Halo Infinite’s Big Team Battle is fixed, again, maybe

theverge.com:

If you ask me, the best part of Halo Infinite is Big Team Battle, an epic 24-player mode that lets you squad up with up to 11 friends across Xbox, cloud, and Windows PC — but it’s been riddled with matchmaking bugs that keep games from starting, kick out your buddies, or even crash the game. Today, 343 Industries is taking another stab at making things better with a new patch that’s now live.

The February 3rd patch’s changelog is pretty basic, primarily just saying that there have been unspecified “service improvements” to Big Team Battle’s matchmaking and that “[p]layers should find full matches quicker and more consistently.”

But 343 Industries had previously telegraphed that today might be the substantial fix we’ve been waiting for. Here’s what a developer wrote on the Halo Infinite forums six days ago:

Using the telemetry we received from the hotfix on January 19, we were able to make a new build with an update that we believe should address the core issue impacting the BTB playlist. The studio ran a successful playtest today and plans to send it off for certification on Monday. After it’s sent off, it will take some time to go through the certification process and to find out if it’s approved. Once it’s approved, we’ll begin preparing to release it to the public. Since there’s still a little more of the internal release process to go through, the earliest we’d expect this hotfix to land would be next Thursday, February 3.

Today’s February 3rd, and here’s a Big Team Battle matchmaking patch right on schedule.

Whether it’ll actually be the fix is still in question: 343 thought it’d nailed it on January 19th, too, only to be disappointed to find it wasn’t resolved. But I’ve got to give them huge kudos for being so