The “Break it Down” Blog

So you’re coming out of your turkey coma and thinking of doing a little gaming. You throw in Gears of War 2 and you notice the game has an update available.  That’s not a hallucination resulting from your Thanksgiving Day feasting hangover. Epic released their first update to Gears of War 2 today.

Rod Fergusson, Senior Producer for Gears of Wars 2, posted over on Epic’s forums that this is just a quick update to address matchmaking issues and any other fixes will be coming later.

Hey all,

I’m happy to announce that this morning, at 3:40 AM PST, we released a title update that should help with the current matchmaking issues. In order to get the update out as quickly as possible, we focused just on immediate infrastructure issues and have left any potential gameplay issues for a future update. Here’s what’s in today’s title update:

• Adjustments to make Public matchmaking faster, especially in the single player party and the four player party case. Some of these adjustments should be felt immediately and some will play out over several days as our update enables us to reduce player segmentation by reducing the number of servers required to do matchmaking. This will increase the number of possible matches available for you to join.
• A tweak that should prevent us from losing some of our additional detailed stats data that we gather for gearsofwar.com. Due to the large number of concurrent matches, our stats gathering servers were not able to collect data for every single match played. The Xbox LIVE leaderboards are 100% accurate but our existing stats web pages may have some missing data prior to the update.
• A fix to address the issue where some players were unable to start the story-based campaign if Xbox LIVE was down or unavailable.

Something to keep in mind, if you have been playing Gears 2 since the title update was made available, then you will need to restart the game in order to be prompted for the update. If you don’t do this, then a situation will occur where people without the update will not be able to match make with people who have the update. This has nothing to do with the game or this update in particular, just the way the title update system works.

We want to thank everyone for their patience during this time and we will continue to monitor the situation. We’re hopeful that the matchmaking issues we’ve seen up till now are a thing of the past.

Thanks,
Rod

I’m glad to see they got these major issues addressed so quickly. Hopefully they’ll also be able to address some of the glitches in short order as well.