Gears 5 won itself piles of praise from critics and fans alike for its evolving campaign formula, which added wide-linearity to break up the corridor shooter gameplay. As solid as the multiplayer seemed on the surface, at events, and during the game's limited access periods, the live service has proven to be anything but solid. Many of Gears 5's casual fans might have moved on from the game already to single-player games like The Outer Worlds or bigger multiplayer titles like the new Call of Duty Modern Warfare. Gears of War's most dedicated fans, however, are getting the short end of the stick right now.

Unstable

Gears 5 like many of Microsoft's multiplayer offerings (and multiplayer games in general in 2019) is a live service game, complete with incentives to continue playing, atop a promise of free content drops on a regular cadence. The post-launch plan for Gears 5 includes free maps, new playable characters, and skins to earn, among other things. But since the game's launch almost two months ago, the service has been marred with poor stability, which has led to a wave of alleged unfair bannings, and general user discontent. Best VPN providers 2020: Learn about ExpressVPN, NordVPN & more After weeks of silence, Gears 5 community manager known as Octus provided an update on the game's subreddit, which has been charged with negative feedback since a few days post-launch. As part of our continued post-launch support, we are committed to continually improving Gears 5's online experience. We know you have concerns, and we want to improve our transparency around our ongoing development work to address your biggest topics of feedback. Our Development Team is already hard at work on resolving several priority issues, which we've listed below. We recognize that these issues have significant impact on your Gears 5 experience, and we're prioritizing them by the degree of negative impact they have. Dealing with the issues below are our top priority – but this list does not include any new features or smaller fixes also in development. As these issues progress, will provide more details – including timing – to keep you informed. Thank you for all of your support and feedback since release. Our team care deeply about tackling these issues as soon as possible. We'll be keeping you updating you regularly moving forward with any detail we can provide. To start with, The Coalition is prioritizing server stability above all else, removing the temporary bans for "quitting" in standard playlists since it was unfairly banning users who had been disconnected as well. The Coalition is also working to implement fixes to the ranking system, which have been providing inaccurate rewards that don't reflect a player's performance. Matchmaking quality to improve ping times and also general balance tuning is also on-going. You have to wonder why it took The Coalition so long to begin addressing the community's concerns here, which have doubtless compounded some other aspects of negative feedback surrounding the game. Paid DLC as progression