After a week long disappearence from Live, I come back to new swag on the marketplace for Gears of War, including a map pack, a new theme, and even a new patch. While the theme and the new maps are pretty sweet, the patch is somewhat of a burn.
Improvements have been made such as shortening the chainsaw and sticky grenade distance, making them “less cheap” as some players I know would say, and removing the popular glitches, such as the Sprint and Run. However, the rub comes in the fact that they’ve actually removed the Host name from ranked matches. That’s right, boys and girls; if you wanna play with your friends, you have to play a player match, or set up a ranked room with VERY specific parameters and hope that your friends can find the room using very narrow search options, and even then, it’s a crap shoot.
While its understandable why this is done, to prevent boosting and stop acheivement whores from getting acheivements just by offing their friends, it’s a pretty disturbing considering Gears is best played with people you know, trust, and work well with, rather than having to risk being thrown into room full of mutes who don’t care if you get downed, and aren’t working together.
My question is: Why go to such great lengths to create such an awesome team based game, only to go to equally great lengths to make sure gamers can’t play as a team?
