Let’s begin with the biggest change, the new RPG style ranking system. In other words, you can farm yourself a way to the ‘top’. I guess that this shows the problem of the system: it doesn’t show how skilled you are, just how long you’ve played the game, and there’s no one to one connection between those two things, unfortunately. In other words, the rank is quite meaningless, they could as well have made a clock that shows your playing time instead… It is, however, better than the unclear, and partially unfair, old ranking system. Although a better solution would have been to make 100 skill based ranks instead of 100 experience points based ranks.

Nevertheless, the old ranking system is still used in an invisible way for matchmaking. And needless to say, it still doesn’t work. The skill differences between the players in the teams are still very big and total walk-overs aren’t rare. It’s a shame that they didn’t change that.

One of the other big changes is the new system that puts a bot in the team when someone leaves. To be honest, I still don’t know what to think about it. Of course, it’s better for the team than lacking a player, but I prefer playing against a team full of real players who don’t have auto-aim, and who don’t know how to play the game (you’ll understand that last thing when you’ve played annex or King of the Hill against a team of 3 humans and two bots). But oh well, I guess it’s pretty nice not having to play 1 vs 5 anymore.

Besides these two large game-mechanic changes, there’s also a content update. There’s 250 gamerpoints of new achievements and there’s a new map pack. I haven’t got it, so I don’t know if it’s worth buying, but the maps look good. The big question in my opinion is: is the game now playable enough to actually buy extra content.

The answer, surprisingly, seems to be ‘yes’. I say ‘seems’, because I’ve only played for about 2 hours, but they were nearly without any lag. When scrolling through the change notes I noticed that thist wasn’t luck, or at least shouldn’t be. They’ve made the data exchange faster, people who standby are found faster and you are teamed up with people so your ping is lower than 200ms. It still isn’t totally lag free, but it’s a great start. Next to that, the matchmaking seems to be a lot faster than it was. I’m finding matches in 1 or 2 minutes. This used to be a lot more.

Also some minor changes have made the game a lot better. Like the new playlists. You can now actually choose between two gametypes that you want to play, because every playlist now just contains two gametypes. No random horrors anymore (except the maps.. but oh well).

When summing everything up, I’ve really got a positive feeling about this patch. I actually think that it might have saved the  game. With the lag preventing changes, the game is actually playable online, and it’s not as irritating as it was. It feels less like wasting time, and more like having fun.  Sure, it still has a glitch or two, but the problems aren’t as serious as they were.

So, if you have stopped playing GoW2 because the lag nearly killed you, try it again, and play the game as it was, probably, meant to be. This patch has really done it’s job well.

Since the first patch, some improvements were made in the matchmaking system to make it faster, making the game actually playable for the first time… well for a short time that is. Shortly after this improvement I noticed that nearly all games were laggy. Of course, this lag produced more factors that rendered Gears of War 2 unplayable: Host advantages (something quite normal with lag) and the legendary “no-weapon-glitch” which screwed up the rest of the gameplay.

The reason why there’s so much lag seems to be that Gears of War 2 does not make the player with the best connection host… Besides that, it seems that if the host is inactive at start up, there will be lag anyway till the host moves. A problem that lies within Gears of War 2 itself, and that seems pretty patchable.

The second thing that made GoW2 unplayable were the early leaving people. One moment you are with a team, the second moment everyone is gone. Normally, I don’t care about this, but there are times when the host disconnects. In most modern games, this isn’t a problem, but in GoW2 it is. When the host leaves, no new host is selected and the game ends. As a bonus, all players in the game will get a penalty for early leaving (this has even demoted me once).

Next to these major problems, there are some other irritations in the form of minor bugs/glitches like the “jump over a shield and go through the doors” on pavilion glitch, which is extremely easy to do, and can get you a lot of kills with it, including taking out the enemy leader on guardian.

So, after this whole story: WHY does the second Gears of War patch fail? The answer is quite simple: It does NOT fix ANY of the bugs named above, and these are the most irritating ones. Epic even made the “host left -> penalty for all players” bug a bit worse by giving larger penalties for early leavers. Of course, they have fixed some small bugs that were quite hard to trigger (Kung Fu Flip… invisibility… etc.), they’ve done some balancing (or so they say, I don’t even notice the difference),  and the Hail map is really improved (no grenade advantage anymore), but the most essential bugs which make the game unplayable, like the extreme lag, are still there.

The score: After two patches we’ve got an unplayable game, some worthless achievements with which they try to boost the Combustible Map Pack sales and a lot of wasted time. I can not say that I have every seen this in any game before in my life. Similar problems were solved on CoD4 with one or two patches. What irritates me the most is that the patches are so ineffective that the only use seems to be to promote the premium map pack, but what can I do about it? Nothing…

There’s still a little bit of hope if I read the official forum post. They will try, notice the “try” in this sentence, to fix the other problems, and patch them in the future… Sounds to me like they’ve abandoned the project, but we’ll see. If they plan to do something about it, they better do it fast, because I don’t really see the fun in this game anymore… I got better things to do than lagging around.

Thank you Epic!

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Silkroad Online: SRO is an MMORPG, set up in China. Like in every other RPG you earn experience and gold by killing mobs. For more information, visit http://www.silkroadonline.net

Check out the Europe update at http://www.silkroadonline.net/SilkroadOnline_Europe.asp