MAKE SURE YOU OWN THE REV 2 EXPANSION, THE BASE GAME REVELATOR IS OUTDATED AND THE GAME VERSIONS ARE NOT COMPATIBLE

Xrd is still alive and gaining new players regularly and you may very well be one of them!
But as you boot up the game and hop online you find all the lobbies are empty and ranked is a wasteland. Where are all the players?



Lobbies (the spaces with 64 player slots) are very suboptimal for playing online compared to player rooms, which offer

• 8 player slots
  
• 4 cabs to play on
  
• queueing up behind other players
  
• spectating
  
• access to all of the other modes the game has to offer like training, lessons or trials

so the latter is what the playerbase has chosen to rely on for online matches.


So if you want to play online, the option you select is Player Match.
Here you can either look for available rooms (usually there's a room up close to whatever region you may be in) or if there's no room available, you can still open one up, yourself. It shouldn't take long for someone to join.

The reason the room list might look small is because the game automatically hides full rooms so there might be a lot of action going on that you're just not seeing because the room is full already.

If opening a room still doesn't help and nobody jumps in to play with you, another great way to find matches is through Discord. There are many, many Discord servers with matchmaking areas to find opponents and oftentimes you will also find announcements for Netplay Tournaments in these servers, which again open the door to fight other people and spaces to find even more people.

I can't provide a full list of Servers in this guide but I will list a few to give you a head start and a space to ask for more directions or get advice:

The general Rev2 Discord is by far the most populated and you'll find players from all regions here. Matchmaking is more or less only really active for NA here. Still this is a good place to find more resources and get directions to other spaces like the character-specific Discords.
https://discord.gg/vXuQYrR

The largest European Discord servers would be
Guilty Gear Europe: https://discord.gg/pQquh24
and
Hearts are Blazing: https://discord.gg/S328nHk
The latter is not entirely focused on GG but its matchmaking for Xrd is very active.

From these servers you should be able to jump onto many more through cross-advertising of tournaments or just general advice from players.

I hope this helps some new players who might get the impression that the game is dead, because it is very much alive to this day.