343 Industries has updated players on the situation with Halo Infinite’s Big Team Battle matchmaking issues. Unfortunately, while they have restored BTB to 12v12 matches, they have yet to fully diagnose the issue and (with time off for the holidays) will now be unable to fix the problem until 2022 with a patch hopefully possible in January.
The one suggestion that they have for those that wanting to play Big Team Battle (perhaps with one of those weekly challenges forcing them?), is that matchmaking on your own has a higher chance of success. You can still expect to have a variety of disconnection errors and failed matchmaking attempts, though.
343 kicked off their investigation of the issues last week, taking a few measures that they hoped would alleviate the matchmaking errors and help them find the problem. These included reducing player counts from 12v12 to 10v10 and also disabling join-in-progress, which allows players to fill empty spots in a match. Neither of these measures helped, so 343 has reverted both changes.
Their full explanation and statement is as follows:
Over the past few days we’ve seen an increase in Big Team Battle matchmaking errors by way of data, firsthand experience, and player feedback. This issue was not prevalent during the Beta period but inexplicably started to manifest last week. The 343 team has been actively investigating and working to resolve these issues but thus far have not been able to definitively identify a root cause nor a proper fix. During the course of this work, a few mitigation steps were taken such as disabling join-in-progress and reducing max fireteam size from 12 to 10. However, neither of these steps made a meaningful impact towards overall matchmaking success. As of this morning, the max fireteam size has been reverted back to 12 and join-in-progress has already been re-enabled (albeit in a bit more throttled manner).
Unfortunately, the complex nature of this problem, coupled with the impending holidays, means we will be unable to resolve this issue for at least a few more weeks. Work continues as possible but with upcoming closures and dependencies – and a critical need to ensure the team has adequate time to recharge after a tough year – we are targeting a patch in January. This issue is a top priority and we hope to have updates to share once everyone is able to re-engage after the break.
In the meantime, we do know that solo queue players have a much greater likelihood of successfully loading into a BTB match. On the other hand, we know that larger fireteams increase the odds that one or more players will encounter this issue and fail to load into the game. While solo queue players will still periodically experience matchmaking failures, it does appear to work the majority of the time and if not, it often works on the next attempt. In some cases a player may get stuck in a continuous loop of errors which is best resolved by just force quitting the game and restarting.
We appreciate your patience and understanding as we tackle this issue and will share more information as we have it in the new year.
While disappointing, the timing of this is unfortunate around the holidays and with Microsoft and 343 keen to ensure that their employees are able to rest and relax after pushing to ship the game right at the end of the year. Still, it’s been a busy week for 343 Industries who earlier added permanent playlists for Slayer, Fiesta, FFA, and Tactical Slayer (SWAT) on the 14th. This has gone some way to assuage complaints over the playlist set up, but there’s still more work to do on this front as well.
Additionally, 343 hosted a Winter Stream that looked at the current state of the game, promised changes to progression, customisation and events – the Fracture: Tenrai event in particular is getting a big overhaul to the event pass – and teased the Winter Contingency game event that will start next week. Read about all those details here.
Halo Infinite’s free-to-play multiplayer and paid campaign are both now available across Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PC and Xbox Cloud Gaming for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers.
Source: Halo Waypoint
