After several disliked multiplayer public trials, and a singeplayer that is blowing everyone’s minds, not a lot of people are paying attention to the full multiplayer mode in the new DOOM.

Well we haven’t forgotten, and we fired up that mode last night for a few rounds. Unfortunately, the automated matchmaking was painfully slow and finding a full lobby was nigh-on impossible.

The matches we did find were sparsely populated despite having chosen the most popular mode, team deathmatch. The lobbies of other modes were desolate.

The problem seems to be our location, as we noticed all the other players we encountered were also from South Africa. Unfortunately there is no way to change region from within the game, so you need to do a bit of a workaround.

This involves changing your download location inside of Steam. Here’s how to do it:

Open the Steam client. Click on ‘Steam’ in the upper left-hand corner. Click on ‘Settings’. On the left-hand column, click on ‘Downloads’. Under the option ‘Download Region’ click on the drop-down list. You’ll need to choose a country and region. We chose ‘UK – London’ due to the similar timezone. You may need to experiment with this option to find the best fit. Click on ‘OK’. A popup box will appear telling you to restart Steam, which you’ll need to do. Once you’re back in Steam, fire up DOOM and get going. Your matchmaking should be much faster now.

Because this game seems to use dedicated servers, we didn’t suffer any extra lag due to playing overseas opponents. In fact, when we played against South Africans exclusively, every single person on the scoreboard had terrible ping, so switching over makes little to no difference.

One last thing: your region setting seems to reset every so often, so keep an eye on it.