Not everyone of us has the luxury to have a local scene or local players to play with offline, and have therefore to rely on online modi to find opponents.
But as long as you don't play the most popular fighting games like Tekken or Street Fighter, you might have issues finding others online. Fighting games are a very specific nichè of games themselves and depending on the game you play it might be harder or easier to find enemies.

But you can increase your chances easily by taking note of a few things and using the right options, times and channels. Often people claim that a game "is dead" where the main issues is simply because they are not willing to search for people in the right way or not follow some simple rules.

So before you give up and drop a game you like, be sure to give the options I describe here a thorough chance.

Simple, but often forgotten in the days of matchmaking, is that people don't play all the time and with games that have a lower playercount, this starts to show.

In general, the best options from what I can tell are:

• Search for games at the late afternoon to evening. You have a weak chance to find people in the early afternoon and a very weak chance in the morning or before noon. People have to go to work or to school and often just don't have time during the day to play. Some people play till late in the night, but in general, I suggest you start searching up from 17:00.
  You should find some people at least up to 20:00. Times for this obviously differ depending on countries and there are always some outliers.
  
• The best days to find players are obviously Friday, Saturday and Sunday, in short when people have freetime or they are on holidays. I also feel like people sometimes play on Monday still (here in EU) to get some motivation at the start of the week, or sometimes on Wednesday or Thursday if they can find the time. But ye, this surely differs from country to country and there probably is also a lot of cultural differences playing part there.

Depending on the game, consider the following things to be of importance:

• Search in your area/server region. Usually this gets set automatically but in some games you can also set the area the game searches for other players manually. Usually you obviously want to select the region you actually play yourself in, because you get the most stable connections. But in some edge-cases or if you really are just unlucky and in an area where there are no players at all, you could change it to the next nearest server region and bite in the sour apple. You should really consider this only as a last resort though. Just confirm that you've chosen the correct server. IMPORTANT FOR UNIST: In this game, it is seemingly of importance of what you set your "Dowload Region" of steam to. If you try to join the lobby of a player that has a different download-region, you might not find each other! The default region for EU (according to the standard discord) seems to be UK-MANCHESTER.
  
• Usually for anime-fighters/air-dashers like BBTag and Guilty Gear, but also for games like Unist people do not play in ranked or matchmade games! This is simply because there is not a big enough playerbase to make matchmaking worthwhile, and people avoid it totally. What you want to search for player made lobbies or server lobbies. Even in best case scenarios and playing at the right time and in populated areas, people avoid matchmade modes.
  UNIST-update: Since UNIST got added to EVO-2019, the player-count skyrocketed, and so did the people searching in ranked modes. If you search at convenient times (described in this guide as well) you are very likely to find someone to play with within 15 minutes! Just consider that you might also get matched with much stronger opponents, as the player-count is still too low to consider this evaluation, but it can be a good and casual alternative! Also the quality of matchmade games is worse than playing directly with someone and additionally you can't choose the level which can also add more lag if it isn't Park (seemingly).

Because it can sometimes be hard to find players, people don't simply wait around in lobbies all the time hoping that someone joins. Instead, they use other websites or chats to talk with each other and meet together for games. The standard right now is the chat-program "Discord", which you can download here: https://discordapp.com

You can download the app and let it run in the background (suggested) or use it in your browser. The program works with channels that require an invite, so you have to get a link from somewhere to be able to join the channel and be able to watch and write there. You only need to do that once, as soon as you got invited with your account the channels will open anytime you open Discord.

• This here is the most popular Unist Discord channel, click the link to get invited: https://discord.gg/fBbMc72UK2
  
• Every chat is divided into sub-channels, for finding people to play with, click on the matchmaking channel for your platform, there is "psn_netplay_room", "pc_netplay_room" and "europe_matchmaking".
  
• To be able to be notified for when a player searches for a match in your region, you first have to assign yourself a role. For this, click on the "lexbot" sub-channel at the top under Information. Type "!role list" into the chat and press enter, and you find a complete list of all roles you can use and the people who have that role. Search for your platform and your region, then type "!role add " followed by the name of the role and the bot will assign it to you.
  
• Now as long as you have Discord open, you will be notified by a sound and a red flag on the channel it came from when a player who has the same role searches for an opponent currently. Go back to the matchmaking channel and accept the match, agree together on a server lobby or if you want to make a private one and play!
  
• If no one else is searching currently, you can put out a call yourself. For that go into the matchmaking channel of your platform and then type "@" with the role you want to ping behind it and press enter. This informs now everyone on the Discord with a ping who has the same role, maybe someone out there agrees!
  (But don't ping too often and don't spam the "@" option, because if you do it can become very annoying as a lot of people get informed constantly and a mod might ban you for it. Give it a break after every ping, like at least half-an-hour, sometimes people who join later see your ping and then agree.)

As an example, here is how in my case I would go if I want to find a match:

• I play on PC (Steam) and I play in Europe. Therefore I go to the "lexbot" channel and type "!role list".
  
• I see that there is a role that fits my options, it is called "NetplayEUPC".
  I type "!role add NetplayEUPC" and the bot confirms that I now have that role.
  
• I then join the appropriate matchmaking channel, which is in my case "europe_matchmaking". I see that no one searches for someone to play with currently, so I type "@NetplayEUPC" which pings all people on the Discord with the same role.
  
• Luckily after a few minutes, someone in the channel answers me. We tell each other which nick we have in-game and agree to meet in a lobby.

Discord is a great way to take part in the community of a game and to find people to play with. Or just to chat! Also, there is a lot of tech shared about the game and the characters, be sure to check out the approriate character-channels where you can find all kind of information and help. You can also assign yourself a character role to be notified of news about them.

There are other Discord channels of the game, which you may find useful too:
A BBTag discord specifically for EU players, the "Awakening the Chaos" community; very populated and friendly and they hold frequent EU online-tournaments for PC and PS4: https://discord.gg/xjHDwja

Another Unist discord, with a focus on PC matchmaking: https://discord.gg/scemVRQ
There are also Discords for general fighting games and for specific regions and more, you can find more information in the "other discords" sub-channel.

If you followed the above points, the last advice I can give is to sometimes simply be patient.
You may have already opened up a game, went into online mode and then found out that all the lobbies are empty. You then closed the game.
But it could very well been that another player was thinking the same, also saw empty lobbies and also closed the game.

You see what I want to say here? Sometimes no one joins a server because it is empty and it ends with it staying empty. Whereas often if you enter the lobby and wait some 15 minutes, someone who just checked the lobbies saw you being there and then joined too. This often then ends with more people seeing players on the server, and more people joining, further populating it!

So ye, it doesn't work all the time obviously but sometimes you need to be the change you want to see yourself. Mulitplayer games "dying" happens very naturally most of the time, but it always starts with people not wanting to bother to search for others to play with. It sometimes needs a bit of an active effort to drive against that regression.