TWISTED METAL STATUS UPDATE #3

Hey all- thanks for hanging in there with me tonite waiting for an update. Crazy day- very busy. Sorry it's coming so late.

Ok, here's what I know:

1. NETWORK ISSUES:

a- a patch left SDQA today and is in format tomorrow. It's POSSIBLE it will hit Twisted Metal tomorrow nite but Sony tells me it will be either tomorrow nit or Thursday morning. Forgive my layman's understanding of this sort of stuff, but the core idea is that we hope the patch will go some/a long/the full (not sure which) way to making it so players connect consistently to online games. The patch will be addressing the following issues (again, forgive my lay understanding):

- Quick match and user created matches will be split so people looking for human created games are not being pulled/put into quick match games.

- The list of matches will be randomized (to an extent) so not every user sees the same game list in the same order (causing EVERYONE to try to pick games off game list page 1 at the same time and the resulting in some of our CAN NOT JOIN ISSUES).

- When a user gets a CAN NOT JOIN error and tries to create his own game, seems there is a bug where not all of the CAN NOT JOIN game is cleared out, potentially creating a new game room that retains elements of the CAN NOT JOIN logic from the first game the user tried to set up. The programmers at ESP and SONY feel this fix could solve a large % of our issues with players connecting and MAYBE even solve the issues of players being dropped mid game. 

- A few other fixes that- we hope- will make big differences to connecting. 

2. CRASHING OLDER PS3S:

No official word but this is what it's looking like: while it's possible we didn't get rid of all of the crash bugs in the game that lock your system (although we didn't let the game go out knowing there was a crash bug so if you've found a genuine, reproducible one, let us know how you did it!…but more and more it's looking like the crashes we are hearing about on the older PS3s  are hardware related. Twisted- like a lot of games- pulls a big amount of power on ramp up and some of the older systems- perhaps because of age, perhaps because of dust inside, perhaps because of a graphics card that is just on its last legs- can't keep up. This seems like it would explain- according to the very smart tech folks who explained this to me- why we are seeing crashes in the first 10sec-5 min of the game BUT without any consistent breadcrumb trails that would indicate it's a software problem (i.e. every time I turn left at this corner and drop the remote bomb and blow up Juggernaut when he's below 30% health, the game crashes). 

Our Sony Santa Monica Producer is going to speak with customer service to see how rampant this issue is. Turns out a number of games have issues like this but it's usually a small number compared to the number of copies of the game out there. Customer Service will allow us to see how frequent of an issue this is and if it's above the norm of this sort of issue, we'll keep looking for what the problem could be. 

As of now though, that's what we know on that issue.

3. SKINS- 

Biggest issue is the skins are too dark. This will be addressed- according to Sony- with a Twisted Metal website update in the next 48 hours. From what they tell me, this is why Tooth doesn't show up except anything but black and bright white cars show up super dark too. We'll see how it improves but I hear a new version is up in the next 48 hours. My understanding is THIS issue is keeping the NOS skins from being made available as well. Will keep checking on that tomorrow and update you on the NOS specific issues- if they are different form this issue- via Twitter.

Better browsing of skins will also hit by Thrusday. 

4. MISC- Aware of a lot of the issues you guys have that are not on this list and they are going on a TO DO/TO PATCH list but as I'm sure you understand, right now getting the connection issues 100% resolved is where 95% of the effort is going. Will update ya'll on the changes/fixes to common requests/complaints as they come in the next days and weeks. 

5. AUTO START IN MATCH MADE GAMES- Long story but right now, the band aid solve is to make the user who is the host super aware by changing the UI so they won't be able to miss the visuals cues that THEY need to hit START. After that gets in and fixed, we'll see if it's still needed to implement a forced launch after X seconds/minutes. Sounds like this change will hit this week as well but I'm not 100% sure.

Ok, so that's what I know right now. More to come- thanks for being patient with the game and with us. It's super, super appreciated. We're very sorry, ya'll.

David