. We can use matchmaking to allocate a new server if no other servers are back-filling (and still not sure that back-fill tickets get priority).
Ideally, if a single player is looking to join a social hub server, and other servers are full, a new server is allocated and starts back-filling as new players also start looking for a social hub server. The current Matchmaking API requires a minimum of 2 players to get a "match" (for most cases, this is desired I suppose). In development and early-access, this is a problem as there is little chance that any two will be searching at the same time before the match timeout occurs.
What I would really like is for this particular matchmaking ruleset, find a social hub server that has free space, or allocate a new one right away if none are available when the request is made.
I could roll a bespoke system with Redis to accomplish this in conjunction with some cloudscript, but have to pretty much implement all of the same solutions that should already be baked in to the matchmaking backend.
This is NOT a lobby. It is a dedicated game server where players can run around and interact in a different game mode before choosing to go on to another competitive match.