Epic just released their first patch for Gears of War 2 this morning around 3:40 am PST. The patch will be focusing primarily on current matchmaking issues where parties of 1 and parties of 4 were experiencing unusually long wait times.

If you've been playing Gears 2 since before the update went live, I have two friendly reminders. One, get some rest, and two, you will need to restart your game to get the prompt to update. Failure to do so will mean that you will be unable to "matchmake" with people who were able to apply the patch already.

Here are the specific changes as elaborated on by the original post on Epic Games' Gears of War 2 forums:

• Adjustments to make Public matchmaking faster, especially in the single player party and the four player party case. Some of these adjustments should be felt immediately and some will play out over several days as our update enables us to reduce player segmentation by reducing the number of servers required to do matchmaking. This will increase the number of possible matches available for you to join.
• A tweak that should prevent us from losing some of our additional detailed stats data that we gather for gearsofwar.com. Due to the large number of concurrent matches, our stats gathering servers were not able to collect data for every single match played. The Xbox LIVE leaderboards are 100% accurate but our existing stats web pages may have some missing data prior to the update.
• A fix to address the issue where some players were unable to start the story-based campaign if Xbox LIVE was down or unavailable.

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