Epic has finally got Gears of War 2’s third title update out the door which was expected to bring major change to the game.
Title update-one was release to fix bugs that weren’t discovered until the game was released into the wild. Title update-two was released to add server side control to allow realtime adjustments in the game without needing patches as well as fix exploits and do some balancing. Title update-three was suppose to be the one to introduce some significant changes in the game, so did it?
Going from rank 1 to rank 25 since the patch came out which takes about 30 hours, we feel we’ve got a pretty good handle on what’s fixed and what’s still broken.
RANKING SYSTEM
Lets talk first about the ranking system. Originally, to the left of your name were chevrons that represented your trueskill rank. Since your rank goes up and down based on individual and team play, it took a lot of work to rank up and then one or two losses to rank down which was pissing people off. So Epic has made that invisible and replaced it with a number rank like you see in Halo 3 and Call of Duty. The ranks go from 0-99 with the amount of Exp needed to promote is more each time and once you promote to 100 your get a little symbol by your name, there is no rolling over your rank like COD.
This new number ranking has nothing to do with matchmaking, in fact, it’s not even factored in. The new invisible trueskill rank is still what is used to setup matches and you still move up and down in trueskill rank just like you did before, the difference is that you can’t see it happening anymore. Your XP rank will never go down unless your lag switching or dropping games early.
The new ranking system works differently; you get some percentage of points, as normal, at the end of the match displayed on the far left column of the game ending stats page.
The ratio breaks down by gametype and ratio:
- Annex: 0.26
- King of The Hill: 0.28
- Submission: 0.49
- Guardian: 0.91
- Execution: 0.98
- Warzone: 1.00
- Wingman: 1.09
You may think, "ok I’ll just play Warzone or Wingman since they are 1:1 or better ratio," but you need to remember you don’t score as many points in that match. Playing Annex, which has the worst ratio, gives you the chance to walk away from that game with 4000-5000 points fairly easily, which would net you more than 1000 experience towards your rank.
So, really there is no game type that’s truly better than another for ranking up faster. If you’re a really good killer and that’s all you can do, then playing wingman with another strong killer will be your game, or play execution with a team of people. If you’re playing execution and you’re the weakest killer on the team, you’ll walk away from the match with hardly any Experience. So in your case, maybe Annex is a better game for you as you get points for breaking and capturing the annex instead of just straight up killing.
The Experience is really balanced across all game types, you’ll get the most Experience playing the game type you’re best at given the team of people you’re working with. In our experience, execution rounds ended with 500-900 XP on average and annex rounds ended with 1200-1500 XP per match.
Now lets talk about penalties. First, lag switchers, bridges and legit hosts that have bandwidth issues, if detected, will get zero experience points for the round and banned from being picked as host. If you drop out of a game early, you will be assessed a -1500XP penalty.
If the penalty is given to you at the completion of your next game you get zero XP for that game plus get -1500 Exp as your score so it can drop you multiple ranks if you’re in the lower rank levels. However, this penalty isn’t always applied after just one drop, it can take up to three drops out of a games and then on the next game you complete you’ll get 0 XP for that match and then -4500. It could also happen after your second dropped match, there doesn’t seem to be a solid pattern with it but it is keeping track.
Before the new ranking system, playing against lag switchers sucked but you could just leave the match; now it really sucks. If you get into a room and the other team is lag switching or bridging, they’ll lag you out and run around and whore the points off of your team because you can’t do anything due to lag. If you’re playing territories this means the game can drone on forever since they won’t cap the last annex to end the round or match.
The only thing you can do is drop out and risk getting the negative XP penalty or sit there and take it while wasting the time you could be playing a real match earning XP. Either way it sucks and is becoming an increasing problem as the week progressed.
The only other problem I see with the new ranking system is that you can only tell how many points you have and need for the next level at the end of each round. There is no place you can see how much XP you earned in the last match or how much you have or need other than at the completion of matches. It’s not in the game summary anywhere, not on GearsOfWar.com and not in the War Journal. You get a three second view of it at the completion of a game via a pop-up on the right side of the screen and that’s it.
BOTS
Epic has added an auto-team balancing feature in which the team that looses a player early will receive an Insane Bot on their team. Bots aren’t usually great at objective type games but every game we were in yesterday that ended up with a bot, the Bot had the highest down stat on that team. The bots don’t miss and would probably be excellent on deathmatch style games.
You will only get a bot if the teams are unbalanced. If one side already has a bot and someone on the other team drops, both teams will then have a bot for that round. Once the round is over however, both the bots are removed and the game continues 4v4. So bots will only fill in to keep teams even.
In the odd even that an entire team quits the match, you will play your team VS bots and this is a perfect opportunity to do some legit XP whoring.
STANDBYERS/LAG SWITCHERS/BRIDGERS
Epic has promised to deal with this cesspool class of gamer with title update-three. Initially we went 10 wins in Annex without ever running into a single lag switcher and we thought Epic has really done a great job. Turns out, we just by luck of the draw had 10 cheat-free matches. As the day rolled on, we ran into an increasing frequency of lag switched matches and as the week rolled on we’ve run into more and more of it.
The update added advanced detection code to tell who is lagging the game out. This person will finish the game with zero XP and will be banned from hosting future matches. While this seems well and good, it does nothing to improve the experience of the game for the other people not cheating, they still need to deal with being lagged. As I already said, you’re given two bad choices, sit there and waste your time taking it when you could be playing a cheat-free match earning XP or quit and risk the -1500 Exp penalty.
What we think would be the ideal solution is to add host migration to the code and then leverage the new features of UT3. So when a lag switcher is detected, they are booted from the game, replaced with a bot and assessed a -1500 Exp penalty for dropping the match early. That’s what needs to happen, not letting them stay in the game wrecking the experience for everyone and assessing a zero XP penalty. This patch doesn’t go nearly far enough to deal with the issue.
HOST ADVANTAGE
The host advantage now is as bad as it ever was in Gears 1. When Gears 2 came out, Epic made some effort to balance the host guns with everyone else’s guns, especially the shot gun. Now, however, the host shotgun advantage in a big way. If Epic is going to bring back host advantage like this, they could at least put an outline around the match host so you know who it is and can adjust your gunfighting accordingly.
WEAPON TWEAKS
Smoke Grenades : Now when you get knocked down with a smoke grenade, you get up after 2 seconds. Doesn’t matter if you’re sliding down the stairs or what, you get up. This however creates situations when someone may get up in the air and look like they’re floating, we saw that a few times.
Rodie Running : You get stuck to more stuff now, I’m not sure why Epic saw it necessary to mess with the cover sensitivity. But this is a step backwards as far as I’m concerned.
Two Piecing : While it can still be done, the receiver has much more opportunity to get out of the way so it’s much less effective. You can no longer melee with your shotgun right out of rodie running, the same delay for shooting has been added for meleeing. There is also a longer delay between the melee and being able to shoot now so you can just roll to the side to get out of the way.
Shotgun : I’m not sure if there was a version of title update-three that you had to pay 1600 Microsoft Points for that gave you the one-shot-gib shotgun, but I obviously downloaded the wrong title update, the free one. Epic says they didn’t adjust anything with the shotgun however I’m getting one-shot-gibbed at DISTANCE where as I can have an active reloaded shotgun stuck up a Locusts ass and it still takes three shots to down him never mind gib. It also am getting downed more at a distance from enemy shotgun fire too. Maybe this is all related to the new found host advantage I spoke about earlier but either way, it’s getting really annoying.
Chainsaw : The shotgun will now spin down the saw more reliably than it did before. Also the angle in which a duel is initiated has been increased so you’ll get pulled into more duels now than before which are won easily by programmable controllers.. oh you don’t have one?
Overall with title update-three, the game is better post-patch than before but if you didn’t like the multiplayer before, it probably still isn’t something you’ll like. Only time will tell if this update will be enough to bring Gears back up the Live charts, as of last week it had sunk down another spot. The update doesn’t go far enough in addressing lag switchers though and we’re worried now if every unbalanced or lag switched territories match will turn into a rank whoring fiesta. Who wants to make a guess at when the first double XP weekend will be for Gears?
