Having trouble connecting to a big game of Halo Infinite multiplayer with a bunch of your friends in the game’s 12-person Big Team Battle mode? That will hopefully soon be a thing of the past: developer 343 says it’s not only aware, it believes it has “a fix in hand for the core issue” and will release a special hotfix specifically for it. “It’s a little too soon to give an ETA yet but please know our goal is to release this as soon as we can,” write the developers in an official blog post,” adding that “It won’t be this week, but we hope it’s not too much further out and we’ll share an update as soon as we have line of sight on a release date (once we clear ‘cert’ we are then ready to ship).”

Halo Infinite is the best thing that’s happened to me and my gaming buddies in years. It doesn’t matter how many people are down, it doesn’t matter if they’re on PC or console, and it doesn’t cost a cent — the game’s free cross-platform Big Team Battle multiplayer mode lets all of us dive into an epic game filled with plasma explosions, grappling hooks, nail-biting gunplay and vehicular mayhem.

Theoretically, anyway. Most of the time we’re twiddling our thumbs, waiting for a match to load, only for Microsoft’s servers to spontaneously disconnect (or even ban) a couple members of our fireteam because the matchmaking service can’t seem to connect the dots — and doing that again and again until we magically luck out. Yesterday evening, we finally made one of our friends the fireteam leader and finally got six of us together in matches, but even then the servers split some of us up with randos instead of friends. Once one of us quit for the evening, another player weirdly didn’t make it into the game. When we quit in solidarity, our fireteam leader got banned.

Can’t wait for this to get fixed! Most of my group’s favorite multiplayer games require precisely 3, 4 or 6 players to work properly, so Halo’s been a breath of fresh air.

343 says it’s also planning on a second patch in mid-February that should address “some issues with instances of cheating” and possibly “wonkiness with the ranked experience” among other things.”

Halo Infinite already added some additional multiplayer playlists for four-player fireteams; I’m hoping once the Big Team Battle bugs are worked out, we can get some more variety in 12-player games, too.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/10/22877515/microsoft-halo-infinite-big-team-battle-matchmaking-fix-343