Giant Bomb Video Game News

I think 2008/2009 is going to be the timeframe when people finally sat up and took notice of online issues and unfair play caused by players who disconnect before the end of a competitive match. It's certainly become a more significant issue recently, and I'd say the most dramatic example of why these problems are so unacceptable is UFC 2009 Undisputed. With no penalties programmed in to punish players who quit before their in-game loss can be registered, there was a time when it felt like over half my wins were vanishing out of thin air. And that absolutely ruined a great game.

Not long ago, THQ announced that it was working on a patch to correct this behavior. Today, we've got the list of specific changes that are coming to UFC 2009 Undisputed, courtesy of the game's official blog. Here are said changes:

• 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.
• We’ve adjusted Ranked Matches to match up players with better connections, which will improve lag issues we’ve seen to date.
• We’ve adjusted the difficulty of performing submissions against AI opponents to improve the balance of subs vs. striking when playing against the AI.
• We’ve adjusted the Flash KO rate so that they are less frequent.
• 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.
• We’ve lowered the Winning Streak Bonus Max from 5 to 3.
• We’ve removed the decimal places on the Leaderboard Winning Percentage so we only show whole percentages.
• 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.
• 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.

Between correcting how disconnects are treated and removing unfairly created fighters from the online side of the game, this makes it sound like I'll finally be able to get back into UFC and enjoy it again. And all you scum out there with ridiculously overpowered submission stats may want to see about getting good at the game in a more honest fashion.