Welcome to the new 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:

Valentine’s Event Next Week

Ranking Tier Changes

Weekly Versus Event: FFA OSOK

New Escape Hive: The Blight

New Versus Tour Medals

Rod’s Departure

You may have heard the news yesterday that our Studio Head Rod Fergusson is departing The Coalition.

We wish Rod all the best as we continue the Gears journey here at TC. You can find out more about what this means for the future in this interview with Matt Booty (Head of Xbox Game Studios) over at GamesIndustry.biz.

Valentine’s Event

Next week it’s time for some romantic late night dates slaying it up online with the return of Cupid’s Torque Bow Tag!

Not only will this seasonal favorite event return, but we’ll also have a free Boost Days Weekend for some juicy double XP goodness and the Maria loadout weapon skin set to earn! (pictured above)

Look out for all the details in Monday’s This Week In Gears.

Ranking Tier Changes

Some of you may have noticed changes earlier this week to your Ranked Tier; we have re-calibrated our Ranking Tiers to better reflect your actual Skill Rating based on your Tier points.

This may have resulted in some movement (mostly upwards) of your Tier, but it will now provide a clearer, more trackable path as you work towards progressing to the next Tier. Below are the new tier thresholds. These thresholds will be integrated into the UI in a future title update.

This is another step in improving the ranking system – as it is our top-priority at the studio. We are actively investigating opportunities to improve the system. We’ll keep you apprised if anything develops out of that process.

This Week in Gears 5

In case you missed it, This Week in Gears 5 tee-d up the next 7 days with a look ahead at everything going on in the world of Gears 5. This week included:

Free For All OSOK

New Hive ‘The Blight’

Two Versus Event Tour Medals added

Weekly Store refresh

On Tuesday, we updated Free For All OSOK to reduce body-shot damage to minimal levels, making headshots the only way to get a kill! If you’ve been waiting for headshot only OSOK, jump in now before the event ends on Tuesday.

For full information on all these events and updates, you can read the full article here.

Signing Off

It’s been a quieter week here on the outbound front, but we have plenty of updates coming up in the near future.

We’re currently assessing a potential hotfix following our work to address several key issues that have emerged since TU4. We’ll keep you apprised of any potential hotfix as we get confirmation of our plans.

Our team have also been hard at work on our next game mechanics update, this time focused specifically on the Gnasher. Following our movement mechanics update launched with TU3, this next wave of changes will focus on restoring more of the two-shot gameplay present at launch into the new movement model.

We see this as an important part of our development of the core mechanics to achieve a more responsive, fun second-to-second experience with the depth of gameplay you expect from Gears. Once we deploy these changes, we’ll be monitoring your feedback to determine any next changes to the movement or Gnasher. Look out for full details on the Gnasher changes within the next week.

There’s plenty more going on at the studio right now, but expect to hear more on these topics coming up in the near future. If you have any burning questions, make sure to join us today on our Gears Weekly Developer Stream for some candid answers. Tune in at live.gearsofwar.com from 3pm PT. We hope to see you there.

Until next week.

TC, out.