Gears 2 Multiplayer Patched Again
Epic says a server reconfiguration has eased matchmaking times.
December 11, 2008 - Epic Games has released a second update for Gears of War 2 in an attempt to reduce the long wait times players have been experiencing in online multiplayer matchmaking.
Since the game's launch in November, Gears players have had difficulties getting into multiplayer matches, with multi-minute wait times common for many game types. Epic released a patch over Thanksgiving to address the issue, but many gamers (including the Gears 2 players here at IGN) saw no marked difference.
But this week, Gears 2 senior producer Rod Fergusson posted an update on the official Gears of War 2 message board saying the company had revamped its matchmaking servers for the game to address the ongoing issues.
As of Tuesday of this week (Dec 9th), we successfully completed the reconfiguration of our matchmaking servers allowing us to have more players per server. This optimization allows us to take greater advantage of our Nov 27th title update. Based on what we're seeing so far, matchmaking times have improved significantly. To be realistic though, there will still be times when a particular playlist is low on available players or there isn't a party of the right size to merge with yours but overall, you should get into a match much quicker than before.
Three quarters of the IGN staff is either on vacation, out sick with one or more deadly viruses or still drunk from holiday parties. So we haven't had time to test the latest patch for ourselves to see if it's fixed the problems Epic is referring to. How about you? If you've logged on since the patch went through on Tuesday, have you experienced shorter matchmaking wait times than in previous attempts? Let us know in the comments section below.
http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/937/937878p1.html
