Recent Gears of War 2 Patch Supposedly Speeds Up Matchmaking

Earlier today EPIC released the first patch for Gears of War 2, a patch focused almost entirely on fixing the game’s ridiculously slow matchmaking system.  I’ve gotten some time to test out the new patch, and, I’ve gotta say, it didn’t really change much.  The matchmaking is still riddled with those “wtf?” moments, long search times, and infinite search loops.  For my friends and I, getting into a Gears of War 2 match kind of goes like this…

1. Matchmaking is started.
2. After 2 minutes, matchmaking is restarted.
3. After 2 minutes, matchmaking is switched to a different game type.
4. After 2 seconds, a match is found.
5. When the match is over and you’ve waited the useless 25 seconds in the post-game lobby (why?), repeat the process.

Gears of War 2 is a great game, better than the first even.  However, where it fails is not in some game mechanic or concept, but in its terrible truskill or whatever matchmaking system.  Truskill doesn’t work, every developer needs to get that into their heads.  Matchmaking is fine by me, but destroy the steaming pile of excrement that is truskill (I don’t know if that’s the correct spelling, but whatever).  I’ve been playing Left 4 Dead a lot the past couple of days, do you know how long, on average, it takes to find a match via matchmaking (without truskill thank god)?  Around 3 seconds.  No restarting the matchmaking, no switching playlists, all it takes is a simple select game type, difficulty, and level, and a match is found almost instantly.  Yeah, I know L4D uses dedicated servers, but that has nothing to do with the actual matchmaking (as in finding a game) part of the deal.

So really EPIC, fix your product, because for the time being, it is unplayable by myself and no doubt hundreds of thousands of others.  The game’s great, but right now I’d kinda like to continue the multiplayer experience, but unfortunately cannot because of the s*** servers.  I could forgive this poor quality on launch day and even a few days later when I was writing my review, but I can’t overlook the terrible performance 21 days after launch.

But I guess I must give credit where credit is due.  After all, the title update did do something.  Instead of having to restart matchmaking three times to get a match, now you only have to restart it twice…