Gears of War has been out for 24 hours, hell some people still haven't even been able to find it yet (thanks GameStop / Fedex).
Already, gamers are screaming about the lack of team/clan based ranked match support.
Gears is a team based strategic shooter, so how could Epic miss such a huge blunder and not put ranked team based play in the game? Other games have it, Splinter Cell Double Agent has team based play for example and it's not even that good. Is this the result of inexperience or lack of vision from Epic developing a game for Xbox Live?
If you do have a group of friends that you want to play together with all night, you can get together if you're fast. You can just have one of your friends setup a ranked game and look for him in the list of hosts. At least that's what I'm told, I haven't had the opportunity to try it myself yet. The problem is with some 10,000 people playing Gears of War, the slots fill up fast. This is where the absent Dashboard Party Chat feature would be useful, you could all talk together and tell your friends when you created the game so they could all start looking right away.
It seems, for now, to play team based games you are stick with non-ranked 'Player' matches. You can use various 3rd party ladder systems such as the one here on 2old2play.com to keep track of your ranking within the systems ladder. While this may be enough for some, it isn't enough for the hard core gamers, they want to see their stats posted up in lights on the Xbox Live Leaderboard.
There may be hope though! Gamer Andy ended up in a game with Mark Rein, VP of Epic Games, in a ranked match. Mark told Andy that they actually did think about ranked team matches but Microsoft told them to "axe" that idea because of cheating. So great, cheaters again ruin things for the non-cheaters. Thanks you cheating bastards. Mark, however, did say that the Gears versus system can be updated and they could add such a feature if they wanted to in the future.
So I recommend you get on the forums and make it known you all want ranked team based support. After all Epic pumped this game up as a tactical TEAM based shooter. It's hard to be a team when you're playing with pickups and n00bs.
Gears is a team based strategic shooter, so how could Epic miss such a huge blunder and not put ranked team based play in the game? Other games have it, Splinter Cell Double Agent has team based play for example and it's not even that good. Is this the result of inexperience or lack of vision from Epic developing a game for Xbox Live?
If you do have a group of friends that you want to play together with all night, you can get together if you're fast. You can just have one of your friends setup a ranked game and look for him in the list of hosts. At least that's what I'm told, I haven't had the opportunity to try it myself yet. The problem is with some 10,000 people playing Gears of War, the slots fill up fast. This is where the absent Dashboard Party Chat feature would be useful, you could all talk together and tell your friends when you created the game so they could all start looking right away.
It seems, for now, to play team based games you are stick with non-ranked 'Player' matches. You can use various 3rd party ladder systems such as the one here on 2old2play.com to keep track of your ranking within the systems ladder. While this may be enough for some, it isn't enough for the hard core gamers, they want to see their stats posted up in lights on the Xbox Live Leaderboard.
So I recommend you get on the forums and make it known you all want ranked team based support. After all Epic pumped this game up as a tactical TEAM based shooter. It's hard to be a team when you're playing with pickups and n00bs.
