Tomorrow, on Wednesday 13th November, we will be deploying a live update focused on Phase 2 of our Matchmaking Improvements alongside our updates to the Ranking System.

Matchmaking Update

After the successful deployment of Phase 1 of our Matchmaking Updates, which focused on improving the time to game and quality of connections to matches, Phase 2 adds further refinements focused on regional results.

Phase 2 will improve the regional matchmaking prioritization to ensure players are playing on closest or next closest data centers more often, resulting in more matches played with a lower ping.

In the future, our final Phase will be focused on fine tuning on a regional basis to increase the overall quality in matches, especially in lower populated regions such as South Africa and Brazil.

We’ll be closely monitoring telemetry and your feedback to assess the impact of these changes before moving on to Phase 2.

Ranked Update

In case you missed the news, tomorrow also brings our next Ranking System updates to address Skill Points. Here’s all the details from our Ranked Update blog announcing the changes:

One of our top priorities for the studio has been to dramatically improve the Ranked experience. We know Ranked in Gears 5 has been a frustrating experience so far, and we’ve been working hard to rectify the issues as quickly as possible.

A few weeks ago, we found an issue that cause a discrepancy between a player’s Skill Points rating and their actual Skill Rating, which resulted dramatic point swings seen in the post-match flow.

We now have a fix for this issue ready to deploy which will arrive on Wednesday, November 13th. However, in order to ensure that the changes rollout correctly, we are doing a mid-season reset of all ranks.

Unlike our last deployment, where playing matches would often move you towards where you ‘should be’ in dramatic fashion, this is a full blown reset – which means all Skill Points will be wiped and everyone will need to replay the 5 placement matches in any playlists before gaining a Rank.

We know this move may upset some of you, but it’s necessary in order to achieve the long-term positive experience we all expect from Ranked. This is a critical step in our ongoing work to make Ranked the best it possibly can be.

Since we’re having to reset Ranks mid-season, we wanted to show our gratitude to all our players for your understanding and patience by granting the Blood Moon Imago Character Skin for free. If you haven’t already, log in between the deployment of Title Update 2 and the end of the current Operation to claim your free skin.

Thank you again for your continued support on Gears 5.

You can track all ongoing developments around key issues at Gears5.com/Status, and we’ll be closely monitoring the results of this change – as well as your feedback – to determine its success.