UFC 2009: Undisputed has won countless Editor's Choice awards from various gaming critics, but trying to play it online has been a nightmare as well as a major turn-off for many -- well not for long. A little more then a month ago the interwebs was on fire with virtual MMA talk, but quickly after fans -- including me -- completed the first 5-year career with their created fighter, the chatter seemingly disapeared over night. That's because online play is the laggiest we've seen from a game in a very long time. Combine that with player's frequently quitting matches and the fun quickly turns to frustration.
I announced a few weeks back that a patch was in the works and recently the game's producer Neven Dravinski posted the details of the upcoming patch on the UFC 2009 community forum.
Details after the jump.
1. We recognize premature match quitting as the biggest online issue and have taken steps to fix it. The Patch will have integrated code that detects who pulls the cable and will assign a Loss as well as a Did Not Finish to that player. The DNF is only counted for the player who executes the disconnection. The DNF rate will be displayed on the fighter selection screen of the Online Ranked Match. When disconnected the Winning Streak is also reset to 0.
2. We've adjusted Ranked Matches to match up players with better connections, which will improve lag issues we've seen to date.
3. We've adjusted the difficulty of performing submissions against AI opponents to improve the balance of subs vs. striking when playing against the AI.
4. We've adjusted the Flash KO rate so that they are less frequent.
5. We've increased maximum number of points awarded in online play from 99,999 to 999,999 and we've increased the Max Level from 100 to 200.
6. We've lowered the Winning Streak Bonus Max from 5 to 3.
7. We've removed the decimal places on the Leaderboard Winning Percentage so we only show whole percentages.
8. We've addressed the CAF cheat so the skill levels in CAF cannot be cheated and increased. Also any CAF with unfair point values will no longer be able to be used Online.
9. For PS3 users we've also fixed a bug that causes a freeze during auto-save; whichever controller was used to Press Start on the Title Screen will be identified as the main controller.
Rest assured our entire team plays A LOT of online matches and we read the boards every day, so we are well aware of the issues. We want to make sure we patch this correctly so it is taking a bit of time, but I can confidently say we'll be releasing this patch soon.
We still don't know when this patch will be out, but rest assured that once it is, you will find me playing it online a lot more. I'm also predicting that GamePro's editors revive their great idea of a GamePro Fight Night.
Stay tuned!
Above will be me, below will be you...
