343 Industries delivered one of the best entries in the Halo series since years with the release of Halo Infinite. But its success comes with a downside in the form of multiplayer issues. Their latest fix on February 3th addressed the Big Team Battle issues that haunted players since launch.
Richard Watson, Lead Engineer on the Sandbox team informed us on Halo Waypoint of all the things they are currently working on in their February update. Their main focuss being on problems with “Desync” and the “Overall online experience”.
- As of today, we’ve increased the priority of low pings to our servers in the matchmaking process. This step should help you match with local players, and therefore have a better connection, more often. As you get more of these local matches, instances of playing on further data centers will also decline.
- Separate from the bullet point above, our Services team has taken additional steps to help ensure you can have quality matches with players from your respective regions, more often. We expect this to have a noticeable impact when making matches for players in less populated regions around the world including – but not limited to – Australia and Asia. This update, which went live yesterday, has already shown promising results and should take further advantage of this morning’s changes. Please keep an eye out and let us know how your games start to feel.
- This morning’s update should also prevent players from “geofiltering” their online matches. Since this was impacting matches after they were put together via our matchmaker, it was causing unstable connections for the other players in the lobby.
The Halo Infinite did not sit still the couple of weeks as also the points below have their attention:
- Matchmaking service improvements for Big Team Battle (BTB). Players should find full matches quicker and more consistently.
- Scorpion Tanks and Wraiths will appear more frequently on BTB maps.
- Fireteam members in BTB matches will have the selected Fireteam Marker color, but may still start the match in different areas of the map.
- Join in progress rules updated to avoid matchmaking into games which are nearly complete.
- Changes to Oddball in both Ranked and Arena Multiplayer playlists:
– If the score is tied when a round’s timer runs out, one minute is added back to the timer. If the score is tied at the end of the additional minute, then the round will be declared a tie.
– The match will end if two separate rounds end in a tie and the victory will go to the team with more rounds won. - Halo Championship Series (HCS) variant of Free-For-All Slayer added to the Custom Game modes list.
- In Custom Games, changes to Free-For-All Slayer, FFA Oddball, Neutral Flag and Tactical Slayer game options update correctly.
Head of Design, Jerry Hook also commented on their ongoing changes to the Shop and how Credits work in the game.
“Since launch, the team has been monitoring the discussions on the Shop, bundles, and pricing in the game. Using data and community feedback, we’ve begun rolling out changes to how we package and price items in the Shop. Our focus with these changes is on reducing pricing across the board, providing stronger values in our bundles, starting to put individual items outside of bundles, and more.
Thanks to your continued feedback, we are happy to confirm Credits will be earnable in Season 2’s Battle Pass. That means you will be able to earn Credits as part of your Halo Infinite progression. We’ll have more to share on this as we get closer to Season 2.”
Read the full version on Halo Waypoint.
