The Master Chief Catastrophe
If I owned an Xbox One, I’d be digging into Halo: The Master Chief Collection right about now. Well, attempting to, anyway: the compilation has issues with multiplayer matchmaking taking forever or otherwise not working as intended, and 343 Industries is scrambling to push out fixes.
The studio has temporarily consolidated playlists which should “allow players to get into matches faster, and improve overall match times,” and suggests this one weird trick (no, really!) to improve your odds. Also: “When searching, if you do not find a match within 5 minutes, please return to lobby and restart the search, as this will reset the search parameters and increase the likelihood of finding a match within the [usual 2- to 4-minute] range.”
343 is releasing a game update today for campaign, user interface, and matchmaking party issues. Expect a “larger matchmaking performance-focused content update” to hit next week.
“I’d like to personally apologize to you all for the current situation,” wrote executive producer Dan Ayoub. “I can assure you we’re attacking this from all directions from 343 Industries to the Xbox platform, and we won’t rest until it’s what it should be. People are reporting improvements across the board, which is great, but we’re not backing down until we finish this fight.”
Given these widespread issues, 343 has postponed the first Halo Championship Series pre-season online cup from November 16 to November 23.
