Welcome to What’s Up, our weekly blog where we’ll recap everything that’s happened in the past week and talk a little about future developments. In What’s Up this week:

Gears Tactics Launch Times

Ranked Skill Point Changes

Gears Tactics Is Almost Upon Us!

It’s finally almost here! Standing between you and Gears Tactics is just 5 earth-days before that sweet ‘ready to play’ pop up arrives.

Speaking of when it’s ready to play, Gears Tactics launches on Windows Store, Xbox Game Pass for PC and Steam on April 28th at 15:00 UTC globally (which means this is one launch most of you can get a good sleep for!).

Here’s the local launch time for just some of the major regions around the world:

US/CA West Coast: 8am PDT

US/CA Mid: 10am CDT

US/CA East: 11am EDT

Mexico: 10am CDT

Brazil: 12pm BRT

UK: 4pm BST

France/Spain/Port/Italy/Germany: 5pm PST

Russia: 6pm MSK

China: 11pm CST

Japan: Wed 29th at 12am JST

Australia: Wed 29th at 1am AEST

Our Developer Blogs have also been continuing over on Steam and GearsTactics.com – and you won’t want to miss our latest one containing your first look at Ukkon’s biological horror that is the Zealot (shown above)! Catch up on everything below:

We’ll also be coming at you with a special pre-launch look at Gears Tactics on Monday, April 27th at 10am PDT! Creative Director Tyler Bielman will be on hand as we give you a run through of the fundamentals of Gears Tactics, take on a Corpser and much more.

Ranked Gridiron Update

Last month, we outlined the future of Ranked in Gears 5, which involves a redesign of our entire system as it exists today. Our goal is to deliver a new design, rather than iterating as best we can on what we have today, that aligns more to the kind of experience you’ve been asking us for.

While we work on this new system, we also want to improve some of the biggest pain points with what exists today in Gears 5. The obvious target to fix was the 0 points on a win issue.

When you receive a 0 in Gears 5 on a win, this was the system protecting you from losing Skill Points, despite the fact you won the match.

The current Gears 5 system is based on the quality of your performance vs the quality of your opponents, which means dropping a round against the wrong team could net you more negative points lost than positive points gained. We updated the system to prevent a win resulting in negative points.

As of today, we have released an update to Ranked that ensures you will now gain Ranked Points on a win. As a reminder, how much you gain is dictated by your performance against the quality of your opponents.

However, the impact of this new change means we’re trading Skill Point accuracy for a better feeling experience. So, in certain circumstances, a player may win without performing as expected meaning they will still gain points. In these cases, when that player eventually loses, the system will give them negative points to ensure their rank and True Skill Rank is aligned.

With this update, you may see some initial oddities in the system – it will be most noticeable in Gridiron due to its newness as a Ranked playlist.

As a reminder, this is temporary measure to improve our ranked experience until we roll out the new and improved Ranked System.

If you see anything out of norms or have feedback on the experience, send us a tweet @CoalitionGears, post on our forums or drop a comment on Reddit.

With the impending launch of Gears Tactics, it’s short and sweet from us this week. We can’t wait to see you all dive into Tactics beginning on Tuesday and see what you think!

See you out there,

TC